The sun god Sūrya — and his mother has an M-N- 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 think Yamī, who’s female, is a later transposition. But Manu and Yama are the most fundamental and ancient in the Indic tradition. Manu is the first man, the first human. Yama, the twin, is the first monarch, the first self-sacrificing king. Odin performs the same function in the Germanic tradition. Odin gave himself to himself, according to the ancient Hávamál text, and hung himself on the ash tree by the Royal Mound in Uppsala in Sweden. Woden’s Day commemorates Odin’s self-sacrifice. In the early pre-Christian Irish tradition, Donn is the Lord of Death who performs the same function — note the D-N- sound in both Odin and Donn. They are the first self-sacrificing monarchs to die, and after them they lead mortals to the afterlife. In the Indic tradition, Yama is the first self-sacrificing monarch, the first to die. Yama means a lot to me as a Buddhist, because Yama is the lord of death in Buddhism, which is one of the reasons I started paying attention to these monikers, these same sounds — Yama, Yamī, Yima in the Iranian tradition, Emir in the Germanic and Arabic traditions. Emir in the Arabic tradition is a king, and that comes across from the early Iranian, the Indo-European. I paid attention because Yama is quite important in the daily practice of many Mahāyāna — again M-N- — Buddhists who follow the Mañjuśrī tradition, the Tibetan tradition. But I won’t go into that today. We’ve got Manu and Mannus, and they have twins. In the Germanic tradition, Mannus is the son of Tuisto, twin. In the Indic tradition, Manu is the brother of the twin. We get this phenomenon — a bit of a muddle, like mixing puzzle pieces up. But the names, the sounds of the names are similar, and the function is the same. They’re mythological founders of a tradition. Manu in the Indic tradition is the first sacrificer. He is the first to sacrifice an animal, and the Brahmin who recreate this sacrifice through the Soma ritual — a substance some believe comes from the fly agaric mushroom, but I won’t go into that here. All we need to know is that the first sacrificer, Manu, is the brother of Yama and the mythological founder of the tradition. The mythological founder of the Germanic tradition is Mannus. In Irish tradition, the pre-Christian supreme deity is Manannán. In Wales, Manawydan. In the Iranian tradition, Aryaman — so Arya-Yaman, with M-N- in there. Yaman becomes Manu in India. The Arya element means something close to “area” in English, the centre. Aryaman was literally the treasurer in the royal household, which then became celestialised, goes up to the sky and becomes the symbolic treasurer, the king — a combination of the Manu and the Yama elements. Geographically, the Indo-Europeans who populated India and Iran are descendants of the same community I mentioned before, coming from the Sintashta. We have the same sound, same meaning, same mythological founders, same kinds of stories in these different traditions. It’s Manu in the Indic tradition who makes a deal with sky father — with Indra and Varuṇa, the supreme deities. If Manu sacrifices — first an animal, then substituted with the Soma sacrifice — like in Christianity where wine is supposed to be the blood of Christ, a placeholder for a true sacrifice. So it’s a development and evolution. In the Indic tradition, it’s the Soma sacrifice. They come from the same root. I’ve written before about the Indo-European roots in Christianity, a topic I will return to. If Manu makes a deal with sky father, Dyaus Pitā, with Indra and Varuṇa, who represent the sovereignty function — if Manu, as the man, the human, makes a sacrifice, then sovereignty, security, and prosperity, the fertility of the community, will be protected. Manu is the first sacrificer. Yama, his brother, his twin — in Germanic, you have a slightly different iteration, which you’d expect in different cultures, but the structure and the nomenclature are the same. We even have Ymir in Germanic culture, the primordial giant. And the sound of Hymir — a genuine thunder god, killed or perhaps only wounded. He went out in a boat with the giant Hymir on the outer sea and fished for a monster using an ox’s head as bait. Yima is in the Iranian tradition, in the Avesta, the ancient Iranian holy text — an equivalent of the Rigveda but written down much later, though thought to be just as ancient. Aryaman, as I mentioned, is a functionary in charge of the house, its hospitality, and in charge of the treasury of the nmāna. Mana meaning house, domain in ancient Iranian — mansion in English. We have that M-N- in all of these monikers meaning quite similar things. With all these continuities — same sounds, same monikers, same functions — today we’re focusing on Mannus and Manu because they’re so primary, but as I’ve floated around different Indo-European linguistic and religious traditions, all from the same common source, we have the same moniker, same function, same level. By level, I mean mythological founders of entire cultures. These aren’t founders of a village or one particular family. They are the founders of entire cultures which still persist today — in the case of India, comprising the one billion Indians who are Hindu and come from this tradition. I’m leaving out the 400 million other Indians, though many of those from the Muslim tradition are also Indo-Europeans. But there are many bifurcations and roads off, some of which I’ve dealt with and some I will. For now, we stay focused on Manu and Mannus. We know that Germany and German culture did not have very much or any contact with Indian culture, and vice versa. At the time of Tacitus, yes, Alexander the so-called Great from Greek culture had been to India. He had replaced the Achaemenid Empire, the ancient Iranian empire founded by Darius the Great — again M-N- in Achaemenid. But Tacitus didn’t necessarily have much command of this. Very few people until Sir William Jones, the Welsh scholar of Sanskrit, ancient Iranian, Celtic, Latin, and Greek, who became a Supreme Court justice in India and learned Sanskrit in order to translate the Laws of Manu — the Manusmriti, which contains this M-N- sound and the R-t- sound — which contemporary scholars believe is actually from about 600 CE but is named for Manu, the first human. In order to exercise jurisdiction over Indians, William Jones, living in Kolkata, decided to learn Sanskrit. Because he had already written the first Persian grammar in the English language and was a very skilled linguist from a young age, speaking many different languages, it was he who spotted that the roots of the grammar and the roots of verbs were so similar in structure that they could not have arisen by coincidence. He said that all of these languages must come from a common source, which perhaps no longer exists. That began a centuries-long journey to determine which came first. Was it the Indian? The German? The Scandinavian? The Irish? The Iranian? That journey brings us to the present, and one of the big breakthroughs has been the ancient DNA evidence published in 2015 and 2019, demonstrating that the Brahmin caste in India had, by around 1000 BCE, about 50% steppe ancestry from ancient Ukraine. We had all the cultural and linguistic artifacts, and then we find the ancient DNA. But I’m not tracing the ancient DNA or the cultural and linguistic artifacts — I’m tracing the M-N- sound through all these different cultures, a separate trajectory of evidence. It’s not just a question of one German … Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe
