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Finding Manuland: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Decoding Trolls
Finding Manuland takes us on mental journeys across the space between Ireland and India. Finding Manuland moves us across time from 4,000 BCE until the present. Our mental models of how the past and the present interact expand, through Finding Manuland. We begin around 4,000 BCE with the Yamna community who lived between the Don and Dnipro rivers of Ancient Ukraine. These Yamna created the first Indo-European language. They buried their dead, covered in ochre, with their knees flexed, in the hundreds of thousands of mounds that still remain in the lands between Ireland and India - Manuland. Today, over half of humanity uses sounds and meanings first forged on the Ukrainian steppe. Immanent in the genome of most humans who live in Manuland is the mitochondrial DNA of our Yamna ancestors. Everyone who can understand these words in an Indo-European language, is the cultural descendant of this community of migrants who spread so successfully east and westwards across the Steppelands fr
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- 2 weeks ago58 min
Podcast | India’s gods before India
The gods before the VedaSo, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.”But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy. Indo-Aryan here means, in effect, Indo-European. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology says it without fuss: the Mitanni Hurrians “were themselves ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy with some allegiance to Indian deities.”This is 1400 BCE. The Rigveda was properly systematised around 1200 BCE. It was not written down for centuries after that, and was carried in song and prayer. So from the Mitanni we have a treaty of around 1400 BCE. The earliest writing from India comes centuries later. The best guess we have is that the Indo-Europeans reached the Indian subcontinent around 1200 or 1300 BCE. So the Mitanni Hurrians left written artefacts, which I have seen with my own eyes in the museum in Istanbul, a hundred or two hundred years before the first Indo-Europeans reached India.Parity of esteemThe Oxford Companion calls the gods named in that treaty Indian gods. Yet our evidence that these gods are Indian comes from a later period.People sometimes tell me I am being anachronistic when I call Proto-Indo-European ancient Ukrainian. The Yamna, the community from which all living Indo-European languages come, lived six thousand years ago in Mykhailivka, in what is today Ukraine. Linguists call the language they spoke Proto-Indo-European. I say we can now carry the proper name back: ancient Ukrainian. We do that for ancient Greek and ancient Indian. People say, that is anachronistic, you cannot do that.Well, here is the Oxford Companion to World Mythology doing it. It carries a category back onto deities we know the Mitanni worshipped, because they swore oaths on their names, centuries before India became India.So it is legitimate to carry a name back this way. It may be anachronistic. I will not quibble with the Oxford Companion when it calls these Indian deities. But I will explain, as I just have, what it is doing. It is an anachronism. It calls these gods Indian centuries before India existed, before the first Indo-Europeans reached India and set up their culture there.Some Indo-Europeans may have reached India earlier. But we know from the genetic evidence, in a 2019 paper in Science, that a group associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture brought steppe ancestry into the aristocracy there. They became the Brahmins, who systematised the Rigveda and finally wrote it down. We have written evidence of these gods’ names from the Mitanni long before any of that, long before India became India.So parity of esteem demands this. If the Oxford Companion to World Mythology may call those gods Indian centuries before they became Indian, when we have this treaty from before then, then strictly we should call the Indian deities Mitanni deities. That would be ridiculous, because they truly caught fire in India. They gave their name to India: the N-D-, the Indra in India.We will come back in future episodes to that N-D- sound, the reversal of the D-N- in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. By the rule of first attestation in writing we could even call these Indian gods Hurrian gods. Of course we do not. Like Timothy Snyder, we have learnt that many lines of evidence besides writing help us understand our past, our identities, the origins of our language and culture, and why we say what we say today.So we will not call them Hurrian. But parity of esteem demands this much. If you may do it for Indian deities, then at the very least we may use the name ancient Ukraine for Proto-Indo-European. That is all I ask there. I leave aside, modestly and humbly, the fact that all of these emanations, Indian, Irish, Celtic, Germanic, and the Mitanni gods themselves, come from the steppe, from this Yamna community. So a fortiori, we should be allowed to speak of ancient Ukraine.That is a theme that runs through Finding Manuland. The objection usually comes from people whose mental models have not yet caught up with the latest archaeogenetics, linguistics and history. They have no mental model of Ukraine, because they have not listened to Finding Manuland.I had no mental model of Ukraine either, until by accident I came across that Yamna burial mound in Dnipro, removed by property developers in May 2021. I tell the story in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-
- 3 weeks ago47 min
Podcast | The Crossroads
The first of the Atlas journeysI introduced you to the Atlas series of Finding Manuland in five podcasts, published over the last while. This is the very first of the Atlas journeys proper. I saved one of the best for it. Radiating out of this one is a series of pathways through the Anatolian side of Manuland. We will use them to show the method, the linguistics and the organising focus for the journeys still to come.Someone posted on Substack today that their mind was being blown by this series. That is a wonderful thing to hear. My own mind is, frankly, blown by it too.Today I also gained beta access to one of the first world models open to early adopters. I saw a month or two ago that it would come out in beta, and that people were invited to send in their use cases. I made mine about Finding Manuland and the Atlas papers.A world model is a neural network that builds spatial images and camera-controlled video, up to a minute long, from photographs, films or drawings. The very first proper vision network depended on ImageNet. The creator of ImageNet is the person behind this new world model, made by World Labs.I am very excited about it. Over the weekend I will play with it. The first thing I will try is a journey around Mykhailivka, the village on the Dnipro from which all living Indo-European languages set out. I have the archaeologists’ drawings of the excavations there, and I will test World Labs on them. There are conditions attached to the beta, so I will have to be careful about what I post. But we will see what I can do. So stay tuned.Where the crossroads isSo, the crossroads. Bring your mind to the modern state of Türkiye.Many of you will have been there on holiday, probably on the westernmost coast, near Smyrna, or Kaş. I spent two wonderful weeks camping down in Cilicia, opposite Cyprus. That is not where we are going. We are going east.You may not have a mental model of this part of the world. I certainly did not, before I began all of this work a few years ago. So if you have a chance, now or later, open Google Maps or Apple Maps, or an atlas if you have one in your library. Look at Türkiye and go east. You will find Lake Van. It is always big on the map, on any depiction of Anatolia from ancient times onwards, because it is a huge saltwater lake. Just below it is the place I am calling the crossroads.Each episode of Finding Manuland has three parts. There is the M-N- sound. There is the linguistics. And there is the journey, the itinerary. Calling these episodes an Atlas does not mean giving up any of the three.The roads that crossThe Ukrainian Yamna steppe inheritance did not only run east, to India or to Tajikistan. Picture a wheel with spokes radiating out of it. At the great crossroads of the ancient world, just south of Lake Van, the Indo-European family’s deepest sounds crossed too.This is where a treaty swore the Vedic gods centuries before the Rigveda. The Rigveda is the oldest surviving holy book in Indo-European culture. Modern scholars believe its poems, songs and prayers were settled into their form around 1200 BCE. Centuries before that, we have this treaty, sworn under the moon-god of Harran.I visited Harran last January. I had to hurry through it, unfortunately. It was late in the day, and I had been in the Tektek Mountains looking for another ancient shrine to the moon-god. We will return to Harran, on the podcast and on the ground.This is also where a monarch named Menua built his realm, at Ararat. Its own people called it Biainili. It was based at the modern city of Van. You may remember the video I filmed there last January, on an amazing blue-sky, snowy day. I was the first to go up to Van Castle that morning.In biblical times the Biainili people were known as Urartians. Menua, with the M-N- in his name, was the son of one of its founders and a founding figure himself. Just south of Van is Menua’s Canal, still called by his name today. That is where the crossroads begins, the roundabout this episode is about. And all of these things are caught together on one clay tablet, before the East had written any of them. By the East I mean Iran, and India.In earlier episodes I followed the road east to India and Iran. We will travel that road again. This road turns south-west, to the place where all the roads cross. It is the upland where Anatolia, Mesopotamia
- Sep 13, 202632 min
Podcast | Finding Manuland: The Atlas, Episode Five
The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each OtherThe journeys and the papers in the Finding Manuland Atlas series feed each other, and the Atlas grows out of the exchange: Atlas Intro Episode 2, Episode 3, and Episode 4. A journey grounds a paper. A real place, object or photograph gives the M-N- argument something tactile to stand on. The Sura crossing, on the outskirts of Dnipro, where those property developers tried to destroy that Yamna mound so they could build a fancy house on top of it, but instead found a stone circle, which prevented them from building the fancy house, and which lies by the Sura River. The 64 stones of that stone circle. Menua’s canal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua), which I have stood by, on the great saltwater lake of eastern Turkey, which was the capital of the Urartian Empire, and of Armenia, until the Russians gave this part of Armenia to the Turks, the Turkic language speakers. The crescent on the Göbekli Tepe (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli) bench, which I have written about and will write about again, the moon crescent on the bench which bore the painted boar that was found last year, and had lain under the stones which had buried the Göbekli Tepe site near Urfa, Şanlıurfa, in eastern Turkey, in part of northern Mesopotamia, since 9,000 years before the Common Era. The son of Manu that I saw on a column at Edessa, modern name Urfa, or Şanlıurfa, with its great, great museum, if you ever have the opportunity to visit. The museum at Urfa, where the oldest depiction in statue form of a human-sized human, with his obsidian eyes, is the first thing that strikes you as you enter this incredible museum, where many of the treasures from Göbekli Tepe rest. And the signage photographed at a site becomes primary-source corroboration in its own right, the museum’s own label stating the case. We must, and we do in Finding Manuland, balance the scholarship from the great universities of Tübingen, of Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin and Yale and Penn and all of those places. But we also don’t ignore the archaeologists who work in place in Türkiye. So if they state something, then we use that as weighty evidence. The papers, once finished, feed all of this Atlas in their turn. Each becomes a part of the frame the next journey grows from. Each is at once a finding and a seed, so every one is held to the same grounding bar. And this, I hope, will inspire you too, because Finding Manuland is also an iterating itinerary of infinite journeys, and as long as I live, I hope I will continue on these journeys. I have many hundreds of journeys to report to you as of today, and I hope that in the future I will have many hundreds, perhaps thousands more. And that they will inspire you, if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit places, or you have spare time, or you are just divorced, or you are looking for somewhere to bring the children in the summer. You are looking for a theme for a holiday. You don’t want to spend two weeks on a beach. You want to explore. If you want to learn about the sounds and the meanings in the words you use in your everyday world, then I am going to help guide you to the places where these words lived, live, and, as long as there is an Indo-European culture, will live.To India with the Rig VedaSo then, if you can get your mental model from... So, we were in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, moving across Tuva, Afghanistan, and the route which those Sintashta migrants took all the way to India. And we know this because of the Rig Veda, which was standardised around 1100 years before the Common Era, and is traditionally cited as the oldest book in an Indo-European language, and the holiest book in an Indo-European language. Slightly complicated, because Zarathustra was probably three centuries before that, but the Zoroastrian corpus had to be reconstructed much later. We will get to all of these complications later. But in the Sintashta culture we have, and this was only discovered a couple of decades ago, the burial customs, for instance the placement of horses’ heads and the remains of funereal feasts, which match exactly what is in the Rig Veda. We know now, with genetic evidence, that the Yamna, who travelled from Ukraine, established the Sintashta culture, ran through these burial customs and buried their chariots, and their descendants would end up in India.India is really where this project was seeded, in some respects. The family’s root it is not,
- Sep 7, 202658 min
A Don Hacks the Moon
A haven, and two objectivesNormally I find Finding Manuland a haven, a Garden of Eden, a means of escaping the world of geopolitics. Hardwired into Finding Manuland, at its very core, rest two objectives. One: I want to re-centre Ukraine in our species’ story of origins and in the Indo-European origins. I want to make it consistent with the truth, and with what archaeogenetics and other matters tell us today. I also want to remodel the last 6,000 years of history, as we mentally model that history. This is very central to Finding Manuland.I have spoken before about how we can outflank a kind of ideologue. These are the ideologues who provide a philosophical justification for Russia’s activities in Ukraine. Justification is doing a lot of work there. That was in Outflanking Dugin. But I mainly keep that to my Disinfolklore project. That project is umbilically tied to Finding Manuland. Not least because mana as energy, the charge, the affective charge in memes, is very central to the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is also central to the method I try to use myself in making sense of our information space.All that aside, I find a great sense of harmony and peace when I am on the road. When I am visiting archaeological sites. When I am looking at Hittite monuments. Recently I saw the most amazing Urartian monument. I have yet to talk about it and process it properly. And to be in spaces that were very important millennia ago. When I was in Kaneš, I looked at the place where the first writing in any Indo-European language was found. That writing is from 2000 BCE. I cannot communicate quite how that makes me feel. But I do try. That is the purpose of these podcasts.So what?There is also another aspect of Finding Manuland, and indeed the whole Power of Mana project. It goes right to its beginning. I was explaining this pattern that I had noticed to a friend of mine. I did not really understand the M-N- pattern in so many ordinary everyday words. This was around Christmas time in 2022. And they said, yeah, but so what? What use is it? The use I put to it is this idea of creating an entity, a mental entity, called Manuland. Manuland is a geographical space between Ireland and India containing all of those countries. Even those in my Turkic-language-speaking Finding Manuland episodes, as you might have noticed. All of those different countries have fought for all sorts of various different reasons. They have fought about differences over particular religions, which I might archetype as Indo-European religions. If they have a sense of collective identity, then perhaps we might find more reasons to unite and be in harmony. A collective identity which goes beyond the West or Christianity or the winners of World War II or Asia or Europe.But of course I do not do this at the cost of truth, or historical truth. I do this using the truth as we find it. From archaeogenetics and archaeology and history and texts, whether those texts are in cuneiform on stone. Connecting us all genetically, culturally, linguistically through the Manuland project has an idea at its core. We can create a more harmonious community of individuals, defined by something positive. The analogy here is with the positive nationalisms that grew out of Herder’s insight in 1777. That was while the French were occupying part of Germany. The Franks were occupying part of Frankfurt. Ironic, of course. Originally the Frankish aristocracy from Germany had gone to what we call France and occupied it. Although the French kept their Romance language, which grew out of Latin, they took the name Frank.Herder’s callHerder called: where is our Shakespeare? With this call he said, look, let us unite the historic Germanic tribes. Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about them in 98 CE. To do this we need songs. We need common songs celebrating our common culture across the Germanic tribes that Tacitus had written about. This call launched the folklore and folk-song collecting movement. It eventuated in this great flowering of the 19th century and the 20th century, until today, whereby certain cultures won the lottery. They managed to get protection and status as sovereign states. And of course thousands of amazing cultures lost in this. But let us celebrate the countries that did manage to solidify around a common identity. It is formed of th
- Aug 30, 202645 min
Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4
We went in the first episode from Ireland to the island of Britain. Then we went on to the continent of Europe, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria and into Greece. And see what I’m doing there. Those are all countries most listeners will probably be able to visualise on a map. Although, as my listenership goes beyond Europe and beyond America, I want to perform the same trick in people’s minds.I want to create new mental models, mental geographies, psychogeography if you like, of the area I call Manuland, which is the area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, between Ireland and India. And if that sounds a bit like gobbledygook to you, well, by the end of listening to the Atlas series and the orientation series, you will totally understand what I mean by Manuland, and the ambition I have for reworking our mental models of the past 6,000 years: populating our mental models of the past 6,000 years with a lot of different development and evolutionary trajectories, all mainstreaming the linguistic element, but also the cultural, the religious, the migratory, the historical, and so many other dimensions across this geographical area.Populating Our Minds with the GeographySo I also want to populate your minds, our minds, with the geography that for me, before I started this project, was really sketchy. I now realise that we as humans have an amazing capacity to fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we know. And I remember, for instance, meeting and befriending my first real friend from Central Asia. It was, and it is, a real experience for me. Because previously, before I arrived in Ukraine on a January night, around 11 o’clock at night in January 2015, I had a very sketchy view of Ukraine itself. I had seen it from the border in what was then Czechoslovakia, back in the early 90s, when I and a friend had made our way by train to the border. We wanted to see Ukraine. We wanted to see what by then was the former Soviet Union. And then, while I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, obviously my mental model of Ukraine expanded enormously, and my geographical mental model expanded enormously. But really, what was east of the border of Ukraine, between there and the coast of Japan, between there and Afghanistan, was quite sketchy, and still is quite sketchy, I don’t mind admitting to you.However, in this particular episode we are going to be talking a bit about that area of Central Asia. And that is just one example of how Finding Manuland and the Atlas can help expand not just our temporal models of where we come from, but our linguistic models, our understanding of the words we say, the meanings and their evolutionary trajectories from the first Indo-European language speakers, but also about geographies.And when I talk about the places, and visit places, and connect those places with the words and meanings that we use, which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we are exchanging what I call Mana, which is an energy. I could have used another word for it. Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.The second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: the M-N- sound, which is immanent, I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. And you will notice the M-N- sound is also in immanent. It is immanent in immanent, if you like. One of the three of what I call cryptotypes that we look at. And again, we will explain these terms, and the necessity for them, because I don’t use these fancy words just out of fanciness, trying to make you feel as if you don’t know as much as I do. I arrived at a term, say, cryptotype, because I really needed it. Long-term readers of Finding Manuland, which you will find on powerofmana.net, will note the 2024 post when I first spoke about cryptotypes, because a reader had written to me and said, I think what you are talking about is cryptotypes. I went away to the library and I started reading Benjamin Whorf’s theory of cryptotypes, which he confined to grammar. And I thought, wow, that is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something slightly different, but he is the closest thing to what I’m talking about, the cryptotypes.Ancient Ukraine and the Parity of EsteemSo today, as ever, you might notice I talk about all living Indo-European languages emanating from ancient Ukraine, what the ancients called Scythia. We will call it ancient Ukraine, because if you have read my In
- Aug 23, 202649 min
Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3
Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the third episode of our new Atlas orientation series, which will last, hopefully, for hundreds of episodes. So this is the third episode. We went from Ireland to Britain, then on to the continent, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria, and into Greece — and Ukraine, where I spoke about the Yamna emanating from there, carrying the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages, in the first two pilot episodes of the Atlas.So, what we’re doing in Finding Manuland: each episode integrates Mana, meaning energy — the charge we exchange as a function of being sentient beings and human beings. And when we talk about places, and visit places, and connect with the words and the meanings we use which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we’re exchanging what I call Mana. I could have used another word for it; Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.And the second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: this MN sound, which is imminent — one of the three cryptotypes we look at, the others being RT, Rit, that sound, and DN, the DN sound of the Danube, the Donets, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester — the great rivers of ancient Ukraine, where, genetically, most of us who today speak Indo-European languages emanate from. It’s in our genes, as demonstrated by the Alexey Nikitin paper, which was published in Nature in February 2025. We’ll come back to that. I write most days on Bluesky, Mastodon, and X, as well as on Substack.The Mental Model, and the UrgencySo today: you might notice I talked about how all living Indo-European languages emanate from ancient Ukraine — what the ancients called Scythia, but which we’ll call ancient Ukraine. And you might notice my piece recently, In Defence of Ancient Ukraine. I won’t go into that at the moment, because I’m going to try and stick to this geographical survey.What I’m trying to communicate into your minds, and all of the listeners’ minds, is this new mental model, which has gradually grown over me since I began the Finding Manuland journey consciously and intentionally in November 2021, in Maing village in northern France. I usually say eastern France, for some reason — but that’s actually northern France, where the Menapii tribe lived, by the Manche, near Mons in today’s Belgium, near Frankfurt-on-Main, and Mainz, and various other MN places and rivers.And so what I’m trying to communicate is this mental model, which has been disrupted by my travels. Finding Manuland is about finding and identifying a unifying force in all the areas between Ireland and India where we speak, traditionally, Indo-European languages. By monikering it Manuland, I’m giving us a collective identity, and I’m trying to disrupt the type of mental models we imbibed at school, which are old-fashioned, and the product of a time before we had archaeogenetics and scientific linguistics — the comparative method and comparative methodology. They are artifacts of a time when we thought history, and myth, and Finding Manuland, and language, honestly, didn’t matter that much. But because Russia uses the bogus history as an excuse — to disarm us, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country — there is a certain urgency, and a meaning, to Finding Manuland, which in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. So I do have a sense of urgency.Anatolia: The Palimpsest — First to Write, Not First to BeSo today, this is the Anatolia edition. I talked about living Indo-European languages emanating from Ukraine. Anatolia is the palimpsest where seven Indo-European layers are stacked, and where the oldest Indo-European writing survives. First to write — not first to be. The homeland is still the steppe. And I’ve walked hard, to and fro, across Anatolia.I’ve told you in past episodes — pre-Atlas episodes, let’s call them — about some of my journeys in Anatolia. Some of those journeys I have not yet told you about, and I have many more journeys planned, crisscrossing Anatolia, which we know today mainly by the country of Turkey. So part of the mental-model aspect is: we start in Ireland, we cross onto the island of Britain, then we hop across the Manche — MN in Manche — into France, and the Netherlands, and Belgium, and then gradually move across. So this is what I’m going to try to do — and forgive me if I miss doing it — using the geography.So we swing back south of the Black Sea, into the peninsula where the Indo-European family first learned to write. This is a place I’ve walked hard across, over three journeys so far, between October 2023 and January 2025. It i
- Aug 15, 202653 min
Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2
You’ll remember I spoke about how each episode of Finding Manuland looks at Mana, as the energy we exchange, as a source — the function of being human; the linguistic aspect, the miracle of MN being immanent in so many words we use, and places we go, and the founder figures, and so much else beside, and as an organising focus for this journey; and the third element, the journeying element, of every Finding Manuland episode. In the last episode I brought you on a quick survey of Ireland and Britain, and now this is the Western European Corridor atlas survey.The idea here is: I’ve got hundreds of papers and journeys to talk to you about. In each of these podcasts will be immanent those three elements — Mana, language, and journeying. These are the introductory episodes, just to give you a flavour of what is to come next.Maing: Where the Project Got Its NameSo, the Western European Corridor. This is the drive home from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 — or rather, the drive back to Ukraine. Now we cross the continent, and the map starts to move under us. This corridor is where the project Finding Manuland got its name. On a drive back to my diplomatic posting, just prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — I was driving back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro, in the autumn of 2021, at the very start of a three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre run from my home near Emain Macha in Ireland to Dnipro — I was already noticing that my route threaded through MN- and M-A-I-N-sounding place-names, when I followed the word Maing off the satnav into a village in northern France. And there it was, on the side of a shed: Manuland.It was getting late. I photographed the shed. The next morning I doubled back and, without quite deciding to, invented the method I have used ever since. So when I go to a place on this journey, I start at the church, or somehow in the centre of a village. I don’t know what I’m looking for, why I’m there, or if I’ll find anything. And that day in Maing, I ran in ever-increasing circles out from it, around the village, up one street and down the next, until I reached the edge of town and a cobbled road — an ancient road — climbing up a hill. Off the hill sat a mound with a herdsman on it, who, when I reached him, pointed me towards Cassels, the old capital of the Menapii, the same Manannán-worshipping sea tribe, now inland in France. I set off for Cassels, and that circling, born in Maing, is the recurring shape — like a chariot wheel — the recurring shape of every journey since.The exchange of Mana with the herdsman; a sound heard in a place-name — the language; a hand on actual ground — the journeying. All three elements were already there, in what would have been a nondescript but altogether beautiful French village I would never have stopped in. And the name, Manuland, taken off a shed.The Main Corridor: Goethe, Herder, and the Making of a National CultureThe corridor is a string of MN-sounding names: Mons, Mainz, Frankfurt-on-Main. I stopped along it at Goethe’s house in Frankfurt — occupied by the French when Goethe was a child. And it was at that moment that the great Herder decided: we must create a national culture, a German culture. We must unite the German tribes, by finding our Shakespeare, by creating our Shakespeare, our culture. Herder wrote, as I have said in previous episodes, which you will see and we will come back to — he said, in 1777: where is our Shakespeare? We need a Shakespeare, like England has a Shakespeare, to unite around.And Goethe — whose house was literally hosting a French occupying general, who would eat and drink and live in that house — Goethe then became Germany’s Shakespeare. And the Grimm Brothers then became the great linguists, the first of the great philologists and linguists of the Germanic languages, and collected folk tales, and looked at the language and the meanings inside them. And then, of course, Wagner, 90 years later. The tales which Tacitus had told about the Germans, and Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples, and his three sons, became operas, and became stories — like Faust, like The Sorrows of Young Werther — which Goethe and Herder and so many great writers used to unite around, and create the first unified Germany. And that model of nation-state formation, around national cultures grounded in folklore, song, and culture — that is part of the heritage Finding Manuland uses to explore all the spaces between Ireland and India, which I archetype as Manuland.The Museums: Halle, Wrocław, and Enheduanna in BrusselsThe museums on that journey are where the moon and its measuring keep surfacing in bronze — in Halle, in Wrocław in Poland, where in October 2021 I photographed a Bronze Age sun-chariot. In February 2022, in the last weeks before the full-scale invasion, driving back, leaving Ukraine with my cat, anticipat
- Aug 8, 202636 min
Podcast | Stonehenge and the Older Circle
Stonehenge, where I am standing this Saturday morning, is the answer to a question I have been carrying since May 2021 - and it has taken me five years and three thousand kilometres to carry the question back to these stones. I want to say something at the outset that will only be fully earned by the end: I feel Ukraine’s presence here. Not as metaphor. As ancestry, as language, as the later courses of this very monument. By the close of this piece I intend to have shown you exactly where to look for her.The coach parks are already filling. Jackdaws are working the wind above the lintels. Several hundred people are filing along the rope walkway, photographing the most famous stone circle on earth, and nearly every one of them - I have been listening - is doing so in a daughter language of a mother tongue first spoken on the steppe of what is now Ukraine. They do not know that. Most of them also do not know that when the great sarsens in front of us were being raised, a stone circle beside the Dnipro river had already been buried, deliberately, under a mound of earth, for something like a thousand years.I have touched that older circle. This post is about who built it, who buried it, and why the answer runs in a single thread through three monuments: Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, Tara in County Meath, and the cromlech at Novooleksandrivka, fourteen kilometres south of Dnipro. What I have noticed - and it is a pattern I keep testing, not a verdict I am handing down - is that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans; that the people who buried the third one were, in the most literal genetic sense, their own descendants; and that the burying itself may have been the wisest thing anyone ever did for it. The wisest people I met in Ukraine thought so. We will get to them.Let me take you to the Dnipro first.The Uncovered CircleIn May 2021 a five-thousand-year-old burial mound was torn apart by housing developers in Novooleksandrivka, a wealthy suburban hromada south of Dnipro, Ukraine’s third city. News of the vandalism found a global audience - it made the front page of the New York Times, and Ukraine’s chief mound guardian told that paper: “It’s genocidal. Erasing our culture like that.” Residents blocked a road in protest.After the kurgan - as such mounds are known in Ukraine; Mane, as I have come to call them, for reasons that will surface below - was removed, a much older stone circle was, unexpectedly, discovered underneath. Five thousand years for the mound; five and a half for the circle beneath it. Hold that five-hundred-year gap; it is very important, and it is in the contemporaneous record, not just in my memory.At that time I was an Irish peacekeeping diplomat serving with the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, posted to Dnipro, in my final year before compulsory retirement, watching for early warnings of Russia’s meddling in a war then already seven years old. Anything that made international front pages in my city was my professional business, so I crossed the Sura River to investigate. What I found rearranged my mental furniture, and eventually my life.Sixty-four stone boulders, set in a ring. Touching them felt like caressing the Delphic Omphalos - except that this rondel was older than any material reminder we have of the oracle at Greece’s cultic centre. Through that summer and early winter, as Russian forces massed beyond every one of Ukraine’s borders, I kept going back. I photographed each of the sixty-four stones, carefully, on every visit - it was the one thing I could do, since a minor Irish diplomat has no mana with which to counteract a property developer. And the stones began to resolve themselves into human-like forms. Stelae. The deities they had represented to the people who levered them into position. I had a favourite: a broad-shouldered stone god. Sometimes, when I arrived, there were fresh flowers in the centre of the circle.Inside the mound that had covered the stones, the bulldozing archaeologist working for the developer had found the bodies of twenty-seven people, buried there between roughly 3,500 BCE and 1932. Many were covered in red ochre. Most were crouched, knees bent. One was mummified. The 1932 interment was the manager of the Soviet collective farm that the Muscovite colonisers of Ukraine had planted on the site - a functionary laid down where the high kings of the area had lain five thousand years before him, in the very year Moscow’s engineered famine began killing millions of Ukrainians. Talk about delusions of grandeur! And, in a darker key, about continuity: the mound never stopped doing what m
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About Finding Manuland
Finding Manuland takes us on mental journeys across the space between Ireland and India. Finding Manuland moves us across time from 4,000 BCE until the present. Our mental models of how the past and the present interact expand, through Finding Manuland. We begin around 4,000 BCE with the Yamna community who lived between the Don and Dnipro rivers of Ancient Ukraine. These Yamna created the first Indo-European language. They buried their dead, covered in ochre, with their knees flexed, in the hundreds of thousands of mounds that still remain in the lands between Ireland and India - Manuland. Today, over half of humanity uses sounds and meanings first forged on the Ukrainian steppe. Immanent in the genome of most humans who live in Manuland is the mitochondrial DNA of our Yamna ancestors. Everyone who can understand these words in an Indo-European language, is the cultural descendant of this community of migrants who spread so successfully east and westwards across the Steppelands fr
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