Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2

You’ll remember I spoke about how each episode of Finding Manuland looks at Mana, as the energy we exchange, as a source — the function of being human; the linguistic aspect, the miracle of MN being immanent in so many words we use, and places we go, and the founder figures, and so much else beside, and as an organising focus for this journey; and the third element, the journeying element, of every Finding Manuland episode. In the last episode I brought you on a quick survey of Ireland and Britain, and now this is the Western European Corridor atlas survey.

The idea here is: I’ve got hundreds of papers and journeys to talk to you about. In each of these podcasts will be immanent those three elements — Mana, language, and journeying. These are the introductory episodes, just to give you a flavour of what is to come next.

Maing: Where the Project Got Its Name

So, the Western European Corridor. This is the drive home from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 — or rather, the drive back to Ukraine. Now we cross the continent, and the map starts to move under us. This corridor is where the project Finding Manuland got its name. On a drive back to my diplomatic posting, just prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — I was driving back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro, in the autumn of 2021, at the very start of a three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre run from my home near Emain Macha in Ireland to Dnipro — I was already noticing that my route threaded through MN- and M-A-I-N-sounding place-names, when I followed the word Maing off the satnav into a village in northern France. And there it was, on the side of a shed: Manuland.

It was getting late. I photographed the shed. The next morning I doubled back and, without quite deciding to, invented the method I have used ever since. So when I go to a place on this journey, I start at the church, or somehow in the centre of a village. I don’t know what I’m looking for, why I’m there, or if I’ll find anything. And that day in Maing, I ran in ever-increasing circles out from it, around the village, up one street and down the next, until I reached the edge of town and a cobbled road — an ancient road — climbing up a hill. Off the hill sat a mound with a herdsman on it, who, when I reached him, pointed me towards Cassels, the old capital of the Menapii, the same Manannán-worshipping sea tribe, now inland in France. I set off for Cassels, and that circling, born in Maing, is the recurring shape — like a chariot wheel — the recurring shape of every journey since.

The exchange of Mana with the herdsman; a sound heard in a place-name — the language; a hand on actual ground — the journeying. All three elements were already there, in what would have been a nondescript but altogether beautiful French village I would never have stopped in. And the name, Manuland, taken off a shed.

The Main Corridor: Goethe, Herder, and the Making of a National Culture

The corridor is a string of MN-sounding names: Mons, Mainz, Frankfurt-on-Main. I stopped along it at Goethe’s house in Frankfurt — occupied by the French when Goethe was a child. And it was at that moment that the great Herder decided: we must create a national culture, a German culture. We must unite the German tribes, by finding our Shakespeare, by creating our Shakespeare, our culture. Herder wrote, as I have said in previous episodes, which you will see and we will come back to — he said, in 1777: where is our Shakespeare? We need a Shakespeare, like England has a Shakespeare, to unite around.

And Goethe — whose house was literally hosting a French occupying general, who would eat and drink and live in that house — Goethe then became Germany’s Shakespeare. And the Grimm Brothers then became the great linguists, the first of the great philologists and linguists of the Germanic languages, and collected folk tales, and looked at the language and the meanings inside them. And then, of course, Wagner, 90 years later. The tales which Tacitus had told about the Germans, and Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples, and his three sons, became operas, and became stories — like Faust, like The Sorrows of Young Werther — which Goethe and Herder and so many great writers used to unite around, and create the first unified Germany. And that model of nation-state formation, around national cultures grounded in folklore, song, and culture — that is part of the heritage Finding Manuland uses to explore all the spaces between Ireland and India, which I archetype as Manuland.

The Museums: Halle, Wrocław, and Enheduanna in Brussels

The museums on that journey are where the moon and its measuring keep surfacing in bronze — in Halle, in Wrocław in Poland, where in October 2021 I photographed a Bronze Age sun-chariot. In February 2022, in the last weeks before the full-scale invasion, driving back, leaving Ukraine with my cat, anticipating the invasion, I stood in Halle, in the great modern museum there.

And in the dusty corner of a museum in Brussels, I found the thread: a cuneiform tablet, in a dusty corner, holding Enheduanna’s hymn to the moon god Nanna. The first named author, from 2400 BCE — the first named author in human history, already signing her name: a moon priestess, MN. Her alabaster, still, after 4,000 years, as luminescent as a full moon. And we will go to the Penn Museum in Pennsylvania — Penn, the great Ivy League university where my grandfather studied. We will go there, and that is where Enheduanna’s luminescent disc, which was created in her own lifetime, now abides. I photographed her, and the cuneiform text, almost by chance, and she turned out to be a doorway to Mesopotamia, which is very, very far to the east, and somewhere we’re going.

Domburg and Nehalennia: The Menapii’s Last Surprise

The Menapii have one more surprise waiting for us, on their own coast. In January 1647, a storm stripped the dunes at Domburg, on the Dutch island of Walcheren, in the old country of the Menapii, and exposed dozens of Roman altars to a goddess nobody had heard of: Nehalennia, a protectress of sea traders. Within weeks, a Leiden scholar, Boxhorn, responded — and in his pamphlet of the same year, he argued something bigger: that Greek, Latin, and the Germanic tongues descend from one older language, which he called Scythian. Scythia: ancient Ukraine. The common origin we now know from the analysis of ancient DNA, published in our species’ preeminent journals. I want to walk that dune-front with Boxhorn’s pamphlet in hand and in mind, and bring you on that journey. There we will exchange Mana with him, and with the first intimations that our entire Indo-European culture, from Ireland to India, emanates from Scythia — ancient Ukraine.

The Mediolanon Towns and the LG Shadow Axis

And deeper into France waits a field of MN names, from a map in my own notes: the Mediolanon towns, the Celtic middle-places — one of which, Châteaumeillant, some historians read as a meeting place for Druids. The corridor keeps going into country I’ve not yet crossed, but we will cross it together, and we will visit the little museums and the places, and we will see if we can feel the Mana. Sometimes you go places and you feel nothing.

The lunar calendar sites all wait: the wooden ring at Goseck, which I did visit; the bronze Coligny calendar plate, which no one has yet fully deciphered, with its months cut into metal — month and measure and menses, all one word. So do the towns strung along a second sound I’m following: the LG of Lugus and Lug — Lyon, Léon, Loudoun, Carlisle. It’s a lead, not yet a result. And Lug himself — solar, LG, the founder slot — is one of the great gods of Irish mythology.

Grail Country: From Manannán’s Cauldron to Monty Python

The grail country of Chrétien de Troyes waits too, where Manannán’s Cauldron of Plenty surfaces centuries later as a French romance vessel — one and the same Indo-European bowl, which the great Indo-Europeanist John Carey demonstrates: the Grail emanates from Irish mythological texts, and a collection of them, which got into the hands of Philip of Alsace, who then gave it to Chrétien de Troyes, via Belgic migrants in southwest Wales, in today’s Pembrokeshire. And from there into European literature and art, from Chrétien de Troyes all the way up to Monty Python — MN in Monty Python. But we won’t dwell too much on certain MNs; others we will just take notice of.

Tacitus Country, Lake Nemi, and Dumézil

And in Germany — MN — the roads bend through the Tacitus country, which I want to visit knowingly, and with intention, mens rea: the Saxon lands whose three nations he derives from the sons of Mannus; and Saxony-Anhalt, the princely mounds around the Nebra find-spot. I want to go back there and explore properly.

And in Italy, at Ariccia in the Alban Hills, Rome kept a figure the great comparativist Georges Dumézil — who is a very important influence and character in these Finding Manuland tales — could not resist setting beside Manu: Manius Egerius, founder of the grove cult of Diana — DN — at Lake Nemi — NM — ancestor of the proverbial multitude of the Manii, with the manes, the ancestral dead, gathered around the same MN sound. The grove of the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, waits on that lake.

The Danube Road: The First Road West out of Ukraine

The Danube road: the first road west out of Ukraine, down the great DN river — Don, Donets, Dnieper, Dniester, Danube — through the copper and gold of Old Europe. Before we reach Greece, adjust your mental map once more, because the road that matters runs along a river our schooling never made us look at. It is the DN river sound at its grandest. No one can resolve whether the name emanates from the north or the south; you may guess by now where I believe the name spread from. And it was the first road west — the corridor by which the homeland first reached out of Ukraine towards everything I’ve described so far.

And I’ve stood many times on the shores of the Danube, before I conceived of this project. When I worked in Kosovo, I visited Belgrade, and Novi Sad, and Niš, where Constantine the Great was born, and so many other places in different countries along the Danube. And I’ve stood and sat along the shore of the Danube — where the Russians are bombing every night now — looking across to Romania. But I did this, I emphasise, when I didn’t know any of this. I did not know about Manuland. I did not know our language family emanates from that place, and spread up the Danube.

The copper-and-gold road waits to be driven end to end: down through the Ai-Bunar mines, past the tell at Karanovo, to Varna on the Black Sea shore, where around 4300 BCE the richest funerals in the world were being held — six kilograms of gold in a single grave. Old Europe at its peak, not imagining that what was about to come was the Indo-Europeanisation of a continent — which at the time, we know from archaeological evidence, was basically a unified place, from the megalithic monuments of Ireland to the megalithic monuments of Ukraine, to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which was built 6,000 years before then, and which I’ve also visited, and which we’ll also talk about; you can look back at my archive to see my visit to Göbekli. So this was Old Europe, the culture before the Indo-Europeanisation. 4300 BCE: they were planting six kilograms of gold in a single grave, and they could not imagine what was going to come afterwards. And yes, I could focus on Old Europe — and we will talk about Old Europe — but my focus is Manuland, and the Indo-Europeanisation of the space between Ireland and India: the 6,000 years that it has taken to get to the point where I am speaking to you in English, a Germanic language.

The Meeting Written in Mounds: Wagon Wheels and the First Carts

And that is the world the steppe, the Yamna from Zaporizhzhia, met and were a part of. And the meeting is written in mounds. Seventeen and more Yamna cemeteries stand in Bulgaria alone. And at Plachidol, a grave held four wooden wagon wheels placed at its corners. The vehicle — the vehicle, and that veh-, that sound, which has been deep in Indo-European language ever since. The first carts — one of the earliest carts in human culture — was hidden away in the Dnipro city museum. I passed by it before I knew any of this, and thought: gosh, that looks old — not realising for a moment that it is a monument, that it was made by the hands of the first cartwrights and wheelwrights, by the people who would forge a language, a culture, a religion, a whole way of seeing. Finding Manuland has identified, and tells you, the story of my journey to understand it — and the continuing journey.

And so each country on that road already has a page in my copious files of millions of words. In Hungary, east of the Tisza, the largest Yamna population outside the steppe raised its kurgans — 3,000 of them by one count — men buried in leather caps with silver temple-rings. And the Bell Beaker bridge at Csepel, by Budapest, is one published account of how the family’s dialects crossed into Austria and Bavaria and became, in time, proto-Celtic. In Slovakia, the old Lengyel world. We will go to these places. We will see if we can feel the energy, and we will tell the story of how these places relate to our lives, and our days, and our language, and our poetry.

The Iron Gates: Lepenski Vir and Trajan’s Plaque

Strabo records that the river was the Danuvius from its sources down to the cataracts, and Ister from the cataracts to the sea — the gorge where the river word runs out. On its bank sits Lepenski Vir, the whirlpool shrine-village of the seventh millennium BCE; and above the water, Trajan’s rock-cut plaque, raised on pylons when the dam came, still faces the traffic of the river.

So let’s think: seventh millennium BCE. Most of us look at these dates and these cultures and we think, ah, ancient Rome is to come. Instead, the Finding Manuland perspective goes 3,300 years before this. So this is late. The seventh millennium BCE is far from where we’re going to begin — and the perspective I’m acquiring, the mental model which I am myself forging in my mind, and have been over the past three years as I’ve been finding Manuland, is what I’m going to communicate into your minds.

The first scientific survey of it all was Count Marsigli’s six folio volumes of 1726 — a book I want to travel with, and bring you on my travels with.

Tărtăria, Gurbănești, and the Kokino Thrones

In Romania, at Tărtăria, clay tablets carry signs of an Old European script that has never been read — we cannot read it. And at Gurbănești, a grave held carbonised hemp seeds, the earliest evidence of cannabis burning, carried in, the scholarship suggests, by the Yamna. The Gumelnița Lovers, a clasped pair of clay figurines from the Lower Danube, wait in their museum for us to visit — to understand the Old Europe which the Indo-Europeans would replace.

North Macedonia — where I travelled a lot while I lived in Kosovo, past Suvodol near Bitola, dozens of times, without knowing any of this, without knowing I was in Manuland, without knowing that my past is connected with these places by my genes, by my DNA, but also by culture, and by the words, and by the art. Flat stone sceptres carved as horse heads have been read as symbols of power — of Mana, imbued with the sacred Mana of the horse. The word Mana; the mane of a horse. The word Mana arriving in the archaeology before I ever reached for it. And on the peak sanctuary of Kokino, which I passed without knowing, cut stone thrones face an eastern horizon whose markers are claimed to track the standstills of the moon. I will sit in one of those thrones; I will film it; I will show you, and test the claim with my own eyes — which is the way to hold a moon hypothesis.

And Kosovo again waits, under a one-word note in my files: crows. When I go, I will see those crows again, that I once saw as night fell, sitting in Film City, looking above the great city of Pristina, as the crows — thousands of crows — came in to the NATO base and settled down for the night, making their noise, giving their names to these places. And I knew none of this then. So none of that road have I driven knowingly, with all this in mind. And the road runs down the Danube, out of Ukraine, and into the whole of the West. And one day you will follow me on that journey, the way the first travellers did.

The Greek and Aegean Shore: The Amazing Daughter Culture

The Greek and Aegean shore — which, Greece, I’ve visited a hundred times without knowing any of this. It’s the amazing daughter culture that Empire and the Grand Tour turned into the founder: a parallel branch, not the root. This is axiomatic in Finding Manuland. It’s a parallel branch, not the root — still entirely to be visited with Finding Manuland in mind. I’ve not yet knowingly stood anywhere on that shore, though it is the shore we’ve been trained to treat as the beginning of everything. Greece is one of the most amazing daughter cultures of the family, but it’s not its mother. It became the founder in our schoolbooks because it wrote early, and because Empire and the Grand Tour chose it — not because it stands closer to the source than any other branch. And I’m quite consciously wanting to upset and replace your mental model of how our culture, the ancient world, came from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and somehow we relate to it. I want to upset those mental models, using the latest archaeogenetic and linguistic evidence, and bring you to the places, so that you can feel how we are all daughter cultures of ancient Ukraine.

What waits there is a palace at Knossos, belonging to Minos, the founder-king, who carries the same sound as Manannán at the far western edge of the family, on an island Greek speakers reached late. There is the Iliad’s opening word, mēnis, the wrath, which answers to the Vedic Manyu — M-A-N-Y-U. And there is the Mani Peninsula in the south, which I first saw on a map when I first conceived of the idea of visiting Manuland — a stub of land that keeps the sound in its own name, and whose deep Maniot men, the geneticists have found, carry a snapshot of pre-medieval southern Greece in their blood still today.

Manuland is unashamedly a travel book. This is what it is. If you’re lucky enough to be thinking, where am I next going to go on holiday — and then, when you go there, how do I avoid wasting three weeks in this amazing place on a beach; what will I do — Finding Manuland provides an itinerary, wherever you are.

Trophonius, Orchomenos, and the Cave on Mount Ida

And Pausanias, who at Lebadeia did the thing every travel writer since has flinched from: he consulted the oracle of Trophonius himself — drank first from the spring of Lethe, forgetting, then from the spring of Mnemosyne — MN — memory: the one faculty licensed to cross the death-door and come back with knowledge. Odysseus, who crossed into the underworld at the Kerch Strait, where the Cimmerians — the Crimeans — lived. I want to drink at those two springs, in his order.

At Orchomenos — MN — Pausanias ranked the great domed treasury of King Minyas with the pyramids of Egypt, and scolded the Greeks for never mentioning it. Schliemann followed his pages there in 1880, as he had followed them to Mycenae — and the first Greeks are the Mycenaeans, MN in Mycenae. And the grey pottery he dug there, and named Minyan ware, became for most of a century the calling card by which scholars tracked the first Greek speakers arriving: a founder on the MN, a dome to rival the pyramids, and a whole people’s arrival named after him.

On Crete, above the Knossos road, the cave on Mount Ida waits, where tradition sent Minos every ninth year to receive the laws from Zeus. Zeus: Dyēus, Dyēus Pater, the sky god, deity. In India, Dyaus Pitar; in Rome, Jupiter; in Greece, Zeus Pater — Sky Father. It’s the same word we still today have in deus, deity, and dei. Every time you say dei, you’re invoking a deity. When you say Monday — Moon-day — you’re invoking the moon god. When you say Tuesday, as I wrote in that piece you can go back to on powerofmana.net, you’re invoking Tiw, Tiwaz — which was just a development of Dyēus in the Germanic tongue, but emanating from the same common source: not from the Greek, but from the ancient Ukrainian. So Tuesday is two gods in one word — Tiw’s day, but the same word as deus. It’s like saying God, God. The MN king refreshing the RT rule at its source. Pythagoras went down into that cave wrapped in black wool, and stayed thrice nine days.

And Euboea sits there — a drowned city with a name that could have been coined for this atlas: Manika, one of the first urban places of the Aegean Bronze Age, half of it now under the sea. We will go there in Finding Manuland. When the road reaches this shore, I will read all of it as a parallel witness — one more branch downstream from the Dnipro, but not as its root. And that is the essential core idea: recentring — recentring our idea of where we come from, on our culture and our language, according to the latest science. And we have a lot of work to do, because for hundreds of years none of this was known.

The Ukrainian Heartland: The Ground the Whole Atlas Rests On

The Ukrainian heartland, the homeland. This is the ground the whole atlas rests on. The homeland is the territory of Ukraine: Yamna by the Dnipro, around 3600 BCE. It’s territorial, not ethnic — just like Ukraine’s identity today is civic, not ethnic. It doesn’t matter what language you speak: if you were born in Ukraine, you’re Ukrainian. Now put your finger on the lower Dnipro River, the mighty river that divides Ukraine, because everything else in this atlas is measured from there. Open an atlas. Look on Apple Maps. Look on Google Maps. Find the Dnipro. The homeland is not a people but a place: the territory of ancient Ukraine, where the Yamna were living by the Dnipro around 3600 BCE, at the settlement of Mykhailivka on the lower river.

I have passed Mykhailivka, and I did not know this was the origin of everything. And as soon as the Ruschists withdraw, I will return to Mykhailivka. Currently, the Russians are occupying the other side of the river, and sending drones to kill the villagers in Mykhailivka — most of everyone not knowing the importance of this place. This is the ground upstream of every living branch, and it’s where the anchor of the whole project sits. We all emanate from this place. A map on my own shelf counts 150,000 kurgans — these are the burial mounds, Yamna burial mounds, in Ukraine. That is the density of the memory in this ground.

Novooleksandrivka: The Mound Guardians and the 64 Stones

In May 2021, while I was posted as a diplomat to Dnipro, property developers in Novooleksandrivka, a well-off suburb of Dnipro — the city of Dnipro, named for the river, because we name cities for rivers, and the Isle of Man for gods and deities, and we exchange all of these monikers between different places; the pattern repeats everywhere — property developers tore the top off an ancient burial mound to clear ground for a luxury house. The mound was a kurgan, the grave of some Yamna chief. So this was six months before I conceived of Finding Manuland. I’d never heard of the Yamna in May 2021. I couldn’t imagine for a second that it was even known where Indo-European languages emanated from — I hadn’t even imagined for a second it could be known.

So, if you are a new people and a new culture, how do you manifest this? You bury the monuments of the people you replace. This is a pattern we will find across Manuland. And it stands whenever one country today conquers another: they change the names of places, and they eradicate what was there before.

In May 2021 I first heard of this place through a civil society group called the Mound Guardians, dedicated to preserving the Yamna heritage in Ukraine — a civil society group in Dnipro who were protesting at its removal, along with the local community who had lived there for millennia, though most of them didn’t know what lay beneath. So I went out there to see what was happening. And I went to my bosses and I said: look, there’s a story in the New York Times about the protests, community protests, against the removal of this ancient mound. The leader of the Mound Guardians is telling the New York Times that this is cultural genocide. And now there are protests. And my job as a diplomat there was to collect early warning signals — so I convinced my bosses that I should follow this, that this is part of my job. But even at the time, I was interested in this, because I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what these burial mounds were. And also, I had worked in property law, so I had come across this pattern before, where property developers will do anything they can to overcome any rules which stop them from destroying things.

So the first time I crossed the Sura River to visit the cromlech — Sura, S-U-R-A, a very Indian-sounding name to me the first time I heard it — something about it really affected me. And on every visit afterwards — and I’ve written about this in Finding Manuland, and you’ll find my early posts about this on powerofmana.net — on every visit afterwards, perhaps because it was the only thing I could actually do, I photographed each of its 64 boulders, one by one. And over the visits, they began to resolve themselves into human-like forms: broad-shouldered stone gods. On one of them, one Sunday afternoon, I found a pair of horse teeth, left champing onto a tube of fossilised wood — an offering someone had placed on a deity. I thought about taking it and giving it to the museum, but I didn’t want to be blamed for desecrating heritage. Someone had obviously found it in the mud and the stones after the mound had been destroyed, and they placed it on top of one of the stones, for me to see and photograph — and you can see those photographs. But I left it there, and I contacted my contact in the governor’s office, and I said: look, there’s this here; could someone come out and catalogue it? And no one did, in time.

After the scorching summer and the first winter rains, I watched the stone gods begin to crumble. Touching those stones felt like caressing the Delphic omphalos, the navel-stone of ancient Greece. The burials in that ground span an extraordinary arc, from 3500 BCE, the first Yamna, to 1932 — and the last of them was the head of the local collective farm, under the Soviet occupation, in 1932.

When those stones began to fall down, I had to think — I was just a very minor diplomat — how can I use the little power I have to try and preserve this monument? And so I convinced my bosses to come with me and go and see the governor, to talk about the monument. What I was trying to do was signify to them how important this everyday place was. They had to deal with a hundred different community disputes and problems with property owners — and what was special about this place, and who cares if the stones accidentally-on-purpose fall down, and then the property developer can build their house anyway? And merely by manifesting the interest of the international community, and bringing my boss along to that meeting, and asking them questions — leading questions, because by that time I had learned about the Yamna, and I had learned something about the history, nothing compared to what I know today — I was able to signal that the international community is interested in this monument, and in how the authorities manage to overcome all the bureaucratic hurdles there are to intervening in such situations. And the very next day, teams of bulldozers and diggers went out and half-reburied the monument, to preserve it.

The Bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska: Where the Intuition Began

The other posting in Ukraine came earlier. From 2015 to 2018, I served as a peacekeeping monitor on the wooden and iron bridge over the Donets River at Stanytsia Luhanska — the only pedestrian crossing at the time between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. And I write a lot about the origin story there, on disinfolklore.net, and disinfolklore.eu, and Disinfolklore on X. I crossed that bridge over the Donets River daily, to meet the men I came to think of as the bridge trolls — the Russian occupiers, exacting a toll by trolling the Ukrainians who had to pass between the lands they unlawfully occupied and the rest of Ukraine. And that is where the whole intuition began. A river crossing that judges those who may pass across it is the oldest DN image — the D-N continental skeleton the Indo-European family keeps: the Chinvat Bridge of the Zoroastrians; the Norse Gjallarbrú; the bridge of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in the 19th-century folktale first written down and translated into English. I did not know then that I was standing on a version of it.

The Rest of the Homeland: Fragments of a Working Life

The rest of the Indo-European homeland I know in fragments of a working life. Knowing the Russians would invade, I did everything I could, with the small power I had, to go and visit, and document, what the elected officials in the areas that are now under a brutal, genocidal occupation were doing. What were they doing to overcome the legacy of the Soviet occupation, where everything was arranged around collective farms — even the provision of water in villages, the culture house? And after the invasion of 2014, the Ukrainian government, with the help of the now-defunct USAID, and thankfully the non-defunct European Union, did everything they could to decentralise power to these villages, and invest large amounts of money — in waterworks, and in community-building projects that the communities themselves decided on. What they did in each of these villages was to create euro-standard schools, as they saw them — hundreds of which Russia has destroyed, and stolen all the computers from — street lighting, and the things which we in the rest of Western Europe, who did not suffer from Soviet occupation, take for granted.

So I travelled and ranged all over this area of southern Zaporizhzhia, without knowing for a second that this was where the Yamna were. This understanding only came to me gradually, towards the end, towards the time before the full-scale invasion. I visited Melitopol, which is under a horrific occupation, often. In southern Zaporizhzhia, I stood at Stone Grave — Kamyana Mohyla — a sandstone sanctuary on the Molochna, the Milk River, whose ritual use runs back perhaps 10,000 years.

I lived in Severodonetsk, where my house was pillaged — and I’ve seen the photos of what it looks like when your home is repeatedly looted. My neighbour there was torn to pieces by a Russian artillery strike, and when his friend went to help him, he was then torn to pieces. These are living places for me, that I lived in for years, that I did not know the importance of — not just in the context of contemporary geopolitics, but in the story of our family, and our language, and our culture. It was in my room there that I read the email telling me that my friend Harry had died — and you can listen to ‘Harry’s Mana and Me,’ about the energy-exchange aspect of how, in those we leave behind, our Mana remains — which is a reason to communicate positive Mana.

From there, when I lived in Severodonetsk, for those years, I would board the overnight train from Rubizhne — another city now turned to biological dust by the Russians; thousands murdered. And when I was living there, standing at that railway station — the photographs which appear on my blog, of me and my cat travelling on that train — I never imagined for a second Russia would turn and vaporise these thriving places. I passed Kreminna — which today marks the limit of the Russians’ occupation; Kreminna, with MN in it, now occupied — and I would wake up in Kyiv.

Usatove near Odesa: The Small Forging Zone

I travelled through the small forging zone, through Odesa — the Usatove country, where Italic, Celtic and Germanic were shaped in contact with the Yamna. Though sadly, once again, at the time I stood on the Danube right there, and at Chornomorsk, just west of Odesa, where the Usatove community met the Yamna, I did not know. The community out of which everything you know about ancient Rome, everything you know about ancient Ireland, everything you know about Germanic culture emanates — from this geographical location. And many of the people living there don’t even know this themselves. The inventor of Claude Code, for instance — Boris Cherny — he is from this place. He bears it in his name. I don’t know whether he knows it. Anthropic’s Boris Cherny. So these are the kinds of journeys we will go on, again, when the war is over, and I can be free to go there — and I want to go to all these places still. And I passed through that area around Odesa before I knew what it was.

And for six years, going village to village across the smallest settlements of the east, for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, I asked every village leader I would meet the same question, once I knew to ask it: do you have any kurgans in your community? And I filed the answers to Vienna. Vienna didn’t care. But what I wanted him, or her, to know was that someone took an interest in the heritage in their community. And this heritage in their community is of importance to everyone who lives in Manuland — because the people who built those mounds built the words, and associated the sounds and meanings — the MN, for instance — that we still use in every sentence today. And yes, you can touch them, through the words you use today, and the sounds and the meanings you use today. But if you want to touch the tactile places, then we must all go there — and I will bring us all there, because not all of us can go there.

The Homeland’s Waiting List: Mykhailivka to Bilsk

And the homeland — the Indo-European homeland’s waiting list is the longest in the atlas, because this is the country where every thread begins and ends. Mykhailivka itself, the settlement the whole dating rests on: I have still to stand in it. I could have gone to it a hundred times, if I’d known. The island of Khortytsia, which I have stood on, at Zaporizhzhia — I’ve been there many times. In its shadow, the Serednii Stih culture got its name — the island flooded by the Soviets, then de-flooded when the Russians blew the dam, the Nova Kakhovka dam. Dereivka, which I went to find in January 2021, and I drove all around it and I couldn’t find it — where the earliest chapters of the horse story were dug; its finds waiting in Kyiv.

The Trypillia — the Old European Trypillia megacities of Cherkasy county: Talianky, Maidanetske, Dobrovody — towns of thousands of houses that no one dug up. A military topographer named Shyshkin read their ring-plans off aerial film in the 1960s, in fields where the surface shows nothing at all. These cities were larger than the cities at that time in Mesopotamia, which we will also visit. You stand in a wheat field and you see nothing. And that is the point — the point of Finding Manuland.

Verteba Cave, in Ternopil oblast — kilometres of gypsum passages that the Trypillians used, and their dead still occupy — dug by Gotfryd Ossowski in the 1890s, and worked today by Alexey Nikitin himself, the great geneticist of the February 2025 paper in Nature. Nearby, at Monastyrok, above the Seret, a rock canopy on three rough pillars shelters a cave temple locals call the Ukrainian Stonehenge — a great slab unlike any local rock. At Bezvodivka, in Chernihiv country, several dozen mounds are laid out across the plain, and the man who surveys them reads them as an instrument: sight-lines fixing solstices and equinoxes, and, he contends, the long cycles that let you predict eclipses. We will test it with our own eyes.

At Bilsk, in Poltava country, a rampart 35 kilometres around encloses the site the field identifies with Gelonus, the great timber city Herodotus describes in Book Four — the oldest travel account in our Indo-European tradition. I mean to walk it with Herodotus in hand. And at Stari Kodaky, where I have walked many times, on the high bank at the southern edge of Dnipro city, the earth ramparts survive of the fortress of the French engineer Guillaume de Beauplan, built above the first rapid in the Dnipro River in 1635. He went on to map the river, and print his descriptions of Ukraine, which carried our rivers into the atlases of Europe. The rapids he counted sleep under reservoir water now; their names survive, ending in Nenasytets — the Insatiable.

Two Journeys Named but Not Made

The homeland still holds two journeys I’ve named but not made. There is the river line itself, as a single traverse: Don, Donets, Dnipro, Dniester, Danube — the five great waters whose Dānu — *deh₂nu*, as the Proto-Indo-European, what I call ancient Ukrainian — names sign the land, and carry the fire-and-water custodian: Nechtan in Ireland, and Apam Napat in India, and Neptunus — all one figure. And there’s the country behind the North Wind, the Sea of Azov, where Apollo on swans would fly each year, and the sources of the Ister — the ground the Greeks half-remembered: a memory of this homeland kept at the far end of a rumour, from where the olive branches for the first Olympic crown came. I have not yet travelled properly those rivers, one by one — though every one of them runs through the argument, and through Finding Manuland.

Closing: A Debt to Pay

And — and this is perhaps important — I could have been to all these places, if I’d known. If I’d taken the chance to go when I could. Even though I anticipated the full-scale invasion, I did not anticipate its brutality, and its disgustingness, and how horrible it has become. And the lesson for us all here is that it’s never too late to make up for lost time. And that’s what Finding Manuland is about.

I have a debt to pay — a debt to pay to the Ukrainians who welcomed me into their homes; the hundreds of elected Ukrainian leaders I met; the historians, the archaeogeneticists, the writers that I met and that I’ve read, and who for decades, for centuries, tried to make their identity known to the rest of the world. But it was drowned by the Russians — by the Bolshoi Ballet, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and all that nonsense — which are great writers, and great art, and great culture. But none of it is worth a single Ukrainian child today.

But the real debt all of us have to Ukraine and to the Ukrainians is that, if you can understand the words I’m speaking in Finding Manuland, then every thought you have, and word you form, is made up of elements — MN and other elements — which emanate from this land. And for that reason alone, I hope you will find Finding Manuland an interesting way of spending time.

I have still a couple more episodes of the Atlas to go through, so please tune in for the next episode. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at powerofmana.net, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net. You can find my podcast on every major podcast platform under those titles: Disinfolklore, Finding Manuland, or Decoding Trolls. I write daily on X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Feel free to engage, subscribe, pass on to your friends. The important thing is we get the word out. Thank you for finding Manuland with me.

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