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 Geography So 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 Esteem So 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 Defence of Ancient Ukraine post, and indeed the posts from last year and the year before, on Timothy Snyder and Eurasia, on remaking ancient history, and on illuminating the ancient in the everyday, you will understand why I think and believe that Ukraine and ancient Ukraine deserve a parity of esteem with ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and indeed ancient Ireland, ancient Germany, ancient Armenia, ancient India. These are all emanations of the same community of Yamna, from southern Ukraine, from Zaporizhzhia, on the right bank of the Dnipro River, just across from areas where the Russists today are occupying. And in terms of the great cultures which have managed somehow, through lots of different historical contingencies, to get acceptance as a nation state, which basically, from the international law perspective, demands a seat at the United Nations and recognition as being a state as such: there are, I think, last time I looked, about 184 in my mind, or maybe 194, sovereign states on planet Earth. These are the winners in a race which began when the first human breathed. And at the moment we have this set of great cultures which have become nation states, and behind them, and immanent in them, are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of other great cultures which for one reason or another didn’t make it. But our unit of analysis is in many respects the post-World War II legal order, and Ukraine is just as much a nation state, and deserving of a parity of esteem, as Germany. The first united German state was in around 1870. France has been through several republics. Belgium was founded upon an idea of an ancient past in the 19th century, and so on. So many other of our nation states emanate from this great model for creating a common culture that I have spoken about before, which emanates from Herder’s call in 1777 to unite the ten German tribes. He asked, where is our Shakespeare? Using the example of England, which became an entity and a country and a state from the time the first German migrants arrived there, but really properly using this massive dividend from the wool trade in East Anglia, which takes its name from them. There are many other views of this, but Mannus, son of Tuisto, founded the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, writing around 50 years into the Common Era. And he, Mannus, two Ns, had three sons: Ing, Irmin and Ist. The Ing were the sea-dwelling Germanic community. They were called the Ingaevones, and they worshipped Ing as their founder. And it was from that community that the migrants arrived in East Anglia, in Suffolk and Essex, in a place I visited first. And gradually they took over the whole island. They pushed the Celts, the Celtic dwellers of the island of the Pretani, back towards where, really, they are today, which is in Wales. They basically wiped out the Cornish language. I think the last native Cornish speaker, a Celtic speaker, died out in maybe the 18th or 19th century. Cornish survived Rome, survived the Roman invasion and occupation, but didn’t survive the Angles, or the Ingles, the worshippers of Ing, the Ingaevones. The Three Elements, and the Urgency So I suppose this episode, really, we are going to focus on, as ever, the exchange of energy, which I am doing right now with you as you are listening to this, with the linguistic element, which is the M-N- sound, which is immanent in almost every sentence we speak, and in the monikers of six of the eight living Indo-European traditions. And also the third element, this travel, this remodelling of our minds, learning about all these different places that perhaps we have never even heard of. Or perhaps, like Turkey, everyone has heard of Turkey. I didn’t know that Turkey was basically dropped on top of Anatolia, where the first attested Indo-European language was spoken. And the Turkic people, the Turkic-language-speaking people, arrived there about 800 years ago and gradually conquered the whole of Anatolia, which is a prime piece of real estate. But it has millennia of attested history, and much of my time, as much time as I can, is spent in Anatolia visiting these amazing museums. The Turkic people are great preservers and conservers and researchers of the traditions that they inherited. I’m thinking of Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler area, and very many other places. There are the great museums, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, which I visited and talk about a lot because of the artefacts I saw there. Recently I visited the Istanbul Museum in Istanbul, which has some fantastic artefacts from an area, northern Mesopotamia, in the south-eastern part of Turkey, that I visited in January and talk about a lot. And many other amazing artefacts, which we will get to again. But Finding Manuland also has a very serious aspect to it. And this is just the latest example, but it goes on through history and has gone on since the beginning of the Indo-European world. Marauders come from different territories. In the current time, Russia uses the bogus view of history as an excuse to disarm us, as a community of Westerners, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country. So there is a real urgency about what we do in Finding Manuland, and a meaning to Finding Manuland, which I think in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. But it does today, and I have that sense of urgency. Where to Find Me So, somewhere on the Iranian plateau. Well, first let me just say: I’m De
