Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1

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 to outlast any single journey. A skeleton that runs between Ireland and India, with infinite journeys in between. It could be a travel agency; it could be tour guides. If you’re interested in linguistics, it could be about linguistics, bringing you to the places which are of interest to you. If you’re interested in archaeology, or just a particular country which is or was an Indo-European country, then Finding Manuland is for you.

So this is a frame which is already standing, so that each visit made is one vertebra slotting into it. Not a new skeleton every time, but one spine growing a bone at a time, across a lifetime, with no fixed end. That’s the point of calling it a harness. Finding Manuland is a harness, not just for my life, or my artistic practice, but for yours. It’s an itinerary. The shape holds whether the next journey happens next spring or in ten years. And the eastern edge of the journey, and the western edge, and the southern edge, and the northern edge are all part of the same journey.

The Three Elements: Mana, Language, and Journeying

Every episode of Finding Manuland has three elements. I say them at the top of each episode, and throughout the episodes, so they become like a mantra — and they are also the method.

Mana, meaning energy. I’m exchanging my energy with you. You can hear it in the timbre of my voice. You, by listening and interacting, are taking it in, and you are giving back. We are exchanging our Mana. But I am also exchanging my Mana with the places I’m talking about, and the ideas I’m talking about, and the last 6,000 years of our language.

The second element is the language: the MN sound and its neighbour sounds, followed across the Indo-European family from Ireland to India, and back to the ground where the family began, in ancient Ukraine.

And journeys — voyages, mental and physical. The uprooting and rebuilding of mental models. My aim is to change your mental model of history, of human culture, of our culture, in the way that mine has been. Or let me put that another way: my aim is to communicate to you how my mental models have been transformed, as I have been on this infinite journey, which began in Mons in eastern France in November 2021 — which I’ve written about in the first Finding Manuland non-podcast episode.

The Sound the Language Element Follows: MN

The thing the language element follows across half the world is a sound. I began with the sound MN, in Mons in eastern France, in November 2021. MN, M-N: the pair of nasal consonants that recur in word after word from Ireland to India. Human, mind, moon, meaning, karma, measure, memory, month — all have MN inside them. And, most tellingly, the name of the founding figure in branch after branch of our language family.

The founder who carries the sound turns up in six of eight living Indo-European branches: Indic Manu; Iranian Airyaman; Hellenic Minos; Germanic Mannus; Menua, the great builder-king of Urartu, the kingdom under Ararat, whose successor state is Armenia; and at the western sea edge, Celtic Manawydan from Wales, and Manannán — and Éremón, Ireland’s first High King.

Rome’s first lawgiving monarch — M-N in Roman and in monarch — Numa, is not a seventh. He is the same sound run backwards, N-M: the mirror, rather than another copy. And Numitor, his grandfather — grandfather of Romulus and Remus — carries this reversal too. The mirror struck twice. One name like this could pass for chance. Six of the eight branches landing on the same sound does not. And Nemed, who is Ireland’s originator, pre-Indo-European originator — that is inheritance, not accident.

The reason to trust that it is a system, and not the mind finding faces in clouds, comes from how far apart the witnesses stand. A feature shared by the Indic East and the Celtic West — Manu on the Ganges and Manannán on the Irish Sea — cannot have been borrowed from one to the other. The distance is too great, and the contact never happened. When two witnesses so far apart say the same thing, the thing they share was already there before they parted. Manu and Manannán carry the whole span between them — the whole span of Manuland, the land between Ireland and India.

The Moon: A Hypothesis, Not Magic

So where does the moon come in? The moon — another MN word — is my best guess at why that sound first got its sense. It’s not the object of the search, but a hypothesis inside it: an organising focus, a journeying focus. Of all the bodies in the sky, the moon is the one that seems lit from within, and the one that dies and comes back each month — MN in month. That makes it a natural picture of the mind — MN in mind — the thing that shines through a living body, like the moon, and tells a breathing being from a stone; that goes out at death and, in the stories, returns. The MN words cluster around exactly this: mind, moon, the measuring of months, the founder who first thought.

The moon hypothesis says a moon-based way of signalling meaning — the light of another concept shining through a particular word is meaning — was built into the language early by the first Indo-Europeans, and that it explains most, though not all, of where the MN sits. The empirical pattern is the object; the moon is one account of its cause. And yes, it is a mysterious phenomenon. But we do know that we do, by tradition, speak one of the living Indo-European languages between Ireland and India. We have archaeogenetic evidence, now published in Science and humanity’s preeminent journals, which determined that the Yamna — M-N in Yamna — from ancient Ukraine, just south of the cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, in a village called Mykhailivka, are that origin.

So the idea that something they said, and a meaning they attached to a particular sound, would travel with them and persist through all these different cultures, to be attached to the founder figures of all of these great living Indo-European cultures — we’ll also explore some of the non-living Indo-European cultures, of Anatolia in today’s Türkiye for instance — the idea that they may have planted a sound and a meaning in the language, the core fundamental language they used to describe such ideas as mind, as human, as moon: the idea that they might have done that is completely plausible. And it is mysterious, and it’s amazing, that this imminence in what they said may well have travelled through places and become attached to toponyms — the names of places, of gods, of cities, of islands, of rivers. That mystery is part of what we’re going to explore in Finding Manuland.

But don’t get me wrong: this is not magic, and nor am I challenging the orthodoxy of conventional linguistics. The sign and the meaning are arbitrary when they’re forged together — in this case by the Yamna. But after that, it becomes a matter of evolution and natural selection. And it just so happens that I’m the first writer to have noticed this phenomenon at its true extent. We’ll be talking about many of the other writers and researchers and linguists and historians — starting with the first, with the Welsh discoverer, Sir William Jones, of the Indo-European language family, in the late 18th century. It just so happens that I’m the first person who’s seen it in all of its vast scope.

I’ve spent the last years — basically since February 2020, when I started intuiting there was something going on, and then making a conscious decision in Mons village, recorded in Finding Manuland on Power of Mana — to actually try and find out: what is this pattern, of what does it consist, and how might it have emerged? Does it mean anything? And if it does mean anything, what does it mean? So there is a mystery. But I’m not talking about magic here, in the sense of: oh gosh, the secret code was embedded in our minds by these ancient Ukrainian Yamna, 4000 BCE, and they sat around a fire and decided, we are going to forge this sound-and-meaning bundle and place it in the language, and then we’re going to go forth and travel to the lands between Ireland and India and plant it, and then 6,000 years later someone will do a podcast about it, which will go on for a very long time, with many episodes, and go through the Mana exchange, the language, and the journey. Now, I’m not saying that happened at all. I’m saying we can empirically see this sound, even in the words I’m using to talk to you. We can see it in the founders; we can see it in the places, in our towns, in our villages, in the names of our friends. And I’m just looking into it.

The Three Cryptotypes: MN, RT, and DN

So, a word for the organising unit. A cryptotype is a sound-frame that carries one shared meaning across roots that are otherwise unrelated. It’s a hidden category the language keeps without ever naming it. The atlas is arranged by three cryptotypes.

The MN founder-and-mind sound is the spine. Beside it runs the RT — the right, rule, and order sound: Rta in Sanskrit, meaning truth; Arta in Old Persian; Rex in Latin; Reich in German. Its dark mirror is TR and DR, the sound of the staged lie — Druj — written into the stone at Behistun in Iran by Darius the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid — again MN, Achaemenid — Empire, around 600 BCE. Arta meaning truth; Rita in Sanskrit; Arta meaning truth in Old Persian. The truth of the sovereign, from whom healthy communities arise. And then Druj, the sound of the staged lie — it’s what usurpers speak.

And DN is the river sound — that’s the third cryptotype we’ll be talking about. DN is the river sound: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dniester, the Danube. The great waters of ancient Ukraine — the waters that literally sign the homeland from where all living Indo-European languages emanate. And the Don was, according to Isidore of Seville, who was basically the Wikipedia of the ancient world, writing around 600–700 CE — the Tanais, the Don — the limit of Europa’s protection, and after that, Asia began. And until relatively recently, all the lands west of the Don — people spoke Ukrainian. But unfortunately, the Russians don’t like people who speak Ukrainian, so they took them away.

In this atlas, this Finding Manuland atlas, which we’ll be talking about over the next long, long, long time, places gather under the sound their names hold, not under the map square they occupy. West to east — Irish home ground to the furthest eastern reach — is simply the order of walking, and it’s the order the family itself travelled.

The Method in One Line

The papers, and the podcast this programme introduces, are all illustrations of a method — and the method, in one line: recognise the MN frame, trace it back to ancient Ukraine, and vast tracts of the question settle. The recentring of Ukraine in how we think about our origins, on the basis of parity of esteem — territorial, not ethnic: a ground shared by descent, never owned by it; the undermining of the Russian justification for annihilating it; and the repopulating of our own history. This is my method, and it’s what I uniquely offer. No one else is working back from the archaeogenetics to ancient Ukraine, through 6,000 years, across the entirety of Manuland, Ireland to India, and ranging over it like a tiger, like a lion. And I’m going to bring you on this journey over the whole of Manuland.

The three elements land together at every site. So: Mana exchange, language, and journeying. There’s an exchange of Mana, the numinous charge or energy a place carries. There is a linguistic connection — the music discovery, the sound heard inside a place-name as you move through it. And there is the journey’s own signature, a tactile connection: a hand on a stone, footprints in fresh snow, a name read off a museum tablet. Those three together are what turn a vertebra into bone.

And behind this introduction, more than a hundred papers stand already written, which I’ll speak to you — one for almost every place and pattern you’re about to meet. And that house, that house is Manuland: the area between Ireland and India. Some of you, like me, may have had only very sketchy ideas of places and where they were located, and the cultures, and how everything slotted together. The journey I’ve been on is myself finding Manuland, and now, having learned a little bit about it, I’m going to bring you on that journey. And as we travel, I too will be exchanging my Mana with you, with the places, and the ideas, and the concepts, and the ancient humans who forged these ideas, and the great writers, the great researchers, the great archaeogeneticists, the great linguists, the great historians — and the great normal people that we’ll meet along the way, the people like you and me, without whom this sound, this MN sound, would not exist. It’s only because you and I, today, in almost every sentence we speak, use one of these three cryptotypes, that these three cryptotypes actually survive.

So you may have an idea of the space between Ireland and India, and by the end of Finding Manuland — which I hope will be quite infinite — you will populate that space in your mind, as I have, with actual places and names and times and events. This particular podcast will be one of maybe three or four where I’m just doing the whole sketch of the atlas, and then, in ever-decreasing circles of focus, we will move through the area between Ireland and India: Manuland.

So this is the frame as it stands today. Places I’ve already walked, and those I talk about in the past tense plainly, because the visit is the evidence. Others I have visited, but I need to go back there — I only found out after I left, or passed, what their true significance was. And the road runs on to them. So take out your mental map of the world — the one your schooling gave you, or your holidays in Turkey or Greece, if you were lucky enough, or Rome: Rome at the centre and everything else on the edges. We’re going to redraw it together, country by country, west to east — from the Spiti Valley in the Himalayas in northern India, where I’ve travelled several times, which divides Tibet, ancient Tibet, from the limits the Indo-Europeans reached. There’s literally this valley, and on one side is Tibet, and on the other side is where the furthest Indo-Europeans reached. And I found it because I was looking for the MN — and there were many, many, many towns and villages in that area, and the people living in that valley: sometimes you can see in them the Indo-Europeans; at other times they look Tibetan, and they act Tibetan. And so we go from there all the way west, to Emain Macha in County Armagh, near where I was born.

Irish Home Ground: Emain Macha, the Twins of Macha

And that is the family’s westernmost shore, the Irish home ground. A religion died there; its founder’s name lived on in a story; and a childhood of Sunday mounds — burial mounds, ceremonial mounds, MN in mound and ceremonial — first tuned the ear. Home is near Emain Macha — as the English might call it, Navan Fort, but its true name is Emain Macha. E-M-A-I-N: Emain, meaning twin. Emain Macha, the royal mound outside Armagh city, which still is the seat of the Christian priesthood — and a Protestant primate of all Ireland.

The ear was trained there before any of this was a project. As a child, I was taken on Sunday afternoon excursions to see Newgrange, Knowth, and Emain Macha — three of the oldest and most famous mounds in Europe — without any idea that these outings were a schooling, and a premonition of how the rest of my life would turn out.

The mound itself is an MN word — mound, from the old word mund: the hand, and the protection a hand gives, cognate with the Latin manus. A mound is a hand cupped over the dead — a memory technology, a way of keeping the dead present in the land. It is the literal location of the afterworld in Yamna lore and religion, from which we all emanate. And if you speak an Indo-European language — if you understand what I’m saying to you in English — you are an inheritor, if not genetically then culturally, of those Yamna. But most of us, it turns out, since the 2015 archaeogenetics revolution, which was launched with a paper in Nature — which we’ll come back to — then genetically we all are; most of us are also emanations of that community, to a greater or lesser extent.

And Emain holds a further thing. Its name means the twins of Macha, on the Indo-European family’s old word for twin. So the mound keeps the dead twin beside the founder — the shadow that shows up wherever the first man, the first human, is named. NM: named. Mana and name. We’ll come back to how those two concepts relate: MN, Mana, and name, NM, its reversal. I went back to Emain Macha during this quest, quietly, and I’ve not written much about it since. And it’s near a shore I keep returning to. Newgrange and Knowth, with their lunar-marked kerbstones, sit in the same childhood breath — the moon already cut into stone by people measuring their months. And the people who built Newgrange and Knowth were prior to the Indo-Europeans.

East Belfast: The Least Numinous Address in the Atlas

East Belfast is home too. I lived there, on a so-called loyalist housing estate, while I was unemployed after a spell as General Secretary of Northern Ireland’s governing anti-sectarian political party. And I applied from there for diplomatic postings — which at the time was a very unlikely prospect. But then, as sometimes happens in life — and it happened for me one day in September 2014, the 11th or 12th actually, and I’ll never forget that moment — I went from not really knowing what was going to happen next in my life to being offered a job. I had a job with the Irish diplomatic service, in an international organisation called the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And within two weeks I was on an airplane to the Balkans — to Kosovo, to Kosova, as they call it now, where this journey began. Although at the time I didn’t know any of this; I couldn’t even imagine any of this. It was a job — a job and an amazing interest. And I’m still on that journey that began from that loyalist housing estate: the least numinous address in the atlas, and one of the most important. And that’s the way life works, and indeed how Manuland works.

Tech Duinn and the DN Death-Lords: Donn, Yama, Odin

The road runs on from there to places I’ve not yet stood in, and places which I have been, but not knowingly. I’ve never crossed to Tech Duinn, the House of Donn, the sea rock off Kerry, where the Irish dead were said to gather in the pre-Christian era — the western door of the otherworld. Donn is a D-N name: the death-lord, the Lord of Death, who mirrors the MN founders the way Yama mirrors Manu in India. Yama is Manu’s twin, the first monarch to die. Manu, the first sacrificer; and Yama, the first self-sacrificer, who, like Donn, leads those who come after him into the otherworld, into the mound. And the way Ymir stands against the first man in Denmark and in Germanic culture — Denmark, DN — the death sound rides north to Odin, after whom our Wednesday is named: Woden’s Day, the day of Woden, the god Woden. Odin has a DN in it — or Woden, as the English would call him. Lord of the Slain: another DN name.

And the Irish wrote down where Donn’s people came from eight centuries before the ancient DNA confirmed that the origin of all living Indo-European languages was in Mykhailivka, in southern Zaporizhzhia, on the right bank of the Dnipro River, where I lived for four years. Eight centuries before the DNA did — DN in DNA, but that doesn’t really mean much. The medieval Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions, makes Donn the grandson of the monarch of Scythia, on the Pontic Steppe: ancient Ukraine. So the death-lord of this far western sea rock is remembered, in writing, as a grandson of the very homeland Alexey Nikitin’s 2025 ancient-DNA paper — seminal, MN in seminal, paper in Nature, humanity’s preeminent scientific journal — would later fix on the Dnipro. DN: the Dnipro.

I have not yet taken the boat towards Tech Duinn off the coast of Kerry, nor have I stood on the coracle-launch shores of the Immram Brain, the voyage-tale that is Ireland’s first poem — and it’s the native shape of this whole search. Bran rows west, and the sea beneath him looks like a plain, a flowering meadow — Bran rowing — and the sovereign of that sea is Manannán.

The Bandon, Ogham, and the Goddess Written as Dea

The estuary of the river — and one of my earliest intimations that there was something going on here was how I read that the name of the Bandon was recorded as a goddess. This was written in one of the first pieces of writing ever found on the island of Ireland, written in an alphabet called ogham. And if you have the luck to go into the British Museum in London sometime — that massive entrance hall which goes around in a circle — there’s an amazing ogham stone there, which was found in Dumnonia, which is now called Devon, which was put there by Irish migrants. So this was a script of its own, and it looks a little like cuneiform of its own kind.

And in County Kilkenny in Ireland was found an ogham stone which characterised the goddess of the river as Dea — dea, the same word in deus, and the same word in Jupiter, Zeus; the same word that is used in god, and deva, across the Indo-European family. And it was this realisation — that the same word, deva, used in India, was also used in Ireland, at a time when there was absolutely no chance of physical contact between the two places, and that it was important enough to be written down — that made me stop and think. But that’s just one of thousands of little elements in this story, which we will talk about.

Fermanagh, Monaghan, and the Manapii

The drumlin counties of Fermanagh and Monaghan wait to be walked, for the MN that saturates them — Monaghan, MN, and Fermanagh — laid down by the Manapii, a Belgic sea tribe who worshipped Manannán and left their name thick across the north. And when I went to Mons village, where this all began, in November 2021, that was Manapii country, where the Manapii reigned, just by the Manche. And so many of the MN names in Ireland, and indeed along the coast of the island of Britain, emanate from the Manapii tribe. So again, the MN reappears, not through some sort of magical influence — you can really find these historical moments. I look through the archives, and I find the people.

Like Mongan — this great researcher, who is now dead. He went to the sky. Dies: dead. He went to the sky — that’s what death really means; dies, it means going to the sky. So that concept that we have, of passing into another world. And Mongan wrote this great book, The Menapia Quest, which solved a lot of my questions — questions about how we ended up with so many MN sounds on the island of Ireland and in England, which persist. So Finding Manuland illuminates the ancient in the everyday — not just the places where we live, and think of, the places we love, but the language we speak. And learning that these emanate from this Belgic sea tribe, the Manapii, who worshipped Manannán, Ireland’s and Celtic culture’s founder figure — as well as Éremón, who was the first High King of all Ireland. Éremón: MN. Sounds very like Airyaman, whom we’ll get to in a bit. Just learning that the Manapii existed, which I didn’t know, and that they explain all these MN sounds in Ireland and Irish places — well, that doesn’t take away from the essential interest and mystery of it. But at the same time, it does provide a mechanical explanation for these places.

Ptolemy’s map of Ireland, drawn around 150 years into the Common Era, marks the first trading colony on the island — Manapia — on the Leinster coast. And there is a street sign in Wexford, whose name in Irish is Loch Gorman — the M-N in Gorman, Loch Gorman, Wexford — that remembers it. The same map names a headland in the south of Ulster, Isamnion, which one careful reading places at the Mourne — again MN — Mountains, MN, and renders, very tentatively, as the people of the underworld: an MN headland named for the dead, on my own coast. And I only learnt of it from a paper in my files.

The Broighter Gold and Arthur Evans: The Man Who Dug Up the MN King

One more Irish destination I owe to a man who never came here for it. In February 1896, two ploughmen at Broighter, on the flat reclaimed land below Lough Foyle in the north of the island of Ireland, struck first-century-before-the-Common-Era gold: a great collar, and a miniature ship, complete with oars, mast, and benches. The standing interpretation, argued all the way to a courtroom in 1903, is that the hoard was a votive offering sunk into the water for Manannán — his domain, MN in domain. Lough Foyle is, in Irish tradition — and in an old Irish colloquy, a mysterious youth, long identified with Manannán’s son Mongán, tells Colum Cille that Lough Foyle was once a flowering plain before the water came over it. Just like the steppe in Ukraine, from where these people came. The sea that is really a plain of flowers — the Immram Brain image — anchored on a shore. And I will stand on it with you, knowingly, because that makes the difference.

Mens rea: the intention, the intention in the mind, which is the element you need in English law to determine guilt for a crime, and for criminal liability — MN in criminal as well. The mens rea, the intention, of visiting these places with you, the listener, in mind.

And these stories now, and the connections between — for instance, this. The scholar who wrote up the Broighter Gold in 1897, arguing it was a deposit to the sea divinity, was Arthur Evans. A-R-T: Art, in Arthur — the same Arta, Rit, in the Behistun inscriptions, the same RT of one of the three cryptotypes which we’ll be talking about over the coming years and months. Three years later, he broke ground at Knossos, and gave the world the palace of Minos. So the discoverer of the palace of Minos also wrote up the offering of the collar to Manannán. The man who dug up the MN king of Crete wrote up the MN god first. And we’ll explore whether he even noticed that consonantal skeleton — MN in Minos and MN in Manannán — as so many of the other greats have missed. And I want to stand at Broighter with his paper in hand, and then go to the National Museum in Dublin again, and look at the little gold oars that Manannán was given to row with.

Manannán, the Isle of Man, and the Isle of Môn

Manannán is worth pausing on. He’s the preeminent deity of pre-Christian Ireland — not just some random figure. Sea lord and sovereign of the otherworld, son of Lir: that much is secure. What is genuinely open is the direction of his name — if the god is named for the Isle of Man, or for the Isle of Môn, which the English call Anglesey, but whose true name is the Isle of Môn. And that was where the Druids took their last stand against the invading Romans; two great battles were fought there by the Druids. And if the god is named for the Isle of Man, which stands between the island of Britain and the island of Ireland in the Irish Sea — if the Man is named for the Isle of Man, why is the MN in the Isle of Man? So maybe the Isle of Man is named for the Isle of Môn. No — but why is the MN in the Isle of Môn? And maybe it does go back to the Manapii. Maybe it does — but why are so many important places called MN?

What matters for the atlas is the plainer thing. When the old religion fell, the founder’s name did not — and Manannán survives. He survives. I can speak of him. Books are written about him. Every generation of Irish writers from the 8th century on, including me, has resurrected Manannán, the preeminent pre-Christian deity. We’re keeping it alive. We’re keeping that MN alive. And it survived in the written canon. And in the old tale, Manannán crossed the sea to father an historical king, Mongán — another MN — whose death the annals set down around 625. The founder outlived his own cult by living on in a story, just like this. That handoff is myth into history — a name, NM, kept when the belief around it dissolved.

Ours is a culture of layers, like a layer cake, and this is one of the layers. We will unpack the layers between today and 6,000 years ago, one after the other, after the other, after the other. In Finding Manuland we look at Christianity and other religions — Buddhism, Islam, and what people call paganism, or numenism. We look at the flamines, who were the priestly caste in Rome; and we look at the Brahmin — again, the MN in Brahmin and flamines — a priestly caste in India; and we look at the fir flathemon, a priestly caste in Ireland. And we look at the MN in all of them, and peel off these layers. And through learning about all of these different layers, we learn something a little more about ourselves, which we can bring into every time we notice we use an MN sound in our daily life — when we talk about a month, or a Monday.

This is the kind of historical handoff I’ve so far followed only on the page. There are papers waiting for us here, and they are among the atlas’s best: the House of Donn, where the monks had the address in writing; the Twins in Emain Macha’s own name; the maimed king; Mongán; the tribe that carried the name.

Britain: The Family’s Later Staging Ground

And Britain. Britain is the family’s later staging ground: Germanic mounds, law schools, the first lawgiver’s hill — lived in by me for years, mostly as a workplace rather than a pilgrimage. Now move your map a little east from Ireland, across the narrow sea, the Irish Sea, into an island — the island of Britain — which contains three of the Irish Sea states: Scotland, Wales (Cymru), and England. Britain I know as a place lived in rather than made pilgrimage to, and the sound turned up in it almost by accident. The island’s very name came from the Pretani, a Celtic tribe.

I stayed for months in a friend’s house in Devon while assembling a university application to Cambridge, where I would study Roman law, and drove down there after his death. Only later did I notice — in that period, the British Museum, the entrance hall that I told you about, this great round place: that is where I saw the ogham stone from Roman Dumnonia, and it carries the MN inside it. So there are imminences in words which don’t appear to carry MN — and you will maybe read my Menzies and Mother Matter post about that.

And I lived some years in East Anglia, the launch region of the Germanic settlement — the son of Mannus whose name is Ing, and the Ingaevones, who conquered the island of Britain and gave their name to the island, according to me. You won’t find that in the folk etymologies, which talk about people with blonde hair. But when you understand that Mannus — whose MN is in German, Germanic, German — Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, the Roman historian writing in the first century of the Common Era, had three sons: we will come across these manifestations of three sons in so many different places across Manuland. One of his three sons was Erman, MN; one was Ing; and the other was Ist. And it was the Ings — the people who worshipped the son of Mannus, Ing, who identified themselves as the Ingaevones — they were the ones who spread westwards from the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts across the island, giving their names. It’s the launch region of the Germanic settlement of Britain, and the core of England. That’s where the idea of England was invented.

And where I had the privilege of studying, at a college founded in 1350 by the Bishop of Norwich to train lawyers. And I recently went to see some of the earliest Saxon mounds — burial mounds — on the Suffolk–Essex border. These were raised by the Ingaevones, the coastal nation Tacitus derives from a son of Mannus, the Germanic first man.

Not all of the Britain ground is landscape; some of it is law. And it belongs here, because the whole adjudication side of this work was schooled in it. We flicker between geographies and concepts and ideas and knowledge, and also the methods we use to analyse this information — because we’re looking for Arta, and we’re looking for truth. And there are so many truths passed over during the 6,000 years that many of us, including myself, simply weren’t aware of. In that Cambridge law college, Trinity Hall, I studied Roman law and international law, and I worked afterwards as a property lawyer in London, where a small curiosity became a thread I later called Mana as a Gift.

Wandlebury Ring and the Gog Magog Hills: The Moonlight Challenge

And a few miles from those Cambridge lecture rooms stands a hill I have written about but never circled by night: Wandlebury Ring, in the Gog Magog Hills. Gog Magog: Magog, one of the sons of Japheth, son of Noah — and we’ll go into this again. If some of you have seen my Indo-European Imminence in Early Christianity paper, which I’ve recently written — we’ve already touched on it, but we’ll talk about all the different strands in it that demonstrate the imminence of Indo-European culture in the Holy Land at the time the Old Testament and the New Testament were written.

Evidence, for instance: we have written evidence from 1400 BCE, in the Amarna Letters found in Egypt, that the names, the monikers, of the monarchs of certain kingdoms in Judea and Canaan were Indo-European. So at Megiddo we have an Indaruta — that ND, giving their name to India, to Alexander, who reappears then in India. These are Indo-Europeans there. We have the Achaemenid Empire again — Darius, whom I just mentioned, who occupied Canaan for about 300 years. Then we have Alexander the Great — of course, Greek, Indo-European, coming there. Then we have a Roman occupation at the time Jesus dies, and the lingua franca then was Greek — the first scriptures written in Greek and in Roman script. And of course, even the trope of the first self-sacrificing king, who then founds a culture: that trope recurs everywhere from Ireland to India. In Ireland, in the form of Donn, who is one of the sons of Míl, who was the grandson of the monarch of Scythia, according to the medieval scribes. And he lands on Ireland with his brother Éremón — M-N in Éremón — and they conquer Ireland. They win against the Tuatha Dé Danann — D-N in Danann. And there, on the Hill of Tara, Amergin, the first judge of Ireland — the first, and one of the sons of Míl — decides.

Besides — well, we should go back beyond the ninth wave, which is reminiscent of that great album by Kate Bush. Listen to it tonight, if you’ve got access to Spotify or Apple Music. Beyond the ninth wave, which is how — before the Law of the Sea was passed, in whatever it was, 1967 — was determined, in the way modern international law determines, the limit of your jurisdiction. And Donn went beyond the ninth wave and made a very proud speech. But the Tuatha Dé Danann drove up a storm using magic, and Donn became the first self-sacrificing lord of death for the Irish.

And Gervase of Tilbury recorded Wandlebury’s legend: a warrior who rides into the ring at dead of night, in the Gog Magog Hills, by moonlight, and cries out a challenge that will be met by an otherworld horseman. Moonlight is not decoration — it’s the operative condition, the key that opens the door. The one site in Britain where the moon is written into the ritual instructions sits on a hill named for a giant of the island’s foundations. And I never went there — but we will go there, if we have enough time. Who knows how much time we have? So this is why it’s important to put this down, and speak this now, and write it — write it out in verse and in text and in words.

Three More MN and DN Surprises: Clackmannan, Anglesey, Doncaster

Britain holds three more MN and DN surprises I mean to collect. The smallest historic county in Scotland is named after a stone you can touch. And Scotland is named for the Irish who colonised it, the Scoti — which is my middle name, Scott. So I am named for the island I speak about, and where I was born, and where this journey began. And my people, we colonised Scotland, and gave the name to Scotland, and left the name Ireland on Ireland. And that’s a common theme, a common pattern which we’ll come across — just like the which-came-first: Isle of Man, or Manannán, or Isle of Môn; or Kayseri, near where the first Indo-European writing, from 1800 and 1900 BCE, was found in the village of Kültepe — Kayseri is named for Caesar. And so we have this switching of onomastic, toponymic names between people and places and things and ideas, and the MN travels between all of them.

And so Clackmannan is Clach Mhanann — the Stone of Manau — in Scotland, and the boulder itself is the Stone of Manau. The stone itself stands mounted beside the town Tolbooth, where the townsfolk raised it onto a plinth in 1833. Manau was the old district at the head of the Firth of Forth — the same territorial name the Isle of Man carries. And it’s the one place in Britain where the MN survives as a touchable stone — kaminnia, in Ukrainian: a touchable stone with a county wrapped around it.

Anglesey is the second, which I spoke about: Môn, the island of the Druids, the professional keepers of memorised law and lore — which I became an inheritor of, the Romanised version of it, when I went and read law at Cambridge. Whose destruction in 61, Tacitus describes, shore by shore. Many Irish will just think of Anglesey, the Isle of Môn, as somewhere we go through on the way to the ferry to cross the Irish Sea, to go home or to leave home — perhaps to emigrate from. Actually, the Isle of Môn plays a very important role in the occupation of Britain by the Romans, and the de-Celticisation of the island of Britain — which thankfully didn’t succeed, because we still have two Celtic states surrounding England, the Germanic state. And in the 1940s, a little lake there on the Isle of Môn — Llyn Cerrig Bach, excuse my pronunciation; forgive my pronunciation, and I hope we do have some Welsh listeners, because Manawydan is very important to this story — gave up more than 150 offerings thrown into the water across two centuries: chariot fittings and slave chains, plausibly the votive wealth of the Druid island Rome destroyed.

You will not find Rome eulogised in this podcast. This is not like the ancients, where we think the world began in Greece and Rome. Yes, they are great cultures, but they are just some of the great cultures in the land between Ireland and India, and we will explore each of them according to parity of esteem in Manuland. The island, the Isle of Môn, Anglesey, whose treasure went into the water.

And the third is hiding under a railway town: the Yorkshire Don, which carries the name Danu — the river name — as the Don of the Steppe, the Danube, the Dnipro, the Donets, where I worked from 2015 to 2018, three years, over the Donets River at Stanytsia Luhanska; and the Dnipro, the Dniester, the Danube. So the Don, the Yorkshire Don: Rome named its fort there for the river — Danum — after which my schooling, and Doncaster, the land it stands on, was named. So Doncaster is Britain’s own DN river signature — which came first, the fort or the river — and almost nobody says its name slowly enough to stop.

Tynwald Hill and Manawydan Country

From Britain, the road runs on to two places I’ve not yet reached, but mean to. On the Isle of Man stands Tynwald Hill — I was there as a child, but I hardly remember it — the open-air parliament, the MN in parliament, that still meets in the air on a mound. It’s a living version of the oldest idea in the Indo-European family: that the founder is also the first judge. The way Manu shades into the lawgiver, Morann mac Máin. And there is Manawydan country in Wales, where we will visit too, where the Celtic founder name is cleanest of all. Manawydan comes down by regular sound-law from the older Manawydion. That is the ground where the etymology can be shown at its tightest — and I’ve not walked it.

Closing

You’ve been listening to Finding Manuland. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at powerofmana.net, where you can subscribe to my channel. My masterwork is disinfolklore.eu — disinfolklore, disinfolklore. I write daily on X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Thank you for being with me. This is the first episode of the Atlas, overseeing the whole series of Finding Manuland that we’re beginning today. I hope you’ll come back for the next episode.