The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each Other The 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 Veda So 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, despite 19th-century people, and a lot of people who have this kind of sketchy view: oh, Sanskrit was the first Indo-European. But India is a parallel branch, the founder sound, M-N-, arriving there from the Dnipro, or here from the Dnipro. Imagine I am in India right now. We will go there again. I have been there a lot in the past. Arriving with the language and the chariot. And India kept manas, mind, at the very centre of its archive. So we have the Brahmin, who are the priestly caste, like the flamen. Again, M-N- in flamen, M-N- in Brahmin. The Brahmanas, which are the holy songs, are in the Rig Veda, and they are sung by the Brahmin, and they are arranged in mandalas, M-N- in mandalas as well, in the Rig Veda. I travelled in India in the 90s, and learned, probably from a guidebook, that India’s first man was called Manu, and it was the coincidence with the Germanic first man, Mannus, with two Ns, one N in Manu, and that is the Manu of Manuland. Though, as listeners will know, I actually took the word Manuland from the side of a shed near Maing (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i) in eastern France. It was the coincidence with the Germanic first human, Mannus, that first set this inquiry going. Earlier still, six months across India and Nepal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was visiting schools. They all became a part of me as I worked for a charity, trying to identify poor and clever, and mainly female, children, and put into place systems that could identify them, to qualify for scholarships paid for by a very munificent English couple. The Himalayan North: Ulaanbaatar, Spiti, Dharamsala The Himalayan north is where the sound and the moon-mind come back together, in places I have actually stood. And once, far north of the Himalaya: in January 2014, in Ulaanbaatar, I spent 14 freezing days keeping hypothermia at bay by mimicking the pilgrims’ circuits around the Gelug temple, the Gelug being the Dalai Lama’s tradition, spinning the maṇi prayer wheels. A nun there led me to practice on the sixth of January, and I encountered the figure of Yama, the death twin, for the first time, in that warm temple in Ulaanbaatar. In the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border. The Spiti Valley, I have spoken about it before, but I will just remind you, is in the Himalayas, and it is the extent of Indo-European India. It is where, on one side of the valley, you have got Indo-European, and on the other side you have got Tibet, now occupied by China. When you visit Spiti, as I have a few times, and you look really carefully, you will see how people often are ethnically Indo-European, so they look like me, they have just got slightly darker skin, but culturally they are Tibetan. They have got Tibetan names, they speak Tibetan, they act with the same body language as Tibetans, and they worship in Tibetan Buddhist temples there. So it is a wonderful melting pot of the Indo-European with the Tibetan. But of course the Tibetan Buddhist memory is Indo-European itself. The Sanskrit tradition of Buddhism was solidified over eight centuries in the great monastic university of Nalanda, in Bihar in India, ending around the 11th or 12th century into the Common Era. That intellectual and religious inheritance had begun in the Sanskrit around 300 BCE with Shakyamuni Buddha and Ananda, his last disciple and the name of my cat, Ananda. That tradition was lost, really, in India until lately, and transmitted into a different linguistic family, into the Tibetan, the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, and preserved and elaborated and perfected by Tibetan Buddhists in their own language. And now it is being converted back into Indo-European languages. Just in the past couple of decades, under the patronage of the 14th Dalai Lama, who is my direct teacher, much of this Indo-European inheritance has now been translated back into an Indo-European language, and we have it again, available to Indo-Europeans. So that is very much part of our Finding Manuland Atlas, and where we range around. And in the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border, near Mane village, M-A-N-E, not to be confused with Maing village, M-A-I-N-G, in north-eastern France, where Finding Manuland all began. In Mane village, under Manirang mountain, the Man- sounds thick in that contested borderland, where parts are occupied by China today, and you need to get a special pass to travel through certain parts of the Spiti Valley because of the military element, I photographed a Yama-like painting in a monastery there. In Dharamsala, on the 16th of June 2016, I heard the Dalai Lama teach on emptiness and the Heart Sutra, and was initiated into Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ, the M that closes the Oṃ. Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ. I have also spent time near Bengaluru, on the Dravidian line, which is where Indo-European India essentially ends and goes into Dravidian, the pre-Indo-European remnant of India, where the Indo-Europeans didn’t manage to convert them. This is where the M-N- meets a language family not its own. The Plain of the Ganges: Manu’s Own Country The Indian journeys still to come, in the future, are the ones I have thought about longest, because my own note on India is a single line: the sacrifice manuals of the Rig Veda are the texts closest in time to the Yamna, as indeed, I believe, are the esoteric texts of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The plain of
