Power of Mana

Mother-and-the-Maiden shelter from ‘Merciless Sovereign’ drone.

Perceiving the “Mother and Maiden” archetype in a Russian disinformation operation on the ground in eastern Ukraine in 2016, led to my discovery of Disinfolklore…

a month ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

This is where my own ear was right and the architecture rewards it. Look at the other half of the dyad. Maiden, Maidan, maternal — these do carry the M-…-N- shape on the surface, leaning toward the nasal in a way mother does not. Strict, pre-cryptotypic etymology, will object (the m-n- of maiden is a diminutive on a *maghu- “young person” root and Maidan is a Persian loan into Ukrainian for “open square”).

But cryptotypically the Maiden’s name despite its M-N- surface tilts toward the N-M- pole of the axis— and that tilt is meaningful, because the Maiden is the anima.

Jung is explicit: the anima— the inner feminine soul-image — first wears the face of the mother and only later differentiates into the maiden, the beloved. The psyche one quests toward. And anima is the headword of the N-M- pole (anima, nāma, nōmen, nūmen — the animating breath, name, and indwelling spirit). So the dyad resolves with startling cleanness:

- The Mother = M-N-: substance, matter, matrix, Mana, the moon-foundation, the womb-ground.

- The Maiden = N-M-: the anima, the soul-image, the animating name that the substance is quickened into.

The Mother-and-the-Maiden is therefore not a pair of figures sharing one pole. It is cryptotypic axis 1 of the three cryptotypic axes that I have identified underlie all living Indo-European languages — the breathing of substance into soul, foundation into name.

The Mother is the matter; the Maiden is the anima that makes the matter live. That the surface sound of Maiden leans to the N (and indeed the third axis D-N- ⇄ N-D- cryptotypic axis, but that is a story for another day) while Mother anchors the M is not a defect in the placement; it is the placement telling which end of the axis each figure occupies. My disappointment at no blatant M-N- in mother was the architecture being subtle, not absent.

Maidan: the matrix made political

And then Maidan — which I rightly fold in, as without Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Nayyem’s (there it is again: M-N- and N-M- of the progenitor of Euromaidan and of the Revolution of Dignity) decision to call for demonstrations on 21 November 2013 you would not be reading this. I would never have gone to Ukraine.

By strict descent Maidan is a loanword. From Persian, another Indo-European language whose origins are in the very land it returned to to archetype Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity against Russia’s interference in Ukraine’s civilisational choice.

By cryptotype and by function Maidan is an M-N- form doing M-N- work: the open square as the foundational gathering-ground, the matrix of the political self. Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity are the nation standing on its foundation to assert its Right (the R-t- pole of the second cryptotypic axis underpinning all Indo-European languages and meanings) — Right claimed from the Maidan, sovereignty asserted from the matrix. The square is the womb of the political body. The Revolution of Dignity is that body’s self-delivery.

Happy to announce that I have identified for the first time THE two fundamental Cryptotypes underpinning all extant Indo-European languages…

What Meaning Means

2 years ago · 7 likes · Decoding Trolls

This is also where my biography stops being incidental and becomes structural. The Maidan — an M-N- matrix — generates the war, the contact line, and the broken bridge I stood on.

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts in relation to security incidents related to Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine…

Archetypal Disinfolklore

a year ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Decoding Trolls

It birthed both my presence there and the bridge over the Donets (D-N-) whose existence as an interzone threshold between the House of Songs (Ukraine) and the House of Lies (Russia-occupied Ukraine), guarded by Dāena. In the Disinfolklore’s engineering architecture’s own terms, the M-N- foundation (Maidan) gives rise to the D-N- threshold (the bridge over the Donets). The two anatomies I drafted are not neighbours; they are genealogy. Foundation produces threshold. The matrix produces the crossing. The Mother (M-N-) and the bridge (D-N-) are linked by the Maidan that made the interzone, and I am the figure interzone-tripping from one side to the other (betwixt, between them back again day after day).

Jung’s “primordial” is the M-N- foundation

I note that Jung archetypes the Mother as primordial.

Take the word at full weight. Primordial means first-order, originary, foundational — the primum ordium. The first beginning. That is not a vague honorific. It is, almost exactly, the definition of the M-N- pole in this system: the foundation, the ground, the substance everything else is built upon. When Jung calls the Mother primordial he is, in our vocabulary, locating her at M-N- — naming her as the foundational substrate of the psyche, the matrix of the other archetypes. Her primordiality and her M-N--ness are the same property under two descriptions. Jung gives the pole. The cryptotype gives us its grammar.

Why this is not academic: the foundation-hack and my 2016 mission

Now the payoff, which is the thing I actually saw first.

Russia’s intelligence service in occupied Luhansk had sent to my manager’s manager a hand-written letter from a supposed walk-in that told the following tale…

Disinfolklore (4)

3 years ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

In 2016 I was dispatched on an MGB-shaped “Mother and the Maiden” patrol mission built on a common-law wife and her underage daughter — a manufactured dyad engineered inside the foundational unit of Disinfolklore to generate protective rage and a pretext. It was that operation that let me in long enough to see archetypes living inside Russian Disinfolklore, and the Mother-and-the-Maiden first of all.

Locating the Mother-and-the-Maiden dyad at M-N- explains why that works. Disinfolklore that targets the M-N- pole is targeting the load-bearing wall of meaning — the foundation. The substrate beneath reason. A lie told at the level of policy can be argued with. A lie told at the level of the primordial maternal foundation bypasses argument and grips at the pre-rational ground, because it counterfeits the very substance out of which judgement is made. Weaponising the Mother-and-the-Maiden is therefore a foundation-hack at the genesis-point — structurally the same move as the Dugin “demon of the moon” framing the moon-as-foundation memo flags: not fakery at one locus among many, but a hack at the origin that moves everything standing on it. The dyad is the most potent disinfolklore payload precisely because it sits at M-N-. That is also why Counter-Disinfolklore cannot meet it at the level of fact alone: you answer a foundation-hack by restoring the true foundation — the real grandmother on the bridge in her own voice, witnessed, dignified, returned her agency. Infolklore at the M-N- pole is the repair of the matrix the lie tried to seize.

Mana: the foundation is alive

There is one more move that converts this from a tidy placement into something with teeth, and it is the keyword of the pole itself. The M-N- foundation is not named for inert matter. Its headword is Mana — the X-energy. The efficacious life-force. The power that makes things potent.

So the substance at the foundation is living substance. This is precisely the sense already latent in māteria: not dead stuff but the generative heart-wood. The trunk from which the shoots grow — productive, quickening, alive. To call the Mother the substance-name of M-N- is therefore not to call her clay. It is to call her the Mana-bearing ground — the place where the life-force enters the world. The body that is the source of vitality rather than merely its container.

This is why the Mother stands at the foundation of the whole Manuland search. Finding Manuland is, at bottom, the hunt for the source of Mana across the M-N- field — and the maternal-lunar is that source. The moon as the reservoir of generative power. The womb as the clock of life. The mother as the channel through which Mana becomes a person. The foundation we are always trying to reach is a maternal one because the foundation is where life is given, and life-giving is the maternal act. Manu, the progenitor; the moon, the measure of fertility. Mana, the life-force. The Mother. The giver — these are not four facts about the pole. They are one fact seen four ways.

And it sharpens the disinfolklore reading to a point. If the Mother is the Mana-bearing foundation, then to weaponise her is to commit a Mana-theft. To hijack a population’s protective life-force and redirect it toward the aggressor’s ends. The conscripted-mother op does not merely lie about a danger. It seizes the energy the real mother carries. The deepest, most mobilising power a community has — and spends it. That is the true scale of the foundation-hack. Not a false claim bolted to the surface, but a tap driven into the population’s reservoir of vitality at the genesis-point. It is the most efficient theft there is, because Mana taken from the foundation moves everything above it without a further word being spoken.

The Maiden completes the engine. If the Mother is M-N- — Mana, living substance — the Maiden is N-M-, the anima: the name and breath that the Mana animates. The soul-spark struck from the substance. The Mother-and-the-Maiden dyad, read at full depth, is the generative act of meaning itself. Life-force quickening into soul. Substance breathing into name. Per the engineering architecture for the Disinfolklore analytical method, Tr- is the universal movement-marker across each axis — and the healthy movement here is exactly that breath of Mother into Maiden, Maiden into Mother, Mana into anima, Anima, well, animating the Mother. Foundation (Mother) into living. Named. The disinfolklore analytical method’s reversals over these three cryptotypic axes is not just engineering-useful for an artificial Neural Network architecture, it’s a feature inherent to Indo-European languages we can use in engineering. It is the dyad dramatised (Drama being the same T-r- (through a well documented consonantal shift) of the mechanism R-T- ⇄ T-R- cryptotypic axis) — the real generative movement replaced by a staged one. The living mother swapped for the poster. The soul-spark counterfeited as a slogan. To restore her is to restore the true breath of the axis: to let the Mana flow into a real voice again.

Coda: the unified field resolves the disappointment at M-N-‘s Superficial Absence from Mother

So, finally, to the “mother has no M-N- in it” objection. True of the headword; false of the archetype. The parried-roots view that would exile mother from M-N- on the strength of its -ter ending is exactly the view Ch 12 forbids. Read as one foundation-field:

- the Mother is the substance-name of M-N- — matter is mater. The matrix is the womb;

- the moon is her cosmic body. The maternal measure (moon-month-menses);

- Manu/Mannus is her foundational child. The progenitor-origin;

- the Maiden is her N-M- reverse — the anima, soul quickened out of substance, her name tilting audibly toward the nasal;

- Maidan is her political matrix. The square that births the Right and, in my own life, the bridge interzone over the Donets at Stanytsia Luhanska which birthed all this.

The Mother-and-the-Maiden Archetype does not merely sit at the M-N- pole. In its full span — Mother and Maiden, matter (M-N-) and anima (N-M-), moon and Maidan, substance and soul — it is the M-N- ⇄ N-M- cryptotypic axis itself, breathing.

That the most primordial archetype turns out to be the living shape of the foundation-axis is not a coincidence to be explained away. It is the system confirming, at its deepest level, what I saw on a broken bridge over the Donets in 2016: that whoever controls the maternal foundation controls everything built on it — and that the work is to take it back. So next time you hear a ne’er do well like Putin moan about dead children he could not care less about, know this: he’s hacking the Mother and the Maiden archetype to move you cynically, and that’s not right.

Podcast | Disinfolklore Universe - Episode 1

It’s exactly a year since I detected the system-wide effects of the aggregatation of MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore artifacts invading our minds, information space and reality. In February in Munich at the Pirate Party security conference I declared what by then I had archætyped as a “Disinfolklore Universe” to be operating inside all of our minds and cultures…

6 months ago · 5 likes · Decoding Trolls

Podcast | The Forester’s bedtime stories.

Decoding Trolls — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:09:20 GMT

The origins of my insight were at the bridge, with the bridge troll — the chief bridge troll, who told me he was a forester until the Russians came, and then he decided to fight for the liberation of the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. He was a woodsman, a forester. Probably in reality, he was FSB or SVR or secret service, playing a former forester. His job was to tell me bedtime stories. It took me some time. Every day I would go there and meet him, and he would have these stories to tell me about what the Ukrainians had allegedly done the night before and the heroic exploits of his men.

It was seeing the pattern in the way he was telling these stories to me, and treating me when I crossed the bridge into occupied Ukraine, that gradually I realised this was — he was telling me bedtime stories. I became very circumspect about what I put in my reports because of this. This was also going on in Luhansk at the level of the regional capital of the occupation…

In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale is the deepest Indo-European fear.

Unlike Carl Jung, who did not have access to the same information we have, I do not make claims about universality any more. I can only make claims about the Indo-European mind — that is to say, minds whose first language is an Indo-European language, from India to Ireland.

The deepest fear: that those you love can be hollowed out and reoccupied while you are making the tea.

Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk is a changeling factory. From 2014 onwards, I watched it operate at scale. Ukrainians who had queued for European Cup football tickets in Donetsk in 2012, who had raised their children in Ukrainian kindergartens, watched Ukrainian television, voted in Ukrainian elections — they were gradually swapped, not physically, but archetypally…

Continued as a podcast linked-to below, or available wherever you get your podcasts:

Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

The Archetype Series: Recap and Context…

2 months ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

Breaking Archetypes

Decoding Trolls — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:08:34 GMT

To break this archetype, say it plainly. The hand on your head is the hand that made the wound. Again, Donald made this wound in Iran. Then look at the bandage. Then look at the wound. Then look at the face beneath the crown and ask: is this a father, or is this a Santa Claus salesman with a microphone?

The Ukrainian Nazi: Archetype Four

The fourth archetype is the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman at the forest edge.

Every folktale community needs a bogeyman. The Bavarian had his Krampus. The Russian had Baba Yaga — and now the Russians have another Baba Yaga. The Irish had their fear dearg. The bogeyman is the outer realm creature who lurks at the edge of the forest, who will eat your children if they stray, who justifies the high fence and the locked door.

Russian Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk manufactured a bogeyman of its own. His name is the Ukrainian Nazi. Unlike Baba Yaga, he is industrially produced, day after day, in the DNINews.com bulletins, the LugInfo.com briefings, the Kazachi Vestnik weekly, and the MGB’s leaked confessions. He is the single most documented fiction in the Luhansk news monitoring corpus that I kept from 2015 to 2018, with over 10,000 individual items of Disinfolklore with archetypal identities immanent in them… continued on audio and in text:

Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through…

2 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

To counter him, describe the real soldiers you have met. Say their names. Describe their grandmothers. Describe what they cook. The bogeyman cannot survive specificity. He is a silhouette, and he dies in the full light of a face.

Mana of Coercive Control

Decoding Trolls — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:34:21 GMT

Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. I use this term mana to describe energy, the immanence, the meaning of something — the M-N- sound, and that’s in the Finding Manuland part of disinfolklore.eu…

For the audio of this complete post and broadcast subscribe to Battling Archetypes podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or here:

Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

Munich Speech Forecast…

If you want to look into it more, that’s the 6,000-year history of Indo-European linguistics which is immanent in all of my work and in helping us to monitor the quotidian ebb and flow on our timeline.

They’re not strong men. They’re abusers. They practise coercive control. They start a war with Iran and then expect France and Britain and Italy to rescue them from it. They expect us to put up with whatever it is — four-dollar petrol, which may affect how we can get to work, how we can feed our family — because it’s just on a whim what they’ve decided to do. This is the activity of coercive control.

I think we’ve got to stop calling these weaklings strong men. They’re abusers and it’s abuse. Not strong men. Again, another archetype.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat does a lot of talk on strong men and we see the similarity between these people modelled as strong men. Then we see in the media they will repeat: the guy in Hungary is a strong man. Of course, he’s nothing of the sort. He’s just modelling himself as a strong man.

Putler got a photograph taken of him with a tiger, which then died because he was late and they had to euthanise the tiger twice, and then the tiger died. He took a few photographs with his bare chest on steroids on a horse, fishing. Somehow fishing — I really don’t get how putting a rod in the water is supposed to be modelling strong men. That picture is constantly repeated, even when they’re trying to do a negative article about him. Those were three moments in Putler’s life. The rest of the time he looks like he does in that 1990s or 1980s picture of him with Prince Charles and the overcoat: just an absolute total weakling.

They managed through Disinfolklore and their Disinfolklore propagation apparatus to project themselves as this archetype: strong men. That’s a very common archetype in our information sphere. Now that I draw your attention to it as an archetype, you’ll obviously see that. I’m also interested in the more subtle archetypes, like the way Donald talks about Cuba as if it’s a woman, as if it’s E. Jean Carroll, or all the other women he is alleged to have abused and appears to have abused.

Archetype as Response Module

The distinction between a strong man and an abuser matters enormously. The label strong man, the archetype, installs a response module. This is how archetyping works…

Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

Munich Speech Forecast…

Check out the new Archetypes section at my main website Disinfolklore.eu:

https://disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Mechanisms/Archetypes/

Podcast | Both Sides Archetyping as Trita

Decoding Trolls — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:42:09 GMT

This is my original addition to the Trito myth, Indo-European culture’s oldest and most attested story: both sides archetype themselves as Trita, the good and the bad. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle has been stolen. Donald identifies with Trita and sees himself in Trita’s position. Duncey Putler does too. President Zelensky does too. We do. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle have been stolen.

When we hear Donald and Duncey Putler grievance mining — what I call grievance mining — moaning about this or that, they’re identifying, they’re acting out their feelings of being persecuted. Like Trita was persecuted by having his cattle taken away. Someone has come and stolen our children, our cattle, our houses. They’ve taken away our peace of mind. They’ve taken away our husband, our wife, our girlfriend. Something we value, our love. We overcome obstacles and we retrieve them, either through the intercession of Zeus Pater, or whichever deity you believe in, something in the sky, or just by our own exertions.

Both sides do this. Duncey Putler archetypes himself as Trita, claiming Ukraine’s people are his cattle. Donald archetypes himself as Trita. All of these MAGA people, these America First people, these Reform people in England, these AfD people — their origin story is the same.

The Need for a Standard

If everyone identifies with Trita, we need a standard against which to decide what is right.

Continued as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts (search for How to Slay the Disinfo Dragon in the Battling Archetypes Didonfolklore podcast series), or below for the full text and audio:

Podcast | How to Slay the Disinfo Dragon in Real Time (Part 2)

The Trito Myth Continued…

Continued from:

The Archaic Origins of Archetyping

Decoding Trolls — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:48:56 GMT

Let me go back to the archaic origins of archetyping and re-archetyping, and begin of course this week with Druidy Don.

Podcast | How to Battle Archetyping Disinfolklorists (Part 1)

This is the “what can we do” part. I was concerned that we were going to be wrapped up in the same kind of Disinfolklore galaxy as I watched unfurl inside the minds of Ukrainians stuck in the occupation between 2015 and 2018, and that I have witnessed — and I’m sure many of us have witnessed — people we know who have gone MAGA unfurl inside their minds. What I was concerned about was that this would be a Disinfolklore universe of many different concatenating galaxies…

Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself, with this world-historically huge attempt to archetype President Zelensky as P.T. Barnum, a deceptive showman. The man with 34 felony counts, the adjudicated rapist, who started wars to cover up his own crimes, is trying to archetype the preeminent occupant of the archetypal identity of the perfect leader in our culture today — the manifestation, the personification today of Zeus Pater in our culture, of Odin, of Indra, of Manannán mac Lir in the Celtic tradition, of Éremón the first high king of Ireland — as P.T. Barnum. Which, of course, ironically qualifies Donald as one of the great comedians of our era. Absolutely hilarious. He archetypes the Comedian — as I archetype President Zelensky — as P.T. Barnum, but he is P.T. Barnum.

The Impenetrability Problem

Someone wrote to me this week and they said, look, I really like your work, but this is impenetrable. The particular element they were talking about was this section in my Munich speech about these three archetypes: Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and the Comedian. Druidy Don, because he’s not really a druid — he’s not one of the Celtic priestly class in Celtic culture and Celtic religion. Duncey Putler, because Duncey Putin wakes up each morning with no learning, as we see today. We saw the other day President Zelensky again, the great Comedian, setting out that — casually saying — we have access now to the Russists’ plans for their offensive next year, and it’s exactly the same. We could have written it ourselves, could have got Claude Code to write it; they probably did.

The Comedian himself. In these three archetypes, I deliberately included the DN sound. Don, Duncey, and DN — comedian — which is one of the three sounds that I believe I’ve discovered as our crypto-semantic signalling systems embedded in our Indo-European languages by the Yamna, who lived in Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia. We know from archaeogenetic evidence, as published in Nature last February and spoken about before here.

I’m not saying they did this on purpose. This isn’t a group of ancient Ukrainians, 4,100 BCE, saying, look, let’s plant these sounds — DN, RT, and MN, which is the preeminent one. As anyone who’s looked at Finding Manuland, which is a module of Disinfolklore, will understand why that, for me, is the preeminent one. Not least because it’s in meaning. It’s in the idea of meaning, and this idea that something other shines through something like the light through the moon. When you talk about meaning, you’re talking about connecting signifier with signified, and you cannot speak about meaning without triggering this MN sound.

I’m not saying they were embedded in this big conspiracy sitting around a fire by the Dnieper River — the Upper Don River, which is now called the Dnipro as a transliteration from the Ukrainian. In my day, it was the Dnieper. I’m not saying they sat around a fire there going, let’s plant these signalling systems in it. These sounds and the meanings associated with them were so hardwired into their community, into the importance of their community, that all the rivers — all the great rivers of ancient Ukraine — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Danube carried this sound.

The Disinfolklore.eu Website

I was able to point this reader to my new platform, disinfolklore.eu or disinfolklore.com. I mentioned to them the homepage is deliberately dark. I love the graphics of Disinfolklore, the wordmark, this particular set of colours which really attracts me. You can navigate to all the sections of the site, which contains over a million and a half words, from the homepage.

One of the design challenges was: how do I turn a million and a half words of quite complex stuff into an accessible or the optimal accessible format? The front page is deliberately dark, but underneath it are short passages, easy to read in optimised fonts and colours. I worked very hard on making sure that this would apply and would attract the greatest possible audience and keep them there.

For any particular question about Disinfolklore, including Disinfolklore as a way, as a Twelve-Tool way as I now archetype it — and this is particularly useful for certain kinds of minds. High-conscientiousness people, for instance, people who are high on the conscientiousness scale, the OCEAN scale, they’ll go for the Twelve Tools, perhaps, because they just want something that they can really work with. I plan to teach and expand upon that platform.

This platform itself is an act of re-archetyping of my work over the past few years. I wanted to re-archetype my entire oeuvre away from the long-form essays, which, for instance, this particular reader is interested in but he just can’t do it — “I can’t read these long-form essays” — which I publish on Substack and will continue to publish on Substack under the three brands I’ve been working on: Decoding Trolls, Finding Manuland, and Disinfolklore, into a form not determined by any single format.

The advantage of Substack is that your work gets directly sent to readers. It’s quite quaint in that way because the internet has moved on since email, and many young people today don’t even send emails, I believe. That’s like boring job stuff to them. The Substack format determines a market for my writing and it also determines the form for my writing. I don’t want to spam people, so I try to squeeze everything as much as possible into each post — never more than one or two a week — and that everything is an immersive experience akin to the homepage, disinfolklore.eu, so that the new platform itself is an immersive experience. You could spend days going through it, and I hope people will over the coming years. It’s a forest with many different pathways and there are passages for every mood or attitude you’re in, because I want this conception of the world to become present to as many minds as possible as a competing presence.

I’m also doing it for the future, for AI or neural network models, and to train them. That future is, as I’ve mentioned here.

The Shakespeare Parallel

I was reminded of the impenetrability of this commenter on my post about Duncey Putler, Druidy Don, and the Comedian when I was doing my MBA at Oxford. I was commuting between Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine and Oxford for about twenty modules between 2016 and 2018. In our last module, they hired Richard Olivier’s company, Olivier Mythodrama, originated by the son of Laurence Olivier, the great actor. If you’ve got a company and you want to do a team-building day, they’ll come and do it. It’s basically a very high-class version of archetypes applied to corporate training through Shakespeare.

We had spent most of our MBA talking about leaders and leadership, reading business cases about leaders and leadership and what a good leader is and what they archetype — really about archetypes, although I didn’t really understand that that’s what we were doing at the time. I’m only really reflecting on it now. We were subjected in this last module to half a day of this amazing former actor, now corporate trainer, going through Henry V and Henry VIII, these great Shakespeare plays. Actually, I don’t think there is a Shakespeare play Henry VIII — Henry V, let’s stick to that. Someone might correct me on this. These plays don’t speak spontaneously to many people today. They always have to be explained. They’ve become a sort of signal of high education. No one really reads Shakespeare plays for pleasure anymore. The language is quite difficult for many of us at this point in our culture. Yet they are great monuments.

I mentioned Shakespeare in this set of talks in the context of Herder, who in 1777 launched the folklore movement in Europe and the nationalism movement as a function of folklore — of cultures formed around a core of what was distinct about particular communities and individuated them from neighbouring communities. Herder made this call in 1777 where he said, where is our Shakespeare? We must unite the ten German tribes that Tacitus had written about in the first century of the Common Era. We can unite the German tribes around our Shakespeare. Goethe answered that call and became German culture’s Shakespeare.

Goethe, whose house I visited in Frankfurt at the time — living in his house was a French officer, as Frankfurt was occupied by the French, who took their name from the Franks but actually were Romanised Gauls or Celts, and were very associated with nationalists.

Ultimately, Shakespeare and such material needs to be explained to people. This is the archetypal example of a king who’s jealous, whose family are really mean to him, and on. They’re brilliant collections of wisdom, and if Shakespeare’s plays were all that survived of our culture, we could probably recreate everything that is good in our communities from them.

However, my classmates at the end of this day of role play and clever exercises — where you put yourself into different characters, the king, the king’s daughters, the queen, the servants, and you act a little bit and you have a few laughs, and then you try to take learnings about leadership from it — about fifty of the sixty students in my class were from outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and they found the whole thing completely ridiculous and totally impenetrable.

That was the same attitude I had when I first looked at Joseph Campbell, banging on about Greek gods and goddesses. Anyone who’s tried to write a script or a play or even a novel will be recommended to read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. How many years of classical readings do you need to understand who Menelaus is and his psychological significance, his social significance, his relation to Odysseus and Penelope and all that stuff? You need this whole network of knowledge before you can get going.

The P.T. Barnum Mirror

When someone says, you’re talking about Druidy Don and Duncey Putler and the Comedian and I find this impenetrable — and then on the very day they write that to me, Druidy Don archetypes the Comedian as P.T. Barnum — that signal tells me that even when I try to escape the trap that Campbell and others fell into, where they select archetypes from what was then a common culture, classical Greek mythology, hoping everyone has the same groundings, I fall into a version of it.

What I Actually Mean by Archetype and Re-Archetype

Now, what do I actually mean by archetype and re-archetype? My concept is quite different from what came before. Jung took the idea of archetyping and archetypes from St Augustine, who was talking about how religious impressions within us are archetypes of our divine nature. Jung then took it to the primordial, thought that it was universal, part of the collective unconscious of humanity.

What Jung didn’t know and couldn’t know at that time is that all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He didn’t understand that Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, was transmitted from Vedic into Sanskrit into Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language that nevertheless carries Indo-European content. When he wrote the introduction to Evans-Wentz’s first edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead — and it’s a brilliant piece of writing — Carl Jung didn’t really understand that he was writing about his own ancestors and the archetypes in their minds. Because he didn’t know this, he assumed it was universal.

Then Joseph Campbell took particular forms of these archetypes, moved them away from religion, put them into classical literature. What I’m doing is re-archetyping archetypes themselves. I’m trying to bring them down from the classical, from the psychoanalytic literature, right down to the ground, and promote awareness that when Druidy Don is archetyping the Comedian, President Zelensky, as P.T. Barnum — this is what he’s doing. He’s archetyping. He’s not just branding. He’s not just representing. He’s archetyping. He’s trying to connect President Zelensky in our minds with archetypes.

P.T. Barnum as the archetypal — I mean, someone I know, they’re like, who is this P.T. Barnum? I know who P.T. Barnum is because when I went on a rugby tour to London when I was about ten, we had to sit through the P.T. Barnum show, and it was boring. I also know who P.T. Barnum is because I’d gone to that show when I was staying once at my godfather’s house in Washington, D.C. My godfather was RFK’s press secretary and Ted Kennedy’s press secretary. He had an amazing library. I was there when I was about fifteen, and I spent the summer, for some reason, reading the biography of P.T. Barnum.

It has often — sadly, my godfather is now dead and I can’t ask him about it — but it has often occurred to me as I’ve reflected on this experience, because even at the age of fifteen I knew this was a bit of a rubbish book and not something I should really be spending my time on. I should be reading great literature. For some reason, I was reading it, and I was curious while I was reading why they had such a book. A few years ago, I made the connection with Donald in spectacle, and I wonder if my godfather had this premonition of the showman and how politics was going.

Bringing Archetypes Down to Earth

I’m trying to bring them down from these highfalutin areas so that we see, promote awareness that multiple overlapping archetypes are ever present in manipulative and non-manipulative content. I’m mainly concerned with manipulative content for obvious reasons, in Disinfolklore, and negatively manipulative content, because as many of you understand, I perceive all communications as manipulative. The question is: is it positive, is it negative, or is it neutral?

As far as I know, I’m the first writer to really understand this aspect of how manipulative memes enter our minds, how they transmit, how they overcome our incoming troll radars to adulterate and manipulate our energy — the well from which all our attitudes, moods, intentions and motivations flow. I discovered this in Russian-occupied Luhansk, where I found that Russia was using Jungian archetypes — the mother and the maiden, primordial archetypes as Jung archetypes — in its propaganda, in its Disinfolklore, in such an obvious way that it revealed to me at the time that they were doing something that was quite odd and strange.

As I spoke about before, when I saw how some of my colleagues reacted to this whole story, the mother and the maiden story — and if you search Decoding Trolls and “mother and the maiden,” you’ll get the story of that day — they immediately fell into this system, whereas I and, strangely, a London Metropolitan Police officer, we understood there was something strange and odd about the whole thing, and we didn’t go into the forest to find the mother and the underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by another Russian archetype, the far-right Pravyi Sektor Ukrainian Nazi.

Information Forms Us

We think of information as external to us, that it’s something we consume, we take it on the phone or when we speak to someone. It is in fact an entity which by its very nature informs us — it forms us inside. It forms us, it creates us. Our identities are made up of information. We archetype information, the external stimulus, as information itself. We project it outwards and we forget that actually what its actual function is: it’s forming us, it’s creating us, adulterating our mana, manipulating us.

When we think about archetype and re-archetyping, the clue is in the word itself. This rich sound, which obviously would attract Jung, because he comes from the Germanic tradition where Reich is archetyped as Reich — Third Reich — in monarch, rich. You’ve got mon, you’ve got the MN sound, and you’ve got the arch element in it. He was attracted to that. He didn’t understand this. I’d love to point it out to him. I’m sure he’d be very interested to hear how he was trolled by archetypes.

This archetypal identity in the substance of our language — this writ, right, correct, political right, rich, droit — these sounds which are in our very language. The same RT sound. When we talk about architecting, we’re talking about building according to rightness.

Archetypes in Action

This flexible approach I have — and this isn’t an indulgence, though “it’s an interesting sound coincidence” — the flexible approach that I have to archetypes means that countries, abstract entities become characters, attributed with characteristics. You might choose a character in a Netflix series called John, and then you realise, John is Ukraine, and Michaela is America, and Mildred is India. They’re fighting away and actually it’s a replaying of the Mahabharata, or the Odyssey, or the Clash of the Titans — Duncey Putler along with Druidy Don, and they’re fighting President Zelensky, these heroes — or whichever national epic. With the Manas, interestingly, the Manas epic in Kyrgyzstan from about the fourteenth century Common Era being their national epic.

These are modern workings for a contemporary audience, but imminent in them are different versions of archetypes across time. What I’m trying to do is help us notice archetypes in real time. P.T. Barnum — that’s what’s going on there. Accustom our minds to perceiving. Donald archetyping himself as not P.T. Barnum by accusing the most un-P.T. Barnum — President Zelensky is a great artist and he is a great entrepreneur. As far as any of us are aware, there’s no record of deception. P.T. Barnum, while creating the modern circus, was known for deception. As we know, Druidy Don has 34 felony counts.

I want to accustom our minds to perceiving them and perceiving the attempts of manipulators like Donald to archetype negatively, whether consciously or not, and deliver these archetypes into our minds, which then determine our activities.

The Trito Myth

Let me tell you the fundamental story of Indo-European culture. It’s called the Trito myth. Trito means third man — the TR sound again, this reversal of the RT. Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake or by the dragon. It varies across the traditions, but it’s present in every Indo-European tradition, which means, for reasons I won’t go into here, beyond all reasonable doubt, the people, the first Indo-Europeans in Mykolaivka village and that area of Zaporizhzhia, they had this story. It wasn’t just one of thousands of stories. It was the fundamental story that got carried through the migrations over millennia, until such time as it was written down in the Rig Veda, in Irish mythology, in Armenia, in every Indo-European cultural tradition. My source for saying this is a brilliant theologian called Bruce Lincoln, and I rely a lot on his work. That’s all for this week. I’ll pick this up in the next episode…

To be continued…

Podcast | Archetypal Depth, Mana vs. FIMI

Decoding Trolls — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:31:17 GMT

Archetypal Depth: 6,000 Years of Indo-European Culture

The European Union acknowledges that Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) narratives are repetitive and predictable.

It documents the three-phase Russian election interference playbook: delegitimise leadership, weaponise divisions, undermine electoral integrity. But it treats this repetitiveness as a feature of Russian operational doctrine. Disinfolklore goes deeper.

My framework traces these narrative structures, these archetypes, back through 6,000 years of Indo-European culture. The inner-outer realm switching that I documented at Stanytsia Luhanska, where Russian-speaking Mariupol mothers were instantaneously re-archetyped as dead Ukrainian Nazis — that is not a Russian TTP, not a Russian tactic, technique, or procedure. It’s an ancient mechanism of exclusion and dehumanisation that Russia has weaponised. The Trito myth, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the trickster tale — which the Middle Eastern countries are living right now. You give Donald a gold-plated Boeing 747 and all you get in return is 100 Shahed drones attacking your infrastructure. When you say to Donald, “But you said you’d protect us,” all you get is, “How about another jet?”

The trickster tale. We learned these when we were children and these have been passed on and on, whether in the Arabian Nights or Chaucer’s tales or folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, or indeed in the folklore which Mockers reads on Volya Radio each morning. These are structural patterns that predate any state actor. That’s the depth I help provide.

Why this matters operationally: if you only understand FIMI as Russian or Chinese state behaviour, your response is limited to targeting those states. If you understand it as a weaponisation of deep archetypal structures that are hardwired into Indo-European cognition, you can build genuine cognitive immunity because you can teach people to recognise this pattern regardless of who deploys it — whether it’s in your own household or in your own community or from Russia.

The Missing Mana Dimension

The European Union report exhaustively catalogues channels and observables. It counts, it maps, it attributes. But nowhere does it ask: what is the energy inside the meme? What is the affective charge that makes one piece of content resonate and another fall flat?

My concept of mana — the energy embedded in informational units that impacts moods, attitudes, intentions, and motivations — is precisely what the EEAS framework lacks. The report notes that most AI-generated FIMI content is low quality and generates limited organic engagement. It notes that Storm 1516 is the exception, but there’s no framework for explaining why. In my terms: most FIMI content carries weak or misaligned mana. Storm 1516 succeeds because it plugs into authentic fears and archetypal structures that carry real affective charge.

My Finding Manuland research — you’ll see the Manuland section on disinfolklore.eu — traces the etymological and semantic and hermeneutical link between the mana energy, the M-N in mana and energy, and money — it’s in M-money as well — through 6,000 years of M-N sound patterns. The EEAS report documents Russia’s 146.3 billion rouble media budget, about 1.56 billion euros. The linguistic archaeology tells us something the budget line does not: money and mana are cognates. The resources flow where the energy is. Understanding the energy is understanding the resource allocation…

Available wherever you get your podcasts or here:

Podcast | Can't Dismantle a Spell Only by Seizing the Spell Book!

The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for good, understandable political reasons and constitutional and mandate reasons, the European Union of course doesn’t want to get involved in intra-European Union created Disinfolklore or disinformation…

3 months ago · Decoding Trolls

Finding Manuland Site is Now Live!

Decoding Trolls — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:09:31 GMT

As a dear paid subscriber, I wanted you to be the first to see my new Finding Manuland platform.

What I do as a writer

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:14:33 GMT

I write, I speak from a very, very remote place - Ani. It’s very, very beautiful, as you see with the mountains. I thought I would just muse a little bit on what I do as a writer as Decoding Trolls and how I see my role as a writer and where my substacks fit into it, what I’m working on now, what my plans are, and how you helped me by responding and reading and reacting to my work.

I wrote about Eneduana, who is the first known named author in human culture. I discovered her in a very forgotten corner of a museum in Brussels, where a poem, a song she had written to the moon god Nanna, in cuneiform text had been preserved.

She lived around 2500 BCE and was the daughter of Sargon the Great, who was a great emperor in Assyria and Babylon. This particular song, which she had written to the moon god Nana, was preserved in this forgotten corner of a museum in Brussels and had been written or copied about 700 years after she died. It was a little bit of a connection to her.

It really interested me that she was dedicated to the moon god Nanna.

As you probably know by now, my hypothesis for why the MN sound is so common in the English language and Indo-European languages is that the MN sound is a remnant of what I call the moon-based metaphorical semantic signaling system that was implanted by the first Indo-Europeans. It was so important to them that it became implanted in all of the daughter Indo-European languages.

As you may remember from my hypothesis about Osman the Great, who was one of the Central Asians, Turkic language-speaking Central Asians who came to Anatolia as part of the conquest, his name became part of the dynasty, the Ottoman dynasty in Osman.

How we can know M-N- sound’s ubiquity inside Turkic languages and culture is a function of Indo-European and Turkic languages’ early contacts.

M-N- sound appears to have many of the same meanings in Turkic as well as in Indo-European languages (Manas is the mythological founder of Turkic Kirghiz culture, Zaman signifies time in Turkish, for example…

10 months ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

My hypothesis was that since he and his dynasty arrived in Anatolia around 11 or 1200 years into the common era, they eventually conquered the whole area.

As we saw from my work in the Hittite a year ago in the Ankara Museum, seeing Tarmana, his name was written in a cuneiform text from about 1800 BCE, which is 2,900 years before Osman the Great came. Modern-day linguists use the MN sound, the Uman suffix, and other suffixes, but mainly the Uman suffix in these documents.

M-N- Sound Pops Up 3,924 Years Ago!

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the “Archetypes” episode…

a year ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

In these 23,000 cuneiform texts written, I found in a place I visited the summer before last, Kanesh, which was the actual and the mythological founding community for the Hittites, for the first Indo-European.

Modern linguists use this Uman suffix to distinguish between texts. All the texts are written in Assyrian, but there are local Anatolian Indo-European words in there. Modern linguists use this Uman suffix to distinguish the Indo-European from the Assyrian.

Flash forward 3,100 years later, 3,000 years after these texts. Osman arrives here on his horse, Osman the Great, and finds the Ottoman Empire, which would rule Anatolia until the First World War, basically. Three thousand years later, he arrives here with the MN sound. The first person who is appointed as a leader here is Menushur with an MN sound to replace the Armenians, who also have the MN sound. You begin to see the potential of Manuland to unite.

We put a huge play in communities to find the differences between communities defined by different languages, especially by different language families, particularly the Turkic language-speaking family and Indo-European, say the Armenians. My conception of Manuland is to unite us and unite the Turkic language speakers who today occupy this land. It is replete with their MN-sounding names and words, which they or their ancestors brought from Central Asia when they first started arriving here about a thousand years ago.

This is a sign of how I see my job as a writer. I do not merely describe the world; I intervene in the world and try to make it right. This is what Eneduana did in her dedications to the moon god Nanna. She composed songs, which were prayers, learned off by heart, and eventually recorded in cuneiform text so that I could see them. That is a form of writing, of course. The substance of what she did as the first known named author in human culture was independent of the form in which it was recorded and transmitted.

It’s that substance I got to in this piece I wrote as part of my Decoding Trolls project, which is on recoupling the political right with moral rightness.

Although I have never self-identified as being on the political right, it falls to me to try to re-orientate the Right away from continuing its terrible identification with MAGA and Russian right-wing Disinfolklore. Let’s, then, use my concept of Archetyping-Through-Disinfolklore to understand how the (political) Right was hacked by usurpers who managed…

Saving the Global Right

a year ago · 18 likes · Decoding Trolls

I wrote a piece talking about how Meloni, Macron, Merz, and President Zelensky in Ukraine have the potential and are actually doing it by helping rescue the project that has been hijacked by the far right, who are doing very wrong things.

For instance, President Trump threatened to invade Greenland and disturb the European Union, Greenland, and the state of Denmark’s territorial integrity. This is very unright from a legal point of view, as defined by the post-World War II legal order, which makes territorial integrity sacrosanct. It is also wrong from a moral point of view, and I am not afraid to say that.

The second element in the six-element code of positive trolls distinguishes what is right from what is wrong, what is positive trolling from what is negative trolling. This standard is set by the post-World War II legal order. When the current American government says it doesn’t care about international law or the far right talks about not caring about international law, that right is there. I am not afraid to say that is wrong. That is unright. You are trying to usurp what is right and replace it.

My job as a writer and an artist, and the clue is in the “writ” element in writer and also in artist. Arta in ancient Iranian, a Western language, means truth, and Rta in Vedic, an ancient Indian language, also means truth.

We have this idea of truth and what is right hardwired into these Rt- sounds. My job as a writer, through whichever medium I use, identifies me as a writer because in our culture, people doing what I do traditionally wrote.

Of course, now I’m experimenting, as you see here, with video and podcasts. I’m also doing my website, which involves learning, so I’m completely independent and can just write things. I can create and then be responsible for uploading it and putting it into a form that you can read to complement my substacks and podcast platforms where my podcasts are, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. OnX is where most of my raw writing work appears, but I do use images as well.

I’m not a pure writer in that traditional sense. By learning these different mechanisms, different mediums, and ensuring that there is something unified about my content in terms of the Power of Mana, Finding Manuland project, the Decoding Trolls, more journalism, and then Diss and Folklore, which I’m very excited about as well. This is the medium through which Donald and the far right are attempting to usurp and replace the post-World War II legal order with their vision of legal and social order, which is quite akin to the Nazis.

My discovery of Disinfolklore as a narrative form is something I also write about. I help teach myself and embed myself and others to interpret data, the kinds of data we use before we decide who to vote for, whether to go and demonstrate, or whether to participate in public life. Whether to resist those kinds of decisions are made on the basis of data. The very people who promote free speech are actually those who wish to shut it down and turn what is wrong into what is right, suppressing artists like me and others so that we can’t communicate our truth and give others the opportunity to hear how we interpret the world.

That is my job as a writer, and that’s how I see myself. If I’m feeling pretentious, I’ll call myself an artist, which kind of takes in different media forms. I’m happiest being a writer, even though I also create content with video and am learning. As you’ll be seeing over the next year or two, you’ll see how I develop my technical skills using these amazing facilities we have now with iPhones and Substack itself.

As I develop my technical abilities into different formats and forms, the substance of what I teach and what I write doesn’t change. It’s all on this theme of trying to recouple what is right in a moral sense and a legal sense, as defined by the post-World War II legal order. I aim to point out when what is not right is being promoted as being right by the far right, who have their anti-immigrant, anti-human rights rhetoric, pro-discrimination, etc.

From my perspective, the Finding Manuland project and visits like this in Ani to places which are, as you see there, just across is the watchtower. That’s Armenia, the state of Armenia.

One day, hopefully, this border will be open, and people will be able to flow freely again between these two countries, which have had such a complicated crisis history, hopefully sharing the heritage of the MN Sound.

Once Russia is finally defeated and stopped stirring the pot and provoking tumult, we can find a more harmonious means of communicating with Turkic language speakers, Indo-European language speakers, Armenians, Turks, and all the people living in Manuland and on the borders of Manuland because we see that we have more in common with each other. We’re more united. We’re united by this MN sound and by its emanation from the first Indo-European language speakers in Mykolaivka village in eastern Ukraine.

What I believe my hypothesis to be is the moon-based metaphorical semantic signaling system that they embedded in our language and which is still relevant today. As far as I can see, it’s quite embedded in the Turkic language-speaking community. We don’t really have written attestations of Turkic language until much later than Indo-European, maybe three millennia later.

We can certainly see its immanence in, for instance, Osman the Great. In just to hear saying Menesher was the first viceroy of Ani when they conquered it.

MN is everywhere in the Turkic language as well. I think we can use these commonalities to promote harmony between different peoples. That’s partly what my Finding Manuland project is about, and it’s completely consistent with my job as a writer.

Podcast | What's 'Folklore' about Disinfolklore?

I forged the word Disinfolklore out of disinformation and folklore in February 2023…

5 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

Video Podcast: Edessa and Göbekli Tepe

Decoding Trolls — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:12:11 GMT

I’m Decoding Trolls, speaking to you from a place in southern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, near the city of Urfa, historically known as Edessa. Yesterday, I saw an inscription dedicating Roman-era columns to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. This inscription dates back to around the third century of the Common Era, confirming that I am in the right place at the right time.

In many ways, my journey to find Manuland has been leading up to this specific moment. I am about to visit a stone circle, the first of its kind discovered in human culture, which dates back around 10,000 years before the Common Era.

For those who have been following my explorations, you’ll recall that our story began with a stone circle uncovered in May 2021, just eight months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the first chapter of Finding Manuland, I mentioned my travels in eastern France around November 2021, when I was returning to eastern Ukraine from my last leave before my forced retirement from my diplomatic career with the OSCE.

During that journey, I passed a warehouse named Manuland in eastern France, located in an agricultural machinery area. I had noticed the “MN” sound in various places over the years. Upon passing Manuland, I decided it was time to explore what this sound meant. The following morning, I ventured into the village of Maine, without a clear idea of what I was searching for or how to connect the MN sound to a project. I started my exploration at the church and, from there, moved in concentric circles around it. I then went for a run up the mountain and encountered a mound where a farmer was tending to his livestock.

What I discovered there was a method of exploration. Each episode of Finding Manuland integrates three core elements: the MN sound, the concept of exchanging energy deeply embedded in Indo-European languages; expanding our mental models of time and space; and iteratively exploring these ideas.

We began by considering ancient civilizations: Egypt, Greece, and Rome, recognizing how they relate to our current civilization. Recent evidence suggests that Indo-European languages originated in eastern Ukraine, specifically in Mykhailivka village, and spread from there across Europe to India, over a span of 6,000 years. This expansion has reshaped our understanding of space and time.

The third element involves using this iterative method for exploration, which has guided me from Maine village to here, to the cromlech in Novoalexandrivka—a posh suburb of Dnipro, where property developers attempted to build a luxury home on a burial mound from 3,500 years BCE. This site, associated with the Yamna culture, was discovered when developers, in their haste to research it, accidentally unearthed a stone circle built by the Sredni Stog culture, a precursor to the Yamna.

Yesterday, I visited Urfa and explored an impressive museum that showcased artifacts from Göbekli Tepe, including lifelike statues of animals and possibly stone gods.

I have previously discussed the anthropomorphic aspects of the stones in the Dnipro stone circle, and it was a privilege to see these artifacts, which had been buried by the first Indo-Europeans.

While traveling from Lake Van, where I sought Menua’s stables, I faced challenges in my journey.

The museum in Van contained numerous references to Menua, who held significant importance in the region. My travels took me through the historical Kura-Araxes culture, where inscriptions from both the Assyrians and Hittites can be found. Despite their different languages, the Mitanni worshipped Indo-European deities.

During my exploration, I also reflected on the unique aspects of the post-World War II legal order, emphasizing territorial integrity and defined borders—a contrast to the fluid borders of earlier human history. My journey through Urfa and Mardin has been eye-opening, especially in examining the MN sound and its connections to ancient deities such as Marduk.

Mardin, whose name may derive partly from Marduk, intrigued me as I observed its lights from a distance. This exploration challenges us to learn about areas and aspects of life we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The connection between Lake Van and its Iranian counterpart, both saltwater lakes at high altitudes, draws parallels with the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point on Earth.

The relationship between these lakes is reflected in ancient stories, including the narrative of Noah’s Ark, which is said to have come to rest on the Ararat Mountains, near the region of Lake Van. Interestingly, state-of-the-art DNA analysis has revealed genetic links between ancient populations in this area and modern Jewish communities, reinforcing the interconnectedness of these regions.

In the context of Finding Manuland, we recognize that we are situated in a borderland that was once predominantly Indo-European. This area has witnessed the evolution of various cultures, including the Kurds, who still maintain ties to this ancient heritage. I am currently about 50 kilometers north of the Iraq border, with Edessa serving as a historical crossroads for various empires.

Göbekli Tepe is significant not only for its monumental structures but also as a site where the Indo-Europeans laid the groundwork for modern civilization. This connection is reflected in the ancient DNA evidence linking the Yamna culture, the early Indo-Europeans, to what we see today.

As I prepare to see Göbekli Tepe, I am excited about how this moment connects to my journey that began in Maine Village in November 2021. This exploration of the MN sound continues to unfold, revealing new insights as we embrace various mediums such as video and podcasting. I look forward to sharing more of this fascinating journey with you.

Continued from:

First in series:

Podcast | Paradoxes' brainwashing qualities in ordinary news

What I look at in Disinfolklore is particularly the system effects of specific memes…

5 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

Video Podcast | Finding Manuland - Hunt for Menua’s Stables

Decoding Trolls — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 08:55:52 GMT

So, I made it to Van. Amazingly. It’s an amazingly blue-sky day, and I’m climbing up to Van Castle. It looks like I’m the first person to climb up here today because, as you can see, there aren’t many footprints. There are no fresh footprints; I’m causing the only fresh ones around.

This fort was built around... well, people have lived here since 5000 BCE, but it’s of most interest to “Finding Manuland” because we’re in search of stables with an inscription down to and by Menua, who was the son of the founder of the Urartu Empire.

Some of us may remember from the Bible that Mount Ararat is where Noah’s Ark allegedly came to rest—or rather, the Ararat Mountains. This kingdom, Biainili (as they called themselves), which would later become Armenia and the capital of Armenia itself, is the center of what became the Urartu Empire. We’re interested in the truth, the complexity of history, and our ever-evolving mental models.

Our mental model of time really begins around 4100 BCE. The Urartu Empire was at its height 3,200 years after that. As you see, this majestic lake—I once saw it from an airplane, with twinkling lights around it and the blue sky. I first saw this fort last night in a massive snowstorm, actually. I couldn’t work it out because you could just see lights up on what looked like a cliff. I thought it was mountains, but actually, it is a promontory leading out. As you can see on both sides, it’s quite low.

We’re particularly interested in this place from a “Finding Manuland” perspective because the son of the first emperor was called Menua. Here, we’ll find an inscription to Menua, so we’re going to look for that. That “MN” sound in Menua’s name then went into Armenia—into the “MN” in Armenia. I’ve spoken about that before.

In 1856, Russia lost the first Crimean War and ceded what was then Armenia to what was then the Sublime Porte, which became the Ottoman Empire and subsequently the modern state of Turkey. The old city up here was occupied by the Russians in the First World War and destroyed by them. Wherever we go, we find destruction by the Russians. This is why, as a result of the “Second Crimean War” which is currently ongoing, we must do everything we can to ensure that this kind of destructiveness by this state never comes to pass again.

So, we’re going to look at the old city. We’re going to look for Menua’s inscription and the “MN” sound in a non-mythological founder of an Indo-European linguistic and cultural tradition: Menua.

Menua was a historical figure. I’ve seen his inscriptions in Yerevan, and I’ve written about them before in the Menua episode (which I’ll link underneath this). In the Indo-European traditions, we have many mythological founders: Manu in India, of course, and Mannus, the subject of that six-part series I made earlier this year. We also have Manawydan in Wales, a mythological founder, and Manannán, who probably was a historical figure but was the preeminent pre-Christian deity in Ireland—part of the Celtic Indo-European tradition. But Menua was a historical figure, the son of the first emperor of Urartu. It went from being a kingdom to an empire, ruling most of Anatolia.

This area of Anatolia—modern Turkey and Lake Van—is in fact the meeting point of many great empires. It’s part of Northern Mesopotamia, the interaction zone between Babylon, Akkadian, and Ur (which is down in Iraq). But here in Northern Mesopotamia, around where writing first emerged in cuneiform text, we’re going to see some inscriptions in cuneiform.

We also had the Kura-Araxes culture, which was founded in modern Armenia and lasted from about 3500 BCE to around 2000 BCE. At that same time, Assyria is at its height; Babylon is at its height. They’re coming into this area and leaving the remnants of their writing. We also see traces of Kanesh, where the first Indo-European writing was found, which I’ve visited and spoken about before.

Then we have:

* The Hittite Empire: Rules this area from about 1600 BCE to 1200 BCE.

* Urartu: At its height from 800 to 500 BCE.

* The Achaemenid Empire: Darius the Great, who we’ll talk about again—very important in Iran. Today, protests are going on in Iran; we’ll see if the mullahs leave, then I can visit there, God willing.

The Achaemenid Empire dissolves when Darius’s descendants die and Alexander (the so-called Great) takes over. Then comes the great Armenian Empire, which was at its height in terms of land, controlling most of Anatolia all the way to the Levant around 50 BCE. Now, the modern state of Armenia is on 29,000 square kilometers, again having been betrayed by the Russians.

And now we have the Ottoman Empire, and the Kurds are here—Indo-Europeans as well in this area. So what we have here is an amazing interaction zone and Lake Van, an absolutely stunning place.

I’m going to leave it at that for the moment, and we’re going to look for Menua’s stables.

Recall who Menua is:

Who was Menua?

Finding Manuland XVI: M-N- sound in Armenia and Ireland’s first monarchs’ moniker.

Recently I drove by the source of one of the rivers of Babylon: the Euphrates. Menua (790 BCE to 775 BCE) was the third monarch to rule the Biblical era Van / Ararat / Urartu / Bianili kingdom, whose successor state two millennia later is Armenia…

Read on at: https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua

Continued:

Continued from:

First in series:

Podcast | Finding Manuland - Road to Tushpa / Van

Decoding Trolls — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:34:45 GMT

Menua, son of the founder of the Urartian Empire, once lived on the lakeside at Tushpa, whose modern name is Van (Türkiye).

Tushpa / Van is the meeting place of many great empires Kura-Araxes, Hittite (Indo-European), Mitanni (Indo-Europeanish), Babylon/Mesopotamian/Assyrian, Urartu, Armenian (Indo-European), Achmænaid (Indo-European) and now, I guess, mainly Kurd (Indo-European) and Turkish! Today, I’m driving to Van to, well, Find Manuland.

Tushpa, a strategic point in Lake Van basin, was situated in the centre of the historic route from every direction to Van Plain.
The capital, which included the first known written monument of the Kings of Urartu; was one of the most crowded and important Urartian centres with its splendid royal tombs, palaces, governmental storages, sacred sites, vineyards and orchards situated in fertile plains irrigated with dams and channels.

Continued:

Previous Episode:

First Episode:

Solstice - Song of Amergin

Decoding Trolls — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:33:30 GMT

Poem of Amergin, Celtic Ireland’s first poet-judge, sacrificing first Monarch and brother of self-sacrificing Donn (who features in much in my work) put to music and video by Arnold Hensman. Reading by Daniella Hensman. Filmed at Newgrange, Ireland. Music: Walking on Clouds, by Tea Time, (ShutterStock Music).

This poem by Amergin, preserved in the Book of Leinster and the Book of the Taking of Ireland, is an example in the Indo-European tradition of candid almost proud words put into the mouths of Gods.

I am a wind in the sea (for depth)
I am a sea-wave upon the land (for heaviness)
I am the sound of the sea (for fearsomeness)
I am a stag of seven combats (for strength)
I am a hawk upon a cliff (for agility)
I am a tear-drop of the sun (for purity)
I am fair (i.e. there is no plant fairer than I)
I am a boar for valour (for harshness)
I am a salmon in a pool (for swiftness)
I am a lake in a plain (for size)
I am the excellence of arts (for beauty)
I am a spear that wages battle with plunder.
I am a god who forms subjects for a ruler!
Who explains the stones of the mountains?
Who invokes the ages of the moon?
Where lies the setting of the sun?
Who bears cattle from the house of Tethra?
Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?
What man, what god forms weapons?
Indeed, then;
I invoked a satirist…
a satirist of wind.

[John Carey’s translation of Song of Amergin: from The Celtic Heroic Age (2003) (pg. 265)].

Podcast | Indo-European Immanences

Decoding Trolls — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:31:25 GMT

I took this photograph at Alaca Höyük, the Indo-European Hittites’ monumental site. It’s my favourite piece of mythological / sacred art at the site, which dates from around 1,400 BCE. Others below.

My favourite subject, and it all begins in Kherson — whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community. A relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use in almost every sentence, the religions, the soul’s immanence in many Indo-European religions, including what I would characterise as Christianity and Buddhism. Created by this community, which is just amazing in itself, because most of us grow up with a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece, and then our cultures. It turns out this is not true. Greek and Italic culture, Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed inside a mixture of the Yamnaya community from this area in Kherson, Mykolaiv Oblast, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine — this has been an intersection point, an interaction point for millennia — out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaya from there after 2500 BCE, westwards near Odessa, just east of Odessa, and a community of people already there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected this for decades.

Jung explains why he believes archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity: he can’t understand where else they could have come from. He talks about the wildest migration theories, which we now know since the 2015 ancient DNA revolution are scientific facts — the genetic content of people from India to Ireland whose ancestry comes from what they call the steppe, what I call ancient Ukrainian.

For me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity. I realised, as many of us did, that there was a problem — whether it was former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They were perceiving, and perhaps many of us did this too before becoming aware of Ukraine’s importance, not only in our current moment but over time, that Russia was managing by monopolising the myth of Russia’s superiority over Ukraine, archetyping Ukraine as not a real country. Every time Vladimir Putin speaks, he’s re-archetyping Russia as this great power. Many of us and our friends perhaps still perceive Russia’s culture — Dostoevsky, ballet — as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine. I’m a great fan of those writers because they’re very insightful and helpful to us.

But I realised from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, without understanding it as archetyping at the time, that my mission was to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul. Certain communities after World War II managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, a founding member of the United Nations, which signed the UN Charter in 1945.

As I dug deeper and followed this path from working in eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnaya when property developers were destroying this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro. It made the front page of the New York Times. The local people were protesting, so in my capacity as a monitor, I went to discover what was going on. These property developers had destroyed a Yamnaya burial mound in which was buried the local monarch and various other people throughout the millennia, including the last person buried there — the head of the collective farm, believe it or not, around 1932. Delusions of grandeur, and continuity. Underneath the mound, when they destroyed it, was found a stone circle created by one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamnaya.

Through that, I began, from a position of extreme scepticism, to trace the linguistic journey of certain people carrying not just a language, not just words, vocabulary, sounds and meanings. There are about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European, or what I call ancient Ukrainian — the language spoken by the Yamnaya between 4100 BCE and 2500 BCE. I recognise these dates are uncharted territory for most people. Our history begins maybe around 1000 BCE with King David in the Bible. Part of my mission is to re-archetype our mental models — our idea of not just Ukraine but humanity, human history, European history, and Ukrainians’ position in it — to create new structures and frameworks. Because that’s how what I call disinfolklore and disinformation works: it creates untruthful frameworks in our minds. People inside MAGA, in the MAGA disinfolklore galaxy, have all these in-jokes, they know things you and I wouldn’t. This is how Russian disinformation is so successful — it’s not about intelligence or education, it’s about how people’s minds are changed.

I’m quite upfront about this when I outline these histories. The ancient DNA studies are published in Nature and Science, the preeminent scientific journals. I stay away from anything not properly backed up. Feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European connection.

Part of what helped me see this pattern — and this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data — is that I assimilate information, as many of us do on X. As we now know from the third report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference by the European Union, released recently and which I highly recommend along with the first two reports, X was involved in 86% of over 40,000 FIMI instances collected. This is where we are. Many of us have ethical dilemmas about whether we should be on X, and most of us are also on Bluesky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here.

I saw Margarita Simonyan tweeting again in her folksy disinfolklore way — she does this a lot, telling stories, as indeed does Donald. They tell stories of frankly horrifying things. For instance, the way Donald communicated, I think in March 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said they couldn’t pay for their NATO membership and asked would you protect us, he said he’d tell them to “do whatever the hell they want with you.” This was then reported by CNN as fact, though we’re not clear whether it ever happened. These folksy stories get taken up.

Simonyan tonight is talking about how people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives weapons to Ukraine, Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help, therefore Germany is complicit and they’ll have to strike Berlin. This is a classic piece of disinfolklore — there’s a distancing in the narrative form, presented as a folksy story. “People in the offices of Moscow” — the image is she’s just heard gossip.

She’s done this before, at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this, where she said “people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine.” She was sitting beside Putin himself, dressed in green — which is why I call her Maid Margarita Simonyan, like a reverse Robin Hood. This is an aspect of the disinfolklore analytical method: we can use folklore archetypes to interpret and combat those who are themselves using folksy archetypes.

She said people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine — meaning there will be famine in Africa, migrants will come to Europe, and the EU will release sanctions because “it’s impossible for us not to be friends.” This is the folksy banter of the schoolyard — a seven-year-old speaking to their best friend after an argument: it’s impossible not to be friends. But this isn’t a schoolyard chat. It’s a conversation beside the head of state of a country at war, planning to starve millions in Africa in a madcap attempt — something you’d only see in Don Quixote or a folktale. The plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans, provoke Europeans into lifting sanctions, become friends with Europe, and abandon Ukraine. The way she tells it, it sounds like solid Russian strategy told in a folksy way. It’s absolutely horrifying when you parse it, but it passes most people by. It enters their minds.

These are folktale archetypes, folksy stories communicating horrifying things. It’s a pattern they use, and it’s really effective because people like us share them — they provoke something in our emotions. Even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterising him as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme. The horrifyingness is slyly communicated, the energy continues, pinging around the world. Thankfully, today we see great advances in our political leadership over what we’ve experienced since February 2022.

But this method of communication has impacted President Biden’s policy. “Don’t poke the bear” is a disinfolklore meme, probably the most successful one ever. It actually impacts foreign policy — it stopped America properly helping Ukraine. International relations itself, the entire discourse, is full of these metaphors and disinfolklore memes, represented as means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions. Whereas in fact, these strategies are only communicated by and through these means.

What I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware no other writers have really noticed, is this continuity across multiple narrative forms and discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology, folklore studies, or Jungian psychology when they reference myths, archetypes, and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at play inside international relations discourse, inside the speeches of many of our leading politicians until recently, and obviously everything Donald says — he speaks this folklore fluently. The folksy stories, the January 6th anthem of the insurrectionists, the songs used in rallies, the folksy way of speaking about Al Capone, the archetyping of Melania as a character using haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA — Dressx — who supply comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our information space by referencing superheroes or characters from contemporary folktale.

That’s a sample of the scale. Because I noticed that many of the mythological founders in Indo-European peoples had this MN sound in their monikers: Manu, the first human in Indic culture; Yama, who comes from Aryaman — there it is, Aryaman, which gave its name to Iran — becoming Yama in India, with this MN sound, one of the founders in ancient Iranian culture from pre-Zoroastrian times. In Ireland, Manannán. In Wales, Manawydan. In Germanic culture, Mannus, the first human. In Greece, Minos. In Armenia, Menua. All these MN sounds.

And then this other sound, RT — right, rita, truth in Sanskrit, arta in ancient Iranian, in Darius’s inscriptions. Darius founded the Achaemenid Empire — there’s the MN again — about 700 to 300 BCE, before Alexander the so-called Great. These RT sounds — the claim to monopolise what is right, unified right. These sounds recur again and again, patterns which seem to have some impact on our psyche, our minds — MN in mind as well.

I think it’s these sounds embedded in stories, whether the stories are what we might consider folklore. And now I think we have to consider what folklore is: it’s what’s on TikTok, what we’re reading on X, the war lore that we discuss. These are modern manifestations of folklore. What’s common to them and to the Brothers Grimm and other community-forming tropes and informational units, like Russian propaganda in Russian-occupied Ukraine where I started looking at this in detail — what they have in common is these sounds inside them that recur, these patterns that have been around for thousands of years attached to the same meanings. MN is in meaning as well. They shine through, like different meanings shine through different signifiers.

That’s the level I’m on. I know the Russians are looking at this linguistic level too, connecting symbols, signs, sounds, and images to what Jung called our unconscious — not our collective unconscious, but our individual unconscious. The stories are a means of communicating these and somehow controlling us. I don’t fully understand it, but I see the patterns and they’re empirical — empirical patterns through time, through culture. We see them every day. I collect them all the time.

That’s really my focus, what I bring that’s new. I was shocked to see how Russia was using generative AI to represent Western leaders as cartoonish characters to help brainwash children in Russia. Then I saw at a recent meeting that many of our leaders were shown using generative AI as children — this was applauded and seen as fun. It is fun, but it’s very dangerous, dark stuff.

I’ve tried to come up with a means of parsing any data, and I hope my twelve tools in my disinfolklore algorithm would help us see through nefarious attempts to manipulate our minds — like Russians using generative AI to represent foreign leaders as cartoonishly bad characters and embed those archetypes in minds. I saw early clues in Russian films about Gogol, who’s a Ukrainian writer but went to Russia to try to educate Moscow about Ukraine as a culture. All the Russians could see in his work was folktale, quaint characters. They did the same in a patronising way to Lesya Ukrainka — looking at Ukraine as a place of little, quaint people. A bit like how a previous generation of English people used leprechauns to archetype Irish people as inferior. Thankfully, that’s dead now.

As an Irish person, part of my identity let me see this family resemblance. But it can be a positive power too. What Russia is doing to the minds of Ukrainians inside the occupation and inside Russia — they are on the cutting edge of this, and the tools they’re using, whether generative AI or narrative tools, are very much what I’m trying to combat and give us the tools to see. We’re not really at the races generally in our culture. If we just got to know what the Russians are doing, that gives us a menu of what we shouldn’t be doing by accident, and what we’re up against.

Reading Harry Potter and things like that — I think reading Harry Potter is very innocuous. I know many people get exercised about its author. But as an artist myself, I’m amazed at what she achieved. Magic — it’s really important to understand how magic works, war magic, not to be afraid of it but to become familiar with it, because what the Russians manage to do, what Trump manages to do, is magical. We understand magic and magical tales.

Primarily, this is where we get our archetypes. I understand this from my own experience — from cartoons, from Disney, from Grimm’s fairy tales, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher. Both good and bad archetypes. This is how I perceived reality when I arrived in eastern Ukraine in 2015, in this beautiful, halcyon, Arcadian forested area. From the first moment, I saw something folkloric about it. I didn’t understand what it was. That’s the intuition I’ve been uncovering. And at this point in my work, I can report that since we do take in archetypes as children from folktales, if we want to win the war for the next generation, we need to understand how these archetypes work and use them wisely.

Decoding Trolls

Indo-European Immanence in Early Christianity.

3 years ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

Podcast | Peppercorns, Mana, Early Roman Religion (Numenism), Communism and Seeing Life in Memes

Decoding Trolls — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 05:16:08 GMT

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the property. It’s in all the leases. So that was always just a little curiosity to me, as indeed was the fact in contract law, in English and in American contract law, for there to be a contract to take place, there needs to be an agreement. There also needs to be what they call Consideration. If I contract with you, James, to buy 12 widgets, you have to, for the contract to be valid, you have to in some way pay me a deposit. This is the importance of the deposit.

So there’s this reciprocity. I was very interested in this book, which I read a couple of years ago by Marcel Mauss, who is one of the, you know, in every academic discipline, there’s always a few founders who are in every, in the first paragraph in every book. When you look at the laws of Sympathetic Magic, Marcel Mauss is right there.

That’s how I knew I was kind of, this is an interesting area to be in. I noted when I was reading this seminal text that some of you might have read as well called The Gift, by Marcel Mauss is he talked about early Germanic law and early Germanic contract law, which is from... which probably actually then becomes part of English law, even though English law says it’s coming from Roman law, which is a distinct Indo-European tradition from the italic as distinct from from the Germanic but in Germanic law each contract, sale or purchase, loan or deposit entails a pledge.

“One partner is given an object, generally something of little value like a glove or a piece of money, a knife or perhaps as with the French a pin or two. This pledge is in fact imbued,” this is Mauss writing, “this pledge is imbued with the personality of the partner who gave it. And the fact that it’s in the hands of the recipient moves its donor to fill his part of the contract or her part and buy themselves back by buying the thing.”

So when I saw this, I was like, ah, that’s interesting.

What’s going on is if I’m, if James is letting me rent his property, his skyscraper in Manhattan at a peppercorn rent, I give him this peppercorn. Actually in that peppercorn is my energy, it’s my Mana. It’s my personality. I’ve obviously got his because I’m in the I’m in the block itself.

What the whole gift is about and Mauss’s book is about is he’s looking at various different cultures and the exchange that in many different cultures, especially in Ameri-Indian cultures where early examples come from this potlatch, which is this institution of a meal, a communal meal, where you’re being hosted or you’re hosting your child’s getting married. You have to host the whole village. You give them food and drink and stuff like that. That interested me because in a lot of Irish mythological texts are about these big feasts. I always wondered what’s going on here.

It appears as if there is this idea of when you eat, when you partake of the feast, you’re taking something into you. So this is this idea of your energy, your Mana is being affected by what is coming into your body. Just as it is what’s coming into your mind from memes and from disinformation.

Equally, of course, what you’re giving into other people’s minds. So this is a reason. So this is why in my X and Bluesky profiles I say ‘there is Mana,’ ‘Mana is permanent,’ and ‘Communicate positive Mana’ (note the M-N-sound in Communicate, Permanent, and, of course, Mana).

This is this idea that, and what the Russians are doing is communicating just such negative Maa and driving us all to driving us all nuts with it. So this meaning of... And then I discovered this, which I’ve written about in my other project (Finding Manuland/Power of Mana), which isn’t so directly relevant. But that there’s lots, there’s heaps of different names for what I call Mana and this phenomenon which many people have written about from the beginning.

Here are some of the fundamental sources and readings underpinning this episode of Finding Manuland - the story of the X Energy’s immanence in humanity’s main linguistic community…

The 'X Energy' Mana

2 years ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

I’m just applying it to Disinformation studies. That’s my contribution to contemporary culture. Why particular memes take hold. Become contagious and how to detect in particular innocuous artefacts of what I call Disinfolklore or stories to detect in them these three archetypes: Russia’s invincible, Russia’s undefeatable and Russia has the right to intervene in its neighbours of political destinies.

So you can see that energy, that Mana in billions of different stories and items of Disinfolklore being voiced by everyone from Biden to Bill to people who aren’t pro-Russian. I have too in the past. We hear it from our friends all the time about Russia as being invincible. Thankfully, what we’re seeing at the moment is this archetype, this transition, this change. I don’t think if Russia does manage to take Pokrovsk, this is not going to disrupt the change in archetypal identity that appears to be taking place in the minds of, if not Donald (because obviously we know he changes with the weather), but in the minds of everyone around Donald. People - someone said to me today - someone who like two years ago We’re always having intense discussions about Ukraine and he was always like, “oh, Russia, basically Russia’s invincible, nothing will happen.” Now today he’s arguing the opposite. That’s a really good indicator for me.

The different words we have for this in different cultures, in Chinese cultures, it’s called Chi. It’s Qi in Japanese culture, in Hindu, it’s called Prana (breath). It interests me. It’s not called Mana in Hindi culture now. In Hebrew culture, it’s called Ruach.

These are all varieties of what I call Mana.

The Police would talk about synchronicity. That’s what that album means, synchronicity. So teleama, libido. Freud talked about libido. Nous. Someone else talked about Nous. Aristotle or someone like that: Vis medicatrix naturae. So kind of a formative cause. Pneuma. Holy Spirit, Woden. Actually, in Germanic culture, interestingly.

So there is this, or X-energy. So there is this, a lot of different people have noticed what I call Mana. But obviously this was before the disinformation age. So they didn’t really apply it to memes. What we’re dealing with in our timelines or what is in the what is in the information space and in the minds of our leaders and our leadership and how they’re affected.

We, as those pro-Ukraine, people in the pro-Ukraine information space, we have such a history, an in-depth history of this up and down since February 24th 2022. Where we’ve watched all the world leaders go through these changes like from “we need to give Putin a climb down” to ‘would you like ketchup with your 250 4th generation Gripen fighter jets Ukraine.”

We’ve seen this evolution of ideas and changes in archetypes in people’s minds. I think that gives us an edge in terms of it gives us a huge data set. A huge learning set for our algorithms, which a lot of other people don’t have.

This idea that when we write something that other people read changes them. Likewise, what they write changes you. When you’re speaking to people.

So this is what I mean by I’m looking at this in a particular segment of how we spend each day or of our consciousness or in human history, in human culture, which is in disinformation and Disinfolklore is what I’m particularly interested in.

Its insights or what I see in it is it applies in all forms of communications. It’s deeply embedded into our language. This M-N- sound in communication, communal, communal feast,… The M-N- sound in there and in meaning.

The Fundamental Meaning of Meanings

Happy to announce that I have identified for the first time THE two fundamental Cryptotypes underpinning all extant Indo-European languages…

2 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

It makes sense to me that this sound and the meaning and this idea of exchange and energy exchange was known and used by the first Indo-Europeans, the M-N- in Yamna as well, the first Indo-Europeans.

Archæogenetic and Isotopic Revolutions

We notice how certain sounds and meanings are identical across the area between Ireland and India. We remark how over a period…

2 years ago

We’ve just kind of lost sight of it. It is embedded in the language. You don’t need to be interested in linguistics and what unites all native Indo-European language speakers between Ireland and India in terms of their mental frameworks to find this is a useful tool for parsing data.

There was a lot of work done in the 19th century when the Polynesians were discovered to have this concept of Mana. It’s important to know now a lot of the genetic… We know there was a lot of trade between India and Polynesia and between traders and Brahmin traders at the time. The people in the late 19th century didn’t really understand this that much. In fact, it’s really only becoming and I see stuff’s coming up in the last few months on looking at ancient DNA to try and work out the migration patterns in the Pacific.

The meaning of Mana in these tribes where, this is classic, 19th century stuff I’ll quote:

“the Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence almost called almost universally Mana. This is what works to affect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men. Outside of common processes of nature, it is present in the atmosphere of life.”

What I started today with to talk about magic, what I’m trying to do is decouple the idea of magic from something that is otherworldly to its initial and true meaning in our governance systems - Magistrate. Majesty. Magi. Magus. Magister as distinct from minister. The magister is the master and the minister ministrates to the master. We now have that in our governance discourse. When we talk about ministers this is part of the same semantic field and the same signifying field in Indo-European communities across the world as Magic.

Because of various cultural reasons, we associate magic with something that is otherworldly and that is the opposite of science. In fact, it’s intrinsic to the way we organize ourselves. as societies as Indo-Europeans. It’s quite useful when you then come across this discipline, this aspect to this cultural psychology, and you see the laws of sympathetic magic and you don’t think, oh, this is about, you know, some great, I can’t even think of any of those famous Hollywood illusionists. No, it’s not. It’s about an aspect of being human and exchanging - ‘sympathetic’ in this sense is about exchange. It’s about pathos, pathetic, exchanging feelings.

So when these 19th century, a lot of them were religious, they were missionaries South Seas. They encounter this concept of Mana. They’re amazed by it. They just think this is how the primitive mind works and over the course of thousands of years, we became more advanced than them.

That’s not that interesting to me. What is interesting to me is how fascinated this was the whole industry they were in this concept Mana. No one seemed to notice, even some of the greatest minds, that M-N-, the same sound, is in the language that they were talking about, Common. Men, Human.

Ep 1 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Here in the manner of a Netflix season, I’m going to drop all six episodes in this ‘Mannus or Manu’ season in one go. Then, on PowerofMana.net or Spotify or Apple Podcasts (search for ‘Finding Manuland’ and subscribe!!), you can binge listen, or eke out listening as you might savour a fine wine…

a year ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

They were really fascinated. There were various attempts then to connect this idea with Mana with early Roman religion, for instance, Numenism. Again, the M-N- in Numenism. There’s lots of fights over it. This is this idea that in early Roman religion, italic culture. You have a god. So this is an example I picked up from the deities protecting maternity (M-N-):

“You have the tumulus and sentinus have given him life and feeling. Opus, these are all deities. Opus takes him up from the bosom of the earth. Vaticanus opens his mouth for the first time. Levana lifts him off the ground. Cunina cares for him in the cradle. Potina and Aduca give him drink and food respectively.”

From the 19th century perspective, they’re looking at these pagan Romans having, like, gods for absolutely everything. There’s evidence that everything in the household - there is different household gods for every dimension of their lives. From our perspective, we look at these 19th century missionaries in as bizarre a way as we look at these Romans.

What I think is really the link with Disinformation studies is that when we’re looking at memes and these things which come alive in our minds, which come alive in our culture and then are transmitted, they are contagion. Rhey become the object of contagion. That this is really what we’re talking about. It’s the same thing. It’s the same phenomenon (m-n-) that the Romans (m-n-), the ancient, the early Romans. Then they consolidated everything into a few deities. Underneath them were just hundreds or thousands of deities. As there were with the Hittites and in other early religious cultures.

M-N- Sound Pops Up 3,924 Years Ago!

Here we see how the latest analysis of ancient DNA demonstrates the main means through which the earliest attested Indo-European language - Kanisite Hittite (1,900 -1,800 BCE) spread from the area of southern Ukraine…

a year ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

This is when we see life in memes and in certain things which take fire, which go viral. I think it’s a similar phenomenon. I think it’s the same thing really. What is common about it is Mana. There’s an energy in this rock. Or an energy in this God. Rhis deity that protects us or moves between us. I don’t mean protects us in a religious sense. I mean, actually, I don’t mean protect at all. But just that the energy moves between us.

So I’m trying to connect these old manifestations (m-n-) of ideas of energy running between people with what we’re dealing with in the information space. Equally what we’re dealing with in our normal lives when you’re feeling quite down and you bump into someone who just brightens your life. You bump into a child or it’s a cat or a dog or your friend or your friend who always makes you laugh. What you’re really doing there is exchanging energy.

I talked about it before from the biological sense that the mitochondria in our cells creates the energy. Now we know that they create all the energy which keeps us alive. That they transfer that energy between cells. So this model also has a biological um it’s a biological um uh correlate on it and uh that is really all i wanted to um that’s what i set out all of this now i finished now i set out to talk about four weeks ago.

Please also consider listening to /looking at the following series of podcasts which are part of my Disinfolklore project. There is a lot of complementarity to Power of Mana/Finding Manuland and Disinfolklore, no least in the use of Mana in Disinfolklore as a means of communicating the desirability of parsing memes for their many meanings:

Podcast | Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic’s Law of Similarity and Law of Contagion.

An introduction.

Podcast | Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic’s Law of Similarity and Law of Contagion.

8 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

Podcast | Touching on Contagion in Disinfolklore

Final part of a series of four podcast applying Cultural Psychology’s cutting-edge work on the jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic to Disinfolklore.

Podcast | Combatting Russia’s Mental War

Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme…

7 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

Magic as Propaganda Disguised in Disinfolklore

Why Mythology keeps popping up in Russian Disinfolklore

Magic as Propaganda Disguised in Disinfolklore

So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now…

7 months ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

Podcast | Touching on Contagion in Disinfolklore

Final part of a series of four podcast applying Cultural Psychology’s cutting-edge work on the jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic to Disinfolklore.

Podcast | Touching on Contagion in Disinfolklore

7 months ago · 6 likes · Decoding Trolls

What Meaning Means

Meaning of identifying the meaning of the M-N sound - Most significant discovery in Indo-European linguistics since de Saussure?

Happy to announce that I have identified for the first time THE two fundamental Cryptotypes underpinning all extant Indo-European languages…

What Meaning Means

2 years ago · 7 likes · Decoding Trolls

How we can know M-N- sound’s ubiquity inside Turkic languages and culture is a function of Indo-European and Turkic languages’ early contacts.

Decoding Trolls — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 02:23:11 GMT

M-N- might therefore be Turkic rather than of Indo-European origins?!

Especially where its meanings and immanences hover around the same Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system of southern Ukraine from ~4,100 BCE as Finding Manuland has so far been elucidating.

However, among the first documents with writing in any Indo-European language is this text I photographed in Ankara.

It mentions a native Anatolian language speaking (Indo-European as distinct from an Assyrian language speakers) Tarmana (1,900 - 1,800 BCE).

Also, since modern linguists determine the -Uman element was ubiquitous in the first attested Indo-European language - Kanisite Hittite (1,900 - 1,800 BCE), it’s clear M-N- was in Anatolia five millennia before the first Ottoman / Mongol Osman brought it there around 1,200 CE from Central Asia / Quaziqstan.

it seems clear M-N- transferred into Turkic as the first Central Asian Turkic language speakers with Ancient Ukrainian so-called Steppe / Scythian ancestry millennia later abandoned their Indo-European tongues.

Then with much later Turkic migrations into, say, Anatolia with Osman, the founder of the Ottoman / Osman dynasty that would dominate Anatolia from 1,200 CE onwards, M-N- returned and just become another source of M-N- immanent toponyms and words / meanings relating to measurement and the Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling systems in formerly Indo-European occupied areas such as Anatolia.

I’m Decoding Trolls. This is Finding Manuland. It’s very hot where I am, deep in Manuland. I thought today we’d go through a précis of where we are. The other day, somebody asked me about the MN sound and where I am with my research. Over the course of about 40 minutes, I outlined the whole system to them, including some of the latest discoveries, which were extremely exciting but which I haven’t yet properly explored. I’m going to hang these new little frames around various parts of Manuland — the area between Ireland and India geographically, and between 4100 BCE and today temporally — like those little hooks you put towels on in hotels.

Each Finding Manuland episode goes through the method: mana as energy exchange, the linguistic elements of the MN sound, and the voyaging, the journeying aspect, which is obviously the most exciting and perhaps the most accessible for those of us who aren’t specialists in linguistics or energy exchange. The journeying component, the third dimension, is geographical — between Ireland and India, that space I call Manuland, and obviously now the Americas and Australia, but I’m talking about the traditional areas which became anchored in Indo-European languages after around 1100 BCE. There’s also the temporal aspect: 4100 BCE, when the Yamnaya in southeastern Ukraine spoke the first Indo-European language and began migrations. The first wave of migrants ended up colonising the whole of Anatolia, today’s Turkey, establishing the first Indo-European empire, the Hittite Empire. The second wave was around 2500 BCE, and out of that emanate all of today’s living Indo-European language families. In between and since, there have been constant successive subwaves.

Before the advent of ancient DNA, Marija Gimbutas, the brilliant Lithuanian-American scholar who discovered the steppe theory of migration — now as factual as we can get — was looking at archaeological artifacts from digs across Europe and was able to develop a timeline corresponding to three waves of steppe migrants. That has evolved a little since ancient DNA, but essentially what she discovered is still correct.

When Jung was writing in the 1930s and 1940s about archetypes, hypothesising that archetypes must be universal to all humans — otherwise how would you explain Tibetan monks having the same archetypes of the Lord of Death as people in Ireland with Lord Donn? — apart from, as he put it, the wildest migration theories. Well, Marija Gimbutas established from linguistics, archaeology, and mythology that these connections were real. She did a lot of work on folk songs from the Baltic countries and was able to establish continuities between Vedic Indian folk songs and Irish and other Indo-European traditions. We have these different vectors of evidence connecting all of us.

As Finding Manuland followers know, Sir William Jones, a Welsh Sanskrit scholar, learnt Sanskrit to translate the Manusmriti — those two sounds so important to Finding Manuland: MN in Manu, and smriti, with the RT sound, meaning truth, the non-illusory. The Manusmriti, the Laws of Manu, is the usual translation. Manu was the first human in Indian culture. The Laws were written down around 600 CE as later extrapolations, whereas Manu as the first human first appears in writing around 1100 BCE in the Rigveda — there’s that righ, the RT sound, in right, regina, rex.

Every Finding Manuland podcast deals with the mana energy exchange element, the linguistics element, and the voyage — the conceptual, geographical, and temporal journey, the uprooting and rebuilding of mental models.

When I was describing to my friend where we’re at with Finding Manuland, I went through the whole universe, and I thought I’d record it and tell you where we’re at. I’ve made quite a few amazing advances recently which I have yet to explore properly.

The mana exchange element has two dimensions I’ve recently discovered. One comes from the discipline of social or cultural psychology. Long before I knew cultural psychology existed, I began to label myself as a cultural archaeologist. One of the emerging dimensions of cultural psychology looks at consumer behaviour, how fashion works, how contagion operates. The first time you see me wearing this thing on my head, you think it looks ridiculous. Then you see someone else wearing it — this device originates in Afghanistan and gradually spread across Central Asia — and now it’s on my head. We have this phenomenon of how different cultural phenomena, whether words, music, ideas, clothes, designs, anything we can cognise, are susceptible to contagion.

This aspect of cultural psychology emanates from one of the same sources my work does: the amazing writer Marcel Mauss, who noticed that the mana exchange in Polynesia was equivalent to orenda elsewhere. It’s this idea of how people exchange energy, using the moniker mana in Polynesia. He was writing before we knew how Polynesia was populated by migrants from various parts of the world. The mana they exchange, part of their religion, is now seen in cultural psychology as a mechanism for examining how fashions take hold, and they use the term contagion.

This idea of contagion is hardwired into the beginnings of my understanding of mana as a method to describe the essential exchange of energy between sentient beings, between humans — and that NM in animals, the anima, animal, the NM reversed, as in Numitor, Romulus and Remus’s grandfather, the mani backwards. We have this slight reversal, a phenomenon in linguistics that Ferdinand de Saussure also noticed.

Some of you will have read what is probably my greatest piece, “The Meaning of Meaning,” in which I announce that I’ve found one of the cryptotypic signifying systems underlying all human communication in Indo-European languages — this MN sound. In there, I’m talking about this mnemonic through sound, through our language, of a physical phenomenon which on the micro scale happens in the mitochondrial aspect of our cells. Each of our cells has two different genomes; one is mitochondrial DNA, a quite small genome of maybe 32 to 35 genes. This is what launched the ancient DNA revolution — instead of the gazillions of lineages in nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is much shorter. When I say I’ve got steppe ancestry or Yamnaya DNA, it’s when we’re looking at mitochondrial DNA. And of course MN is in mitochondrial — that may be a coincidence, I don’t know.

Mitochondrial DNA gives our cells their energy. The ATP — I always remember this because it’s a supermarket in Ukraine owned by Yulia Tymoshenko’s family, the first female prime minister of Ukraine — ATP is what powers our cells. Recently I had the pleasure of seeing photographs of how particular organelles, these mitochondrial elements, are joined and connect with each other. That’s on the micro. On the macro, it’s me communicating with you — and MN is in communicate. Our mana is exchanging, even though at the moment it’s going one direction. But if you comment or subscribe, our mana is being exchanged.

We go from the micro inside our bodies to the macro, whole human communities and the communal, communitarian sense of exchanging energy. The cultural psychology element is brilliant. When I discovered Marcel Mauss’s work on Polynesian mana, I was already interested in mana, and now I think I can genetically connect it through the migrations from South Asia, from India — they could well have brought with them this signifier, mana, for the phenomenon of energy exchange which all sentient beings experience.

Part of the purpose of Finding Manuland is to remind ourselves in our communities, when we’ve gotten so far removed from these basics, what it means to communicate with people every day, to smile at them. We’re exchanging energy. Part of my purpose is to implant a reminder, a mana reminder system, through this MN sound. If you’re scanning for the MN sound in meaning, in all these common words we use in almost every sentence, when you spot it, it will remind you that in this interaction we’re exchanging mana, and that’s all that really matters. That is the essence of being human, the essence of living inside a community and keeping language alive. The MN sound at its most basic meaning is to remind us of this energy exchange.

It’s particularly interesting to discover this whole area of cultural psychology, which has taken Marcel Mauss’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s insights from early twentieth-century anthropology and moved them forward into a heavily resourced area of academia — understanding consumer behaviour, how fashions take hold, how human culture works. That was a great discovery for me.

The second element I’ve recently discovered, apart from cultural psychology, is essential to Tibetan Buddhism, which is an Indo-European religion. We have this idea of bodhicitta, which distinguishes Tibetan Buddhism from, say, Sri Lankan Buddhism — or as the Dalai Lama would put it, the Sanskrit tradition from the Pāli tradition. In the Sanskrit tradition, there’s this essential idea of bodhicitta: everything one does as a Buddhist is for the sake of all sentient beings. It’s more than compassion. It’s an entire motivation for practice and for everything we do — the core element in Tibetan Buddhism and the Sanskrit tradition.

There are two ways of generating this motivation, bodhicitta, the spirit of enlightenment or awakening spirit. One is remembering the love that one’s mother has for one’s child — if one is lucky enough to have known one’s mother through life. But if not, one can remember seeing other depictions of this, or perhaps good friends. As James Joyce puts it in Ulysses, amor matris — the love of the mother. It’s one of the two core ways of motivating bodhicitta, which is for the benefit of all sentient beings. As distinct from the Sri Lankan or Thai tradition, where you seek enlightenment for yourself. In Tibetan Buddhism, one seeks enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings, not just oneself. It’s trying to get to the same result through different methods, all emanating from the Buddha.

The second core way of generating bodhicitta is exchange of self and other. At the cellular level, our mitochondrial cells are exchanging energy — we can actually see the connections between cells, between the ATP, between the mitochondrial elements, with incredible microscopes. They are exchanging self with other. If you remember this element of exchanging self and other, this mana exchange, then that is the core, the fundamental aspect of human community in the Tibetan Buddhist worldview. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognise how you can be energised in a positive or negative way by other people coming into your awareness, whether over the internet through trolls or in your own life when you’re feeling down and someone you love comes in, or your kitten comes looking for affection.

That is the mana element. We’ll be looking more at that and tracing it. One of the first podcasts I did was on the X energy — the idea of mana powering Tibetan Buddhism, but also on the micro level, the idea powering our mitochondrial DNA.

The second dimension to every Finding Manuland podcast is the linguistic element. Someone said to me recently: is the MN sound just a fundamental sound that humans make biologically? Perhaps it is. But what is particularly Indo-European about the MN sound is that in many cases we can trace it to the Yamnaya community in southeastern Ukraine’s use of the MN sound in menyot, meaning moon — the mechanism for measuring months, days, and moments. The idea of meaning, if my hypothesis is correct, is that the light shining through the moon, the illuminate light shining through the moon, is the moon-based metaphor underpinning much of our language. In humans, the idea of the mind shining through the human, through organic matter, which is the difference between the human and the stone, animating us.

This light shining through the moon, the moon-based metaphor, comes through in the signifier “meaning” — the idea of one particular signifier shining through another, their meanings being connected. The metaphor, the idea that you’re bringing a meaning across from one part to another, and these networked connections, is the totality of the language we use and the meanings we communicate — a particularly effective means that humans and animals have evolved for exchanging mana. It’s not just an organic or biological medium for keeping each other alive, not automated like our mitochondria exchanging energy from one cell to another. When particular cells’ ATP factories aren’t working well, others will communicate energy to them. We can see these connections now with incredible microscopes.

But on the linguistic level, I can communicate many more complex thoughts through language and meanings. The language I’m using, an Indo-European language, is made up of networked connections all generated from fundamental metaphors, the most fundamental of which, as far as I can see, is this MN sound.

We see the MN sound across the Indo-European linguistic sphere, but there are also mysteries. In Turkey, MN is everywhere in place names, just as in Ireland. We can explain Ireland’s MN everywhere through the direct genetic link with the Menapii, who came from Cassel — you might remember from my first and second episodes. Cassel was the centre of this great polity which gave its name to La Manche, and many places: Mons, Main, where Finding Manuland began life, Monaghan, Fermanagh, Cill Mhantáin — the Irish for Wicklow — Loch Garman. This MN sound is in thousands of place names in Ireland, but also in Turkey.

We have the Ottoman Empire, which began with Osman. In the past few weeks, Nature has published the analysis of one of the successors in the Ottoman Empire, still alive today, tracing their DNA back to Osman and a particular geographical location in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan. The people who migrated from there eventually took over Anatolia from us Indo-Europeans.

We had successive waves occupying Anatolia: from the first great empire that really unified it, the Hittites, which I talk about a lot. We can now trace the Areni-1 man, from Areni in Armenia — and MN in Armenia — from about 4000 BCE, whose DNA reappears in the Hittites 2,000 years later. We’ve got this genetic trace and the linguistic trace. The Hittites used a form of Zeus for God — Zeus, Jupiter — so we can deduce that the Areni-1 man was probably an Indo-European who brought this tradition, and the other migrants with him, to found what would become the Hittite Empire 2,000 years later.

Then you have multiple other Indo-European waves: the Greeks, the Lycians, the Cilicians, the Armenians, who were at their greatest extent around 50 BCE with three different states across Anatolia. Successive waves. But the end of Indo-European dominance in Anatolia began with the migration of the Turkic-language-speaking peoples — often called the Mongols, but in fact Turkic. We can trace the Ottoman family, still alive, and their ancient DNA to where they emanated from. They speak a Turkic language — the clue is in the name, Turkey — and the Turkic peoples emanated from Central Asia near Mongolia.

It had been an interesting problem to explore: the MN sound in Ottoman and in Osman, the founder of this empire. Osman was around 1100 to 1200 CE. Given the recent ancient DNA analysis and the work I’ve cited about how uman was deeply embedded in Indo-European from the texts of 1900 to 1800 BCE, we can begin to trace this.

We know the uman sound is very important to the Hittites — so important that modern linguists use it to distinguish between Assyrian and Hittite in the 23,000 texts from Kültepe-Kanesh, where the first example of Indo-European writing was found, and which I saw in the Ankara museum. Ankara, which Celtic-language-speaking people founded about 300 BCE, before the Romans conquered them. Again, successive waves of Indo-European peoples moving into Anatolia. Then the break, often represented as the fall of Constantinople, which began with Osman, founder of the Ottoman dynasty, arriving in Anatolia with the Mongol invaders.

We’ve already been to one of the places of great battles — Sakarya, near the Sakarya River in Gordion. I was there in January on a very foggy day, where I found the first burial mound in Anatolia, not actually the Midas Mound but Mound W, close to the Midas Mound. Right nearby, the Battle of Sakarya was one of the great fights the modern Turks had against the Greeks — the Turkic-language-speaking Turks against the Indo-European Greeks, effectively ending the Greek presence in Anatolia.

We have these successive waves over millennia, whose remnants are in our stories. Through all of them, from at least the time of the Hittites, is this MN sound. When linguists try to distinguish between Assyrian and Hittite, between Indo-European and Semitic, they use uman. When they see uman, they know it’s Hittite, Indo-European, not Assyrian. We have textual evidence of the MN sound’s presence in Anatolia from 1900 to 1800 BCE, nearly 4,000 years ago.

Then flash forward 3,000 years to the arrival of Osman, who’s travelled with his crew all the way from Kazakhstan, from Central Asia, with his Turkic-language-speaking people. They arrive and bring this MN sound — but they’re arriving in a place where the MN sound is already embedded in many place names. We know this from Homer, who’s from Anatolia, probably from Smyrna — MN sound — and around Halicarnassus. MN is all over the early Greek material, and it hasn’t just come from what we today consider Greece.

Modern Turks often describe words which are clearly Indo-European as from the Persian influence. They tend to downplay the Armenian influence — and MN in Armenia. We’ve got layers upon layers of place names which have been present in Anatolia since at least 1900 BCE, from the texts at Kültepe. We saw Chamana — one of the earliest examples of Indo-European writing — in the Ankara museum in January, described as a native Anatolian, which basically means Indo-European. These texts also mention places with the MN sound in them. Flash forward 3,000 years and the Ottoman Empire begins when Osman comes in from Central Asia. The MN sound is also embedded in the Turkic-language-speaking peoples.

My hypothesis is this: there’s a moment in Neolithic times when the Scythians — the ancient Ukrainians — and the Mongolians who created the Turkic language around Lake Baikal meet. The MN sound is very ubiquitous in Turkic language, and I believe that is a remnant of the Indo-European encounter. We know uman is deeply embedded in Indo-European before any encounter with Turkic speakers. But we also know the MN sound is present in Anatolia in almost every layer from at least the Hittites, whose mythological foundation is in Kanesh-Kültepe, around 2000 BCE. The height of the Hittite Empire is around 1400 BCE.

We know the Areni-1 man from Areni in Armenia, from about 4000 BCE — his DNA reappears in the Hittites at Boğazköy, the capital of the Hittite Empire. We’ve also got certain motifs: the amazing Karashamb goblet found in Armenia has the same motifs as items found in Boğazköy and Kanesh — particular motifs which haven’t appeared anywhere else. We have the genetic ancient DNA connection, the artistic and cultural archaeological connection, and the linguistic connection, manifest in the MN sound.

This is a particular aspect we can follow from modern Turkey through Armenia up to Kazakhstan and all the way to Mongolia — MN in Mongolia — and the Mani culture in Mongolia, an archaeological culture which is another strand to explore. This is how the linguistic combines with the cultural and migratory strands across Manuland, from Ireland to India, from Lake Baikal near Inner Mongolia down to Mount Hazi, where the Hittite and Assyrian gods lived.

The third aspect, the voyage element: the geographical journey and the temporal journey between 4100 BCE and 2025, and also the conceptual journey. Our mental models of a world in which Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross in the early Roman Empire — where Greek is the lingua franca, and the structural tale which recurs in Odin and in Celtic culture — is the beginning of time. In Finding Manuland, as my brain has expanded, I’m trying to expand yours — your temporal mind, your mental models.

And so to the meaning of Finding Manuland. We’ve got the meaning of the MN sound as a mnemonic reminding us about energy exchange, reminding us in the moment when perhaps we’re getting emotional that the point of this interaction — whether in a shop, with a friend, or with our enemy in the office — is energy exchange. That’s all that really matters. That’s what life is about. That’s on the micro.

On the macro, Finding Manuland itself as a moniker for a geographical space between Ireland and India, as a moniker for a temporal community between 4100 BCE in southeastern Ukraine — around Kherson, around where the Russians are today killing Ukrainian children through first-person-view drones — and today. Looking at the Yamnaya community spreading out from there and taking over linguistically the space between Ireland and India is an amazing story in itself.

But now we can encompass the Turkic and look at the Mongolian-Scythian unification. In Kazakhstan, we have this amazing unity of a community between the Iranian Indo-Europeans — the Yamnaya who went all the way to the Sintashta and probably all the way to Iran — and the Mongolian. The Turkic and Indo-European languages, at a very ancient level, unified in Kazakhstan as a space and as a community. We now know through ancient DNA, through the mitochondrial DNA of ancient humans in the Sintashta culture and elsewhere in Kazakhstan, that this Iranian Indo-European and Turkic combination is where they unified. It’s the space from which Osman came, as well as whole waves of migrants for millennia, to conquer Anatolia and add their layer.

Finding Manuland is not a message of division. It’s a message of unity. Irish people and Indians are the same. Pashtuns and Ukrainians are the same. We are from the same community. We speak languages from the same family. However different the signs, our mythological founders often have MN sounds in their names. And now we can do the same with the Turkic-language speakers, this emanation from Kazakhstan, from this area where we can trace the connection between the ancient DNA of Osman and his living descendants.

Where we come across differences in human communities premised on linguistic differences between Indo-European and Turkic speakers, Finding Manuland has a powerful new story to tell, which we can use to bind us closer together. Let me leave it at that for now. We’ve got several years’ worth of podcasts and publications to make and a lot of travels to come. I’m very glad you’re on this journey with me.

Continued from:

First in series:

Ep 6 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Decoding Trolls — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:19:21 GMT

This Indo-European, ancient Ukrainian ancestry is in us. When coupled with all of these similarities in the mythological record — and particularly, in the context of today’s episode, MN in Manu and Mannus — we can be very sure that these are separate vectors of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: that we all come from this Yamnaya community in southern Ukraine in some meaningful sense.

If you’re listening to this, you understand an Indo-European language. You probably have ancient Ukrainian ancestry within you if you’re indigenous or relatively indigenous from anywhere in the space between Ireland and India. Unless your ancestors were some of the Turkic or Uralic migrants who founded the Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian peoples, chances are you have this genetic ancestry in you. But just by virtue of using an Indo-European language as your native tongue, it’s actually structuring your thoughts. You have this MN sound. You’re using it in almost every sentence.

Manu and Mannus coming from a common source — like we do — means that all of these phenomena come from southern Ukraine. That’s the answer to the trick question of which came first, Manu or Mannus. The fact of the matter is the Yamnaya came first. The Yamnaya were so called by Russian archaeologists because they buried their dead in a pit grave. We find these pit graves across Europe, associated with the invasion of a patriarchal society that replaced the Old European society. The word for pit in Russian, which is an Indo-European language, is cognate with the word for womb and yemo and twin. So it’s circumstantially connected that we’ve ended up with an MN sound for the Yamnaya too, from whom this idea of Manu and Mannus travelled, emanated.

We know this because when we come across similar sounds and meanings for the founders of mythological traditions, it’s either borrowing — a German visiting India and convincing them to use Mannus, which evolves into Manu, or an Indian visiting Germany — or it’s a coincidence. But then we find so many other founders of mythological traditions in Indo-European languages — in India, in Greece, in Ireland, in Celtic tradition — who have mythological founders with this MN sound in their name. So we come to the common source. And of course, MN is in “common source.” That expression comes directly from Sir William Jones’s lecture in 1782 to the Kolkata society, in which he announces his discovery of the Indo-European family of languages.

The question we started with — which came first, the Germanic linguistic tradition or the Indic linguistic tradition? — is actually a trick question, because neither did. It was the Yamnaya, the Indo-European community in southeastern Ukraine, which came first and is the common source.

We can use linguistics, ancient genetics, archaeology, comparative mythology, and a whole plethora of different vectors of evidence, all pointing to the same truth: that Indo-European culture and all Indo-European languages we speak today emanate from this same area around Kherson, around where the Russians are conducting their drone warfare at the moment. But we can also use the MN sound, and that’s the significance of what I have discovered and what I am telling you the story of in Finding Manuland.

I’ll leave it at that for today. We’ll come back and talk about more MN, because I have at least 25 other episodes planned, and each of those opens up new episodes and new discoveries. I’m constantly travelling in this area between Ireland and India, and I have many new discoveries I haven’t even reported to you yet. All of that is coming. Thank you very much for your support.

Continued from:

First in series:

Decoding Trolls

Pensées (112)

⚡️False Mnemonics: USSR Nostalgia as a Weapon…

a year ago · 4 likes

Ep 5 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Decoding Trolls — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:08:56 GMT

The sun god Sūrya — and his mother has an MN sound in her name, which is amazing. Saraṇyū is her name, and she is of Tvaṣṭṛ, which is interesting as well. We’ve got Tuisto in the Germanic and Tvaṣṭṛ in the Indic. She and the sun have three children. There are stories about how she got really hot from being burnt by the sun — a play on words which transmits and transfers between languages and meanings and sounds, which I’m not going to go into today.

She has three children: Manu, Yama, and Yamī. Many scholars think Yamī, who’s female, is a later transposition. But Manu and Yama are the most fundamental and ancient in the Indic tradition. Manu is the first man, the first human. Yama, the twin, is the first monarch, the first self-sacrificing king.

Odin performs the same function in the Germanic tradition. Odin gave himself to himself, according to the ancient Hávamál text, and hung himself on the ash tree by the Royal Mound in Uppsala in Sweden. Woden’s Day commemorates Odin’s self-sacrifice. In the early pre-Christian Irish tradition, Donn is the Lord of Death who performs the same function — note the DN sound in both Odin and Donn. They are the first self-sacrificing monarchs to die, and after them they lead mortals to the afterlife. In the Indic tradition, Yama is the first self-sacrificing monarch, the first to die.

Yama means a lot to me as a Buddhist, because Yama is the lord of death in Buddhism, which is one of the reasons I started paying attention to these monikers, these same sounds — Yama, Yamī, Yima in the Iranian tradition, Emir in the Germanic and Arabic traditions. Emir in the Arabic tradition is a king, and that comes across from the early Iranian, the Indo-European. I paid attention because Yama is quite important in the daily practice of many Mahāyāna — again MN — Buddhists who follow the Mañjuśrī tradition, the Tibetan tradition. But I won’t go into that today.

We’ve got Manu and Mannus, and they have twins. In the Germanic tradition, Mannus is the son of Tuisto, twin. In the Indic tradition, Manu is the brother of the twin. We get this phenomenon — a bit of a muddle, like mixing puzzle pieces up. But the names, the sounds of the names are similar, and the function is the same. They’re mythological founders of a tradition.

Manu in the Indic tradition is the first sacrificer. He is the first to sacrifice an animal, and the Brahmin who recreate this sacrifice through the Soma ritual — a substance some believe comes from the fly agaric mushroom, but I won’t go into that here. All we need to know is that the first sacrificer, Manu, is the brother of Yama and the mythological founder of the tradition. The mythological founder of the Germanic tradition is Mannus.

In Irish tradition, the pre-Christian supreme deity is Manannán. In Wales, Manawydan. In the Iranian tradition, Aryaman — so Arya-Yaman, with MN in there. Yaman becomes Manu in India. The Arya element means something close to “area” in English, the centre. Aryaman was literally the treasurer in the royal household, which then became celestialised, goes up to the sky and becomes the symbolic treasurer, the king — a combination of the Manu and the Yama elements.

Geographically, the Indo-Europeans who populated India and Iran are descendants of the same community I mentioned before, coming from the Sintashta. We have the same sound, same meaning, same mythological founders, same kinds of stories in these different traditions.

It’s Manu in the Indic tradition who makes a deal with sky father — with Indra and Varuṇa, the supreme deities. If Manu sacrifices — first an animal, then substituted with the Soma sacrifice — like in Christianity where wine is supposed to be the blood of Christ, a placeholder for a true sacrifice. So it’s a development and evolution. In the Indic tradition, it’s the Soma sacrifice. They come from the same root. I’ve written before about the Indo-European roots in Christianity, a topic I will return to.

If Manu makes a deal with sky father, Dyaus Pitā, with Indra and Varuṇa, who represent the sovereignty function — if Manu, as the man, the human, makes a sacrifice, then sovereignty, security, and prosperity, the fertility of the community, will be protected. Manu is the first sacrificer. Yama, his brother, his twin — in Germanic, you have a slightly different iteration, which you’d expect in different cultures, but the structure and the nomenclature are the same.

We even have Ymir in Germanic culture, the primordial giant. And the sound of Hymir — a genuine thunder god, killed or perhaps only wounded. He went out in a boat with the giant Hymir on the outer sea and fished for a monster using an ox’s head as bait. Yima is in the Iranian tradition, in the Avesta, the ancient Iranian holy text — an equivalent of the Rigveda but written down much later, though thought to be just as ancient.

Aryaman, as I mentioned, is a functionary in charge of the house, its hospitality, and in charge of the treasury of the nmāna. Mana meaning house, domain in ancient Iranian — mansion in English. We have that MN in all of these monikers meaning quite similar things.

With all these continuities — same sounds, same monikers, same functions — today we’re focusing on Mannus and Manu because they’re so primary, but as I’ve floated around different Indo-European linguistic and religious traditions, all from the same common source, we have the same moniker, same function, same level. By level, I mean mythological founders of entire cultures. These aren’t founders of a village or one particular family. They are the founders of entire cultures which still persist today — in the case of India, comprising the one billion Indians who are Hindu and come from this tradition. I’m leaving out the 400 million other Indians, though many of those from the Muslim tradition are also Indo-Europeans. But there are many bifurcations and roads off, some of which I’ve dealt with and some I will. For now, we stay focused on Manu and Mannus.

We know that Germany and German culture did not have very much or any contact with Indian culture, and vice versa. At the time of Tacitus, yes, Alexander the so-called Great from Greek culture had been to India. He had replaced the Achaemenid Empire, the ancient Iranian empire founded by Darius the Great — again MN in Achaemenid. But Tacitus didn’t necessarily have much command of this. Very few people until Sir William Jones, the Welsh scholar of Sanskrit, ancient Iranian, Celtic, Latin, and Greek, who became a Supreme Court justice in India and learned Sanskrit in order to translate the Laws of Manu — the Manusmriti, which contains this MN sound and the RT sound — which contemporary scholars believe is actually from about 600 CE but is named for Manu, the first human.

In order to exercise jurisdiction over Indians, William Jones, living in Kolkata, decided to learn Sanskrit. Because he had already written the first Persian grammar in the English language and was a very skilled linguist from a young age, speaking many different languages, it was he who spotted that the roots of the grammar and the roots of verbs were so similar in structure that they could not have arisen by coincidence. He said that all of these languages must come from a common source, which perhaps no longer exists.

That began a centuries-long journey to determine which came first. Was it the Indian? The German? The Scandinavian? The Irish? The Iranian? That journey brings us to the present, and one of the big breakthroughs has been the ancient DNA evidence published in 2015 and 2019, demonstrating that the Brahmin caste in India had, by around 1000 BCE, about 50% steppe ancestry from ancient Ukraine.

We had all the cultural and linguistic artifacts, and then we find the ancient DNA. But I’m not tracing the ancient DNA or the cultural and linguistic artifacts — I’m tracing the MN sound through all these different cultures, a separate trajectory of evidence.

It’s not just a question of one German visiting India, hearing the story of Manu and Yama written down in the Rigveda, returning to Germany, and convincing their mates. Perhaps they’re a poet, they visit India for a few months or years, then come back and convince one monarch: let’s adopt this story as our own. This is just not plausible. To become embedded as a mythological founder of a culture is really difficult. This is the primary story — it’s not one of millions of sub-stories. Here we have Manu as the first human and Mannus as the first human. The chances of one person going from Germany to India, hearing the story, going all the way back, and convincing everyone to replace their foundation myth — or the other way around, an Indian going to Germany, for which we have zero evidence — are very low.

Of course, this is exactly what I’m trying to do: I’m trying to convince you that the mythological founders of all the Indo-European peoples have an MN sound in their names, and I believe this comes from the sound menyot, which means moon, coming from meh1, meaning measure — the moon as a measure of time. The idea of light shining through the moon is like the mind shining through a human. This core metaphor, the reversion to the moon-based metaphor, distinguishes all sentient beings from non-sentient things, stones from humans. We’ll see if in a thousand years’ time our entire Indo-European culture accepts Finding Manuland’s story as its foundational myth. But at least you see what I’m talking about.

The idea of a German going to India and saying, our mythological founder is Mannus, why don’t you adopt that — or vice versa — doesn’t explain why we end up with Aryaman in the ancient Iranian tradition, or Manannán in the Celtic Irish tradition, which comes down as the pre-Christian supreme deity in Ireland. Many of those Celts probably came to Ireland via the Menapii — the MN in Menapii. Perhaps that explains the Irish case. But what we can say for sure, from empirical evidence, is that this MN sound is absolutely everywhere we look.

We have heaps of archaeological, cultural, and mythological stories about structural similarities between the Rigveda and the Mahābhārata, another collection of ancient stories, not quite as anciently written down but very ancient. These have the same structure, the same names, the same sounds as the story written down by Tacitus in the first century CE. Now we have genomic evidence demonstrating ancient Ukrainian steppe ancestry in Ireland, on the island of Britain, across western Europe west of Ukraine, and east of Ukraine through the Sintashta, across the Andronovo horizon, across Central Asia.

Here I’m trying to provoke in your mind this geographical journey — through to Afghanistan, down into Turkey and Anatolia, through Armenia, through Iran, across from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and into the Indus River Valley where the culture was seeded. Into the Brahmin caste, and they take over the whole of the Indian subcontinent down to a point near Bengaluru, where I’ve spent time, where we have the Dravidian line — the Telugu culture. Dravidian is the pre-Indo-European Indian culture which has survived. But we have this Indo-European layer, which brought Indra, who starts life in Iran as Zarathustra’s nemesis. By the time this deity gets to India, it becomes renamed as Indra, and India is named for Indra, this sovereign deity related to Manu, representing the Indo-European transformation of the Indian subcontinent.

The stories, the names, and the sounds of these deities are in our minds today as the names of continents and countries. Iran takes its name from the Arya root, connected to Aryaman. And Éremón is the first high king of all Ireland, which some scholars, including me, believe is cognate with Aryaman. Éremón comes down as the name of the first high king from the mythological record, first written down around 1100 CE, long before we knew any of the rest of this — that Indo-European cultures existed, or that Celtic was a separate culture from Germanic.

We have these separate vectors of evidence all pointing to a common source. And of course, the MN sound is in Éremón, the first high king of Ireland. Beyond all reasonable doubt, we have this steppe ancestry spread across Manuland, and the MN sound immanent in the mythological founders of all these cultures, from Ireland to India.

Continued:

Continued from:

First in series:

While living and working inside Russia’s military occupation of Ukraine’s Luhansk province, I noticed the fluidity between, on the one hand, culture, folklore, music, short-form videos, art, films, færy tale and computer lore trolls, perfectly architected “news” stories and, on the other hand, the cold steel reality of a murderous, absurd, and disgustin…

Disinfolklore Universes

a year ago · 8 likes · Decoding Trolls

Ep 4 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Decoding Trolls — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:05:44 GMT

Yamnaya burial uncovered when in May 2021 at Surskiy / Novosleksandrivka / Dnipro property developers destroyed the Mound under which he was buried (and sparked my Finding Manuland journey - see ‘First in series’ linked below and particularly the second and third episodes of Finding Manuland):

So you see what I'm trying to do there. I'm expanding our mental models of time from 4100 BCE when Tamana's ancestors left ancient Ukraine to 2000 years later when Tamana's name appears in one of the first texts. The first times Indo-European language is written down in Ankira, sorry, in Kanesh, but then I see it in 2025.

So it's written down between 1900 BCE and 1800 BCE in Kanesh, in ancient Anatolia, today's Turquia. And then roughly 4,000 years later, I, Estabones, I visit Ankira, which is named for a Celtic community who founded it around 300 BCE. I see this cuneiform text and the translation of it in Ankira Museum.

And I know the significance of this because the reason I'm in Ankira, archaeological museum is to try and find this MN sound and its origins and to find it there in one of the first texts was more than I hoped for. And then the primary text which was published a couple years ago on

translating Kanesite, Hittite, as it's known, this language. So this great scholar who took these 23,000 cuneiform texts from between 1900 BCE and 1800 BCE, which are mostly in Assyrian, which is a Semitic language, took those texts and deduced from them which are the Indo-European elements, the native elements in them. And he uses this uman sound to distinguish

Indo-European from Assyrian. So again, that was beyond my wildest dreams when I conceived of looking at the MN sound and I thought, oh, that's quite interesting. There's MN sounding names in eastern France and in Ireland and on the island of Britain. I wonder how that arose. And then I found the Manapi, this community of Indo-Europeans. But then...

way, going way, way deeper than Manapi, who dominated that area and the Monche, the area of the Monche, and then colonised Ireland and the island of Britain, and Normandy indeed, probably, from about 200 years into the Common Era. Deep, much, much more deeply than they are these other cultures.

who also have the MN sound in their different monikers and their mythological founders. So it's interesting that the very foundation of the Germanic people and in their myths, we have these three sons, each of which represents a different function, the sovereignty function, the security function, and the fertility, prosperity function.

It's a pattern which we see again and again in different Indo-European cultures and peoples. It's been established by Georges Dumuzel who had this intuition in the 1930s and then spent his entire career. And thousands of scholars since then have elaborated on it. And so the sovereignty function, which contains these two elements, the magico-religious,

like the Brahman or the Flamines or the Phila in Irish society, and the juridical, which is like the legal element, the ruling, the procedural element of the monarch. So like secular and religious. This division is very, like in post-revolutionary France, where the de-clericalization of society, the joining in into the sovereignty function of this magico-religious and the juridical,

the procedural, the ruling, the courts... That is very much part of the Indo-European model of governance and is part of the division which manifests in different ways in different cultures. So the second function, the security function, so my namesake is Stavones, represents the security element and in the Indian caste system, the Kshatriya, which is the army,

the military. And then the Ing is the founding monarch of the tribe of Germans who invaded and occupied what would become a country named for them called England, represents the fertility and prosperity function. And as discussed, that's probably a holdover from the pre-Indo-European.

So the Ingavionese takes their name from Ing, who corresponds to the old Norse god Freyr. So... Let's go back to the sovereignty function then in Germanic mythology. So I'm bringing your mind back. You probably have this mental model of the world. And this is also part of Finding Manaline because I don't only want you to develop

and evolve as I have this temporal model. mental model from 4100 BC all the way up to 2025, these 6,000 years, which I kind of illustrated by telling you the story of Tamana and me seeing Tamana. But the Hermiones, I want to also do the geographical space because for me it was a huge blank, Anatolia, Turkey,

Armenia, Iran, India. These were all kind of blanks in my mind. And we all have them. We might know Turkey because we've gone there on holiday. But we don't really understand the Hittite empire. And I want us to be able to... to journey quickly, to flash between the coast of the west of Ireland, down to Lusitania,

which is Portugal, which was occupied by a Celtic language speaking people, all the way quickly right across to Spiti Valley, which is the valley dividing Indo-European India. from Tibet, and I've also been there. And so the Hermiones take their name from Ermen, and the MN, of course, is the national god of the Saxons,

and this MN sound is really in there, and indeed in Amon, the ancient Egyptian god, and some really interesting research. has come out recently looking at the ancient DNA of the ancient Egyptians, which points to perhaps why the MN sound is in Amon-Re, their supreme deity, and Tutankhamen and the Amarna letters and various other important Egyptian texts.

But we'll get to that in a different episode. And so we all come from the same family. We understand the MN sound. It's part of our energy. We're communicating positive energy now. Me to you, you to me by listening to this. And this is my message of unity. So then let's run over.

Let's fly over to India then. And so the Argy Veda is a book of songs, first written down around 1100 years before the Common Era. And this is our first evidence of Manu, the first human. And the Argy Veda songs we know were composed long before 1100 BCE. So, for instance, they describe funereal feasts,

which we had no archaeological evidence of until around 20 or 30 years ago. which we found archaeological evidence of then in today's Kazakhstan, the Sintashta culture. And so the exact descriptions of the burials of... horses, skulls, and of the funereal feasts correspond to archaeological artifacts then found in the Sintashta culture.

So then we know, even before we had ancient DNA evidence that ties the Sintashta to the first people who were 800 years later. The Syntashta culture is from around 29, sorry, 1900 to 2000 years before the Common Era. So around the time Tamana, our friend Tamana is living in Kanesh and whose name is appearing in this cuneiform

text that I then saw in Ankira. In January 2025, the Sintashta are burying their dead in the same way that the songs, the ancient songs, would be written down in the Ayurveda, this book written in the Vedic language, which predates Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language.

And in 1100 BC, the Ayurveda, the songs are written down, they're divided into words, Mandala, again Amen and Mandala and Brahmanas, Amen and Brahmanas and they describe the Brahmin who are the priestly caste and Manu who is the first human. And so we know because of some of the archaeological evidence from the St.

Tashta culture from between 1900 and 2000 BCE. And I know this is hard for you. I understand. That's why I'm kind of repeating myself. And the whole of Finding Man is about this. is about expanding mental models. So I'm bringing you on a geographical voyage. This is the third element in every episode.

But I'm also bringing you on a temporal voyage. So we've got these songs in the Ayurveda. They describe funereal feasts, which we then find the archaeological evidence for almost exactly the same from 900 years earlier in the Santashta culture. So we know this is the same And until these archaeological remains were found in the Santashta tombs in

Kazakhstan in the 80s and 1990s, scholars believed that these funereal feasts were artifacts of the imagination in the Ayurveda. But then it turns out actually they correspond to archaeological evidence. And now we know through looking at linguistic but mainly ancient DNA and archaeological artifacts... that the people who would form the Sentashda culture actually came from ancient Ukraine.

They were Yamna and traveled eastwards towards, settled for a couple hundred years in the Sentashda culture where they consolidated. And that culture then travels eastwards across Afghanistan and across what we call today Central Asia. and what's known as the Andronova Klein, as it were, which is basically a word just that describes 2,000,

3,000 kilometers across of similar cultures, which we know from the archaeology, which kind of just develop and evolve, but they are the same kind of culture. We've seen the same artifacts in Afghanistan as we do in Sintashtar, as we do in India. And so we call it a climb because they're kind of climbing into each other before

Indic culture then becomes a very dominant emanation of it. And so we see similarities in the songs, in the Ayurveda, and in how Tacitus is representing the songs of the Germanic people and how the Irish mythological texts, which aren't written down until between 700 years into the Common Era and 700 years

after Christ's birth and until around 1200 in the Common Era. And yet, even though they're written down in this late stage, the Irish mythological texts are the oldest vernacular literature in Europe. So we talk about Tacitus is writing down a few stories, but it's written that the Germanic tribe stories are written down in Latin.

And they're not written down in the Germanic language, but we have the oldest mythological text in a vernacular. It's from Irish Celtic. So it's a great source of information for us because we can look at the Greek and the Latin and the Irish and the Vedic and the Armenian, for instance, and the Hittite,

and we can find the commonalities between them and we intuit through a variety of methods what is the Indo-European-ness of this. And so... We look at the Arguveda where Manu is first mentioned, and Manu is, he is the sun, he's the first human, he's the sun of the sun, literally.

He's the sun of Vivasvan, who is also known as Surya, the sun god, and his wife, Saranu.

Continued:

Continued from:

Ep 3 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Ep 3 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

a year ago · Decoding Trolls

First in series:

Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy

a year ago · 5 likes · Decoding Trolls

Ep 3 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?

Decoding Trolls — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:02:25 GMT

So the Ingaevones, this is the ancestors who then became the English, comes from Ing, who corresponds to the Old Norse god Ingvi, Freyr. And Freyr is actually a pre-Indo-European remnant, we believe.

So in this tripartite structure I talked about where we have sovereign, soldier (so sovereign representing, you know, the monarch, the magical aspect of sovereignty, (which is all of the mystical, mythological, the poetic)), the stuff I'm really talking about today (in the context of if we're trying to build a culture of Manuland among all the Indo-European peoples) we’re reaching back into history to find our common ancestors and this M-N-sound and this area, the Yamna.

So that's kind of what I'm doing here. You have the soldiers, the security function, which is my namesake, the Istavones. Then the third function, the economic function, the fertility function, basically, we believe, which corresponds to Friday, the day Friday, corresponds to the Old Norse god Ingvi, whose name is also Freyr.

This is a pre-Indo-European layer. So prior to the Yamna, and their descendants spreading out from ancient Ukraine across to Ireland and eastwards to India, there was a common European culture, old Europe, old European culture. I've written about it before in the context of its female goddess worshipping, which is often we also think of that as the fertility function.

And the amazing archaeological museum I visited in Ankara, which, as you now know, was founded by a Celtic language-speaking community a couple hundred years before the Common Era, and the Romans eventually conquered there as well.

That museum amazing archaeological museum which will come into many of our episodes to come.

I've already printed pictures just has vast numbers of these goddess forms which we find in every area between Ireland and India really, but particularly between Ireland and Anatolia and Ireland and Turkey in Europe.

This is the old European culture where most of the idols we find in archaeological sites from this era are female forms. 95% of them are female forms according to experts who have studied this and there's many of these sites in ancient Ukraine and contemporary Ukraine and also across Anatolia.

This layer was then replaced by the Indo-European layer, the Yamna, the emanations of the Yamna community who founded all the living Indo-European languages. And my, one of my starting points, I talk about it in the second and third episodes of Finding Manuland. Well, actually, I write about it because I haven't spoken about it yet, but I will get to voicing those episodes.

This mound in Dnipro, Dnipro, the upper Don, when you look at it in this D-n- sound, in Dnipro, where this mound, again, M-n-, in Mound, where this mound was destroyed by property developers in May 2021, which was another of my starting points for this amazing journey across Manuland.

Underneath this Yamna burial mound, where there was one, well, the first person buried there was the local monarch, the local Rì, the local Rex, the local king, reich. And there was assorted other bodies in there, including the body of the Soviet era head of the collective farm who had delusions of grandeur.

But underneath this mound was a stone circle. And that stone circle was built by the Stredny Stog culture, which predates the Yamna.

And as part of this old European layer, this unified culture across Europe from Ireland to Ukraine and indeed in Turkey and Anatolia and stuff where we find the same kinds of artifacts. And we also find, in many cases, the same script which no one has cracked as yet and probably fed into the Indo-European language.

We'll come back to that because it's very important. But the old Norse god Ingua Freyr probably corresponds to this layer and it's the survival.

So in Greek mythology, for instance, the story I've just told you is often it's, two gods fighting over each other and dominating a woman. And the woman is the fertility function. And this is a mythologized rendering of an actual historical story, which is the Indo-Europeans, the Danaeans - the Achaeans is another word they use - but the Danaeans, who are these ancient Ukrainians who over the course of of several centuries made their way from ancient Ukraine into Greece, bringing with them their mythology and their culture, which then beats in terms of a break in the archaeological record and overcomes the existing old European layer, which is often represented in mythology by the female goddess.

And that is the Frideside in Oxford, where I studied... We have Frideside Shopping Centre and Frideside Church and that Fride, which corresponds to Friday.

I talked about the tripartite structure and that structure, which was discovered by Georges Dumèzil in the 1930s, that structure actually is in the Germanic. days of the week, which is Tiwaz, Tuesday, Wednesday, Mercury in the Roman, but Woden's day, Odin. And Woden corresponds to the father of the Hermiones, Odin.

Ukraine, for instance, has just created this amazing drone interceptor and they've decided to call it Odin. And again, the D—N- sound is... is in there. But Odin and Hermiones correspond to this sovereignty function.

So that's Tiwaz Tuesday.

I also wrote one of the Finding Manuland episodes on Tiwaz, which is basically Dies, Dies, Tis, Tiwaz, which is a Germanic word rendering of God. Tiwaz, Twisto.

That represents a part of the sovereignty function.

Then we have Thursday, Thor's day, and Thor and Thursday is this Istaevones, the soldier, the security element.

So we've got this tripartite structure which recurs actually in the Germanic days of the week. It doesn't quite correspond in the Roman days of the week, but it is an interesting phenomenon of it. And Friday, Freya’s Day, Friday is the pre-Indo-European layer. Do we've got the Herminones, the German, the -M-N- sound in German.

The Deutsche - the name that the Germans give to themselves today, the Deutsche - that comes from Teut, meaning “place.”

So in Ireland, for instance, we have the second Indo-European layer of mythological invaders I talked about are the Tuatha de Danann, again the D-N- sound, but the Tuatha elememt is cognate with the Deutsche, the Teut, Teuts, which basically corresponds to place.

Mannus, the son of Tuisto, the founder, the mythological founder, twin of the Germanic, people, a twin like Romulus and Remus or Yama and Manu in Indian culture. In Germanic, it's Twisto and Mannus. It's the son, the father and the son, which again is kind of a family resemblance with the Christian element, the son of God. And The Herminones came from Irmin, the national god of the Saxons, according to Wittukind of Corvée.

So we have this M-N/, immanence, in Herminones, Irmin, Mannus, and also in Germeneur. which is a by-name of Odin, again the D-N sound in Odin, who gave their name to Odin's day, Woden's day, Wodanaz day, Odin.

White supremacists sadly support Odin. The Wagner military unit, which was part of the Russian army until it was annihilated by the Ukrainians. In Bakhmut, they worship Odin. We have many white supremacists worship Odin today. But of course, that is a corruption of that.

But so we have the D-N- and the Old Norse Irmin, the M-N- again in Germaner. and Irmin in other Scandinavian languages. So, again, we have this coincidence, this coincidence in so many different subunits of Germanic culture, but we focus on the Mannus element of it and the...

Basically, every monarch really would have these people declaiming their stories, recording their stories. So this is part of the poetic, the Brahman function, the Filid in ancient Ireland or the druid function. That culture is recreated over time by storytelling, by the kind of thing which I'm doing now that we have access thankfully because of Tacitus to these very ancient stories from there and from other cultures. We can put them together and out of this derive not just a means of passing time and amusing ourselves but also of finding commonalities between our different indo-european cultures between Ireland and India. Where we have fought so many wars and have had so many different struggles of understanding with each other. If we can somehow recall and remember and remind ourselves that we are all from the same root, and now we know through ancient DNA that we come from the same gene pool.

I carry within me the genes of the Yamna. Most people living in Indo-European cultures between Ireland and India… We have in our genomes this immanence, the... the genes of people who lived in southern Ukraine at the time, before 2500 BCE, when they started migrating in groups westwards and eastwards and northwards and to become the Italic, to become the Celtic and all that's left of the Celtic today.

All living Indo-European languages, cultures and religions emanate from Mykhailivke, the Yamna type-site in Zaporizhzhia:

Ireland is the only Celtic nation-state which has sovereignty. Wales, for instance, is the only Celtic state, only Celtic country, where there's a really very vibrant and living Celtic language, which my niece... but Wales is not yet independent.

Scotland, another Celtic country, is also subject to Ingaevones and Ingaevones’s ' descendants - the English. So then we have the Germanic, obviously, which became Ingaevones and becoming part of the English language, and the Scandinavian countries, and, of course, Germany, which first became the first unified nation state in 1870.

I also told that story in an earlier episode where I talk about the discovery of the existence of Indo-European languages in 1782, I think it was, by William Jones. A Welsh Sanskrit and ancient Iranian Celtic language and Germanic language, Greek and Latin language scholar who discovered that the coincidences in the structure, the roots of verbs and the grammar between these different languages, between the Celtic, between the Celtic and the English, between the Celtic and the Germanic, the Celtic and the Sanskrit and the Roman and the Latin and the ancient Iranian, were such that they could not have arisen by coincidence, but they must have come from a common source.

So our starting point today is wondering, did India's first man, was it called Manu (by coincidence?) with the Germanic first human called Mannus. If you assume the term human existed prior to these mythological founders, then you could say, well, maybe they did. And if this same phenomenon, which we call human, was called a human in the different cultures, then it would be quite natural for them to call one in one, we might call it Manu, Mannus, or Manawydin, or Manannán as in Ireland, or... Magnus in Scandinavia (with a G in there, but it's the same sound, it's the same word).

That doesn't solve the problem of why the moniker human became so ubiquitous and universal. In fact, though, we do discover that in ancient Indian, they didn't call man or human, human. So we're left with... which came first, the chicken or the egg.

I believe I found a solution to it, but I'm not going to ruin it right for you quite now. We're going to get there.

So there's a story in every place and every time of culture being founded in Homer's work. Wagner, the great German composer of the 19th century, took Tacitus' work, took Herder's work from 1777. Herder in Germany who, a part of Germany which was under French occupation, occupation by a Romance language speaking community, who had been the Gauls.

Ways of Seeing Disinfolklore II

⚡️Disinfolklore is an artificial means of creating a collective consciousness in any community…

2 years ago · 6 likes · Decoding Trolls

The Romans conquered them and took away their language. So only a small part of France, Brittany, spoke a Celtic language. And in fact, the Britannic Celtic language itself emanated from the island of Britain. So the Romans really comprehensively destroyed the Celtic language-speaking aspect of what would become French society. And the French then... take on a name, a foreign name for their tribe, the Franks, when really they are the Gauls. And so Charles de Gaulle, like me - my middle name is Scott, and Scott is the original name for Ireland. people who bear the name of their tribe, like Goethe or Sir Walter Scott, of their country, of their nation, state.

So Herder, which was in Frankfurt under occupation by the French, then says in 1777, where is our Shakespeare? Who will unite the 10 Germanic tribes that Tacitus had spoken?

We need a common culture to do this. Like the English have their Shakespeare and the community unites around the common language, the common tribe. We need the similar. And Wagner and Goethe and other brilliant German artists... took up this cause and they gathered the folklore and the language, the Grimm, the Brothers Grimm and the stories.

90 years later, we had the first unified German state. It is one of my founding assumptions that states and nation states today... were founded on these common culture, these common stories.

I think what I can try and do, and you're a part of this, with Manuland as a moniker to describe the community of people who live between Ireland and India, who emanate from the Yamna, whose ancestors left ancient Ukraine by around 2500 years before the Common Era. We can all find a commonality and a reason to unite, provided our mental models of history change.

So we don't focus on what happened in the 18th or 19th century into the common era. We develop a mental model, which I have taught myself over the past few years, where I dance in my mind between 6,000 years, between really 4,100 BCE, which is really when we assume we have the first evidence the Yamna grew up inside ancient Ukraine.

Then a group left there to eventually, via Armenia, enter Anatolia, who would 2,000 years later become the great Hittite Empire, which is, and the Hittite is the first, the earliest attested in the European language.

Last January, and I've written about this as well, you'll see in earlier posts, last January I saw some, the first writing we have in any Indo-European language, which is from this place, Kanis, I spoke about in my, in the first little sub-episode here.

And Kanis/Kültepe, we have this. I went to Ankara (as mentioned above) To this amazing archaeological museum. Because I wanted to see the first writing in an Indo-European language. I found it. I posted the picture. I’ll actually post it on the page here, Tarmana.

So the first writing in any Indo-European language that we have, where billions of words are written every second today, whether it's on social media... or in computer systems or on paper for shopping lists between Ireland and India over the course of the whole America, of course, which emanates from a whole muddle of different Indo-European traditions. that the first writing we have from this place, Kanis/Kültepe, in an Indo-European language between 1900 and 1800 years before the Common Era is Tarmana.

It's an M-N- sound. I have to say, that was beyond my wildest dreams, was to actually see it and photograph it in the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilisations. They didn't know the significance to me and to the M-N-sound.

So I’m expanding your mental model from thinking um about history from the 19th century or the second world war to we want to run by the end of this I want like my mind runs very agilely through this time from 4100 bce when Tarmana’s ancestors lived in ancient Ukraine. So Tarmana, his name is written down in this cuneiform text for me to photograph in 2025, January 2025. His name, the text I saw, the cuneiform text I saw was written down between 1900 and 1800 BCE. So it was 4,025 years. years old, give or take. Now, 2000 years before then, Tarmana’s ancestors lived in Ukraine. In the Lower Don.

We have around 1200 words, sounds, meanings. So not just the words, the sounds and the meanings. which Tarmana’s ancestors spoke in ancient Ukraine. It's called Proto-Indo-European. I call it ancient Ukrainian because now we know it was spoken in ancient Ukraine.

The M-N- sound is there in the word for moon, which is a much more important word in their culture and in their community than it is in perhaps ours until I came along and discovered this origins of the M-N-sound.

Continued:

Continued from:

Ep 2 Using M-N- to determine which came first - Indian or Germanic culture?