Finding Manuland

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 co...

Finding Manuland is not just one trip. It’s a programme for a lifetime of journeys. I will bring you on the journeys — intellectual journeys, but mainly geographical journeys — across the lands which stand between Ireland and India. So let’s call it an atlas. It’s an atlas of Manuland, that area between Ireland and India — an atlas which is organised by sound. West to east is only the order of walking, or driving, or thinking. The moon is a hypothesis held inside it.

And it’s an atlas and a harness at once — a permanent skeleton meant t...

I write, I speak from a very, very remote place - Ani. It’s very, very beautiful, as you see with the mountains. I thought I would just muse a little bit on what I do as a writer as Decoding Trolls and how I see my role as a writer and where my substacks fit into it, what I’m working on now, what my plans are, and how you helped me by responding and reading and reacting to my work.

I wrote about Eneduana, who is the first known named author in human culture. I disc...

I’m Decoding Trolls, speaking to you from a place in southern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, near the city of Urfa, historically known as Edessa. Yesterday, I saw an inscription dedicating Roman-era columns to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. This inscription dates back to around the third century of the Common Era, confirming that I am in the right place at the right time.

In many ways, my journey to find Manuland has been leading up to this specific moment. I am about to visit a stone circle, the first of its kind discovered in...

So, I made it to Van. Amazingly. It’s an amazingly blue-sky day, and I’m climbing up to Van Castle. It looks like I’m the first person to climb up here today because, as you can see, there aren’t many footprints. There are no fresh footprints; I’m causing the only fresh ones around.

This fort was built around... well, people have lived here since 5000 BCE, but it’s of most interest to “Finding Manuland” because we’re in search of stables with an inscription down to and by Menua, who was the son of the founder of...

Menua, son of the founder of the Urartian Empire, once lived on the lakeside at Tushpa, whose modern name is Van (Türkiye).

Tushpa / Van is the meeting place of many great empires Kura-Araxes, Hittite (Indo-European), Mitanni (Indo-Europeanish), Babylon/Mesopotamian/Assyrian, Urartu, Armenian (Indo-European), Achmænaid (Indo-European) and now, I guess, mainly Kurd (Indo-European) and Turkish! Today, I’m driving to Van to, well, Find Manuland.

Tushpa, a strategic point in Lake Van basin, was situated in the centre of the historic route from every direction to Van Plain.

The capital, which included the...

Poem of Amergin, Celtic Ireland’s first poet-judge, sacrificing first Monarch and brother of self-sacrificing Donn (who features in much in my work) put to music and video by Arnold Hensman. Reading by Daniella Hensman. Filmed at Newgrange, Ireland. Music: Walking on Clouds, by Tea Time, (ShutterStock Music).

This poem by Amergin, preserved in the Book of Leinster and the Book of the Taking of Ireland, is an example in the Indo-European tradition of candid almost proud words put into the mouths of Gods.

I am a wind in the sea (for depth)I am a...

My favourite subject, and it all begins in Kherson — whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community. A relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use in almost every sentence, the religions, the soul’s immanence in many Indo-European religions, including what I would characterise as Christianity and Buddhism. Created by this community, which is just amazing in itself, because most of us grow up with a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece, and then our cultures. It turns out th...

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the property. It’s in all the leases. So that was always just a little curiosity to me, as indeed was the fact in contract law, in English and in American contract law, for there to be a...

M-N- sound appears to have many of the same meanings in Turkic as well as in Indo-European languages (Manas is the mythological founder of Turkic Kirghiz culture, Zaman signifies time in Turkish, for example).

M-N- might therefore be Turkic rather than of Indo-European origins. Especially where its meanings and immanence’s hover around the same Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system of southern Ukraine from ~4,100 BCE as Finding Manuland has so far been elucidating.

(Among the first documents with writing in an Indo-European language is this text I photographed in Ankara. It mentions a “native Anatolian” (an Ind...

This Indo-European, ancient Ukrainian ancestry is in us. When coupled with all of these similarities in the mythological record — and particularly, in the context of today’s episode, MN in Manu and Mannus — we can be very sure that these are separate vectors of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: that we all come from this Yamnaya community in southern Ukraine in some meaningful sense.

If you’re listening to this, you understand an Indo-European language. You probably have ancient Ukrainian ancestry within you if you’re indigenous or relatively indigenous from anywhere in the space between Ir...

The sun god Sūrya — and his mother has an MN sound in her name, which is amazing. Saraṇyū is her name, and she is of Tvaṣṭṛ, which is interesting as well. We’ve got Tuisto in the Germanic and Tvaṣṭṛ in the Indic. She and the sun have three children. There are stories about how she got really hot from being burnt by the sun — a play on words which transmits and transfers between languages and meanings and sounds, which I’m not going to go into today.

She has three children: Manu, Yama, and Yamī. Many scholars thin...

So you see what I'm trying to do there. I'm expanding our mental models of time from 4100 BCE when Tamana's ancestors left ancient Ukraine to 2000 years later when Tamana's name appears in one of the first texts. The first times Indo-European language is written down in Ankira, sorry, in Kanesh, but then I see it in 2025.

So it's written down between 1900 BCE and 1800 BCE in Kanesh, in ancient Anatolia, today's Turquia. And then roughly 4,000 years later, I, Estabones, I visit Ankira, which is named for a Celtic community who founded it around 300 BCE. I see this cuneiform...

So the Ingaevones, this is the ancestors who then became the English, comes from Ing, who corresponds to the Old Norse god Ingvi, Freyr. And Freyr is actually a pre-Indo-European remnant, we believe.

So in this tripartite structure I talked about where we have sovereign, soldier (so sovereign representing, you know, the monarch, the magical aspect of sovereignty, (which is all of the mystical, mythological, the poetic)), the stuff I'm really talking about today (in the context of if we're trying to build a culture of Manuland among all the Indo-European peoples) we’re reaching back into hi...

So this is the second part of the “Manu or Mannus: Which Came First?” I've decided to try and do these recordings in shorter elements. Then like a Netflix (where they issue the whole series at once)…

But instead of issuing a whole series of ten one-hour-long shows, these are going to be much shorter. Then you can decide whether you listen to them all together.

So Manu or Mannus… This episode, like all, will contain the three elements which are:

(1) Mana, meaning energy, I'm exchanging my energy with you, my Mana, you can hear...

Here in the manner of a Netflix season, I’m going to drop all six episodes in this ‘Mannus or Manu’ season in one go. Then, on PowerofMana.net or Spotify or Apple Podcasts (search for ‘Finding Manuland’ and subscribe!!), you can binge listen, or eke out listening as you might savour a fine wine.

Germany or India: Which came first?

Let’s use the Finding Manuland method to see which of these two great Indo-European cultures arrived first into history?

Hint: It’s a trick question, and I’ll reveal all at the end:

O...

⚡️ Kherson today is the future of EVERY single European city.

Russians safari hunting individuals with armed drones.

This future’s out there, thanks to Zarina Zabrisky reporting. It’s just not evenly distributed. Yet.

Killing people going about their daily business every day, on every street.

What did you do to halt this inevitable future being realised?

@ZarinaZabrisky has been cataloguing this inevitable future for ALL European cities meanwhile, @Bundeskanzler and @POTUS are asleep at the wheel.

What begins in Kherson, whether it's the UN Commission of Inquiry...

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the “Archetypes” episode.

When we are thinking about transforming our own mental models—our entire conception of human culture in our minds—this is hopefully really why you are going to be interested in Finding Manuland. Obviously, you may not accept everything I say, or you may Google it and go, “Oh, maybe this or maybe that,” but that doesn’t matter.

I’ll just say, as an aside, this week The Wall Street Journal has published an essay under the title “The Ancient Horseman Who...

Following in the footsteps of the Hittite emperors and empresses, Decoding Trolls makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ḫazzi on the Syria/Türkiye border. Decoding Trolls narrates his visit to Ḫazzi, or as it is written in the bible Mount Zephon (Saphon in Greek), the most sacred mountain in Hittite religion.

In Hurrian religion (some of which was adopted by the Indo-European Hittites and ancient Greeks) the mountain deities Namni and Ḫazzi served the storm God Teššub (the supreme deity in the Indo-European Hittite pantheon and equivalent to Zeus in the Indo-European Greek religion). Note the Dyeus sou...

Today, we’re looking at how the Finding Manuland iterative method of discovery works. And, we look at the first two of ten reasons why Finding Manuland matters.

I'm Decoding Trolls and I'm welcoming you to Finding Manuland. And this is our first recording, which is on the road, as it were. I am on the road. I am in Turkey and I am here in Ankara, here to visit the Museum for Anatolian Civilizations. We will get to this again in the future.

It does take me quite a bit of time to to pr...

Deity, Death, day, *Tiwas (Germanic deity who gave their name to Tuesday),… all derive from the Ancient Ukrainian word for sky *Dyeus. That’s right: when you say someone is ‘dead',’ quite sweetly, you’re saying, ‘they’re in the sky.’

If we can trace that sound and meaning (*Dyeus meaning sky) into every branch of the Indo-European / Ancient Ukrainian language family, then, that’s proof of concept:

It’s definitely possible we might trace the M-N- sound too from Ancient Ukraine between 4,100 BCE - 2,500 BCE into every branch too.

As Finding Manuland unfurls, our journey...

My room in Severodonetsk (eastern Ukraine). As it was at the moment I read the email telling me Harry had died.

My room now, after multiple Ruschian lootings of the house.

My flat in Kosovo - our Mana remains in the manses, domains, maisons, and mansions in which we once lived.

My cat Stanitsia on my OSCE bullet proof vest that I wore every day in work 2015-2018 in eastern Ukraine.

On the way to Kyiv - at Kreminna (currently under a brutal Ruschian occupation).

Hi there, I'm Decoding...

Here we provide an answer to the question of which came first the Ancient Indian mythological first human and first sacrifier Manu (Vaivasvata) the son of Saṃjñā and Bhāskara (sun-god), or the first of the Germans, son of Tuisto/Twin, Mannus?

Tacitus:

GERMANIA, CHAPTER 2

(The Germans) celebrate in ancient songs-which are their only means of remembrance or recording the past—an earth-born god, Tuisto (or: Tuisco). His son Mannus was the origin of their race and their founder. They assign three sons to Mannus, and from their names they call those close t...

Welcome to the Power of Mana podcast. This is the Finding Manuland version, episode one: The X Energy. I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland.

Since this is episode one, let’s begin with an introduction. I’m going to do something very conventional in terms of podcasts: I’m going to set out what I’m going to do, and then I’m going to do something slightly differently — I’m going to tell you about the journey I embarked upon which led to the discovery of mana.

This podcast is about mana, which is energy...

Hi there, I'm Decoding Trolls. This is the Power of Mana podcast and the Finding Manuland branch of the Power of Mana podcast. I've recorded two episodes already of Finding Manuland and we're going to give this the moniker Episode Zero because it's an introduction to the podcast.

I want to challenge this view that many of us have and we hear anecdotally whenever anyone mentions, for example, that the etymology of a particular word comes from ancient Rome or ancient Greece.

We have a vague idea that Western civilization emanated from these two cultures...