Bono, Manna, and the Discovery of Our ‘Common Source’
Bono, Manna, and the Discovery of Our ‘Common Source’
Finding Manuland XIX
And thus the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages and culture was announced. One balmy night in Kolkata. 2 February 1786. By William Jones, a Welsh Oxford-trained Persian expert and lawyer, in his second presidential address to the Asiatick Society which he had founded, shortly after arriving in India to be a judge.
Jones was already a world-renowned Persian language scholar when he had decided to retrain as a lawyer. Shortly after arriving in India, Jones had India’s ancient law code the Laws of Manú translated into English.
So that he and his fellow judges could draw on its wisdom while making judicial decisions in England’s new colony.
While engaged in its translation, the Welsh scholar made a startling discovery.
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [Germanic languages] and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.”1
Many of us have spent the two centuries since studying the implications of Jones’s intuition.
I knew nothing of Jones or even the existence of the Indo-European family of languages when I first noticed the M-N- sound and stable meanings’ immanence in almost every sentence we speak in Indo-European cultures.
We’ll come back though to Jones later and how his discovery led to my unlocking of the Power of Mana. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
In some ways our collective (including modern Ukrainians’) ignorance of the Indo-European roots of our culture was understandable (even the word “root” is derived from ancient Ukrainian *wr(ha)d, which evolved into “radix” in Latin, “rot” in Old Norse from which the English word root stems).
Sometimes, in Finding Manuland, and in making the discoveries it reveals, shivers would go up and down my spine. The Irish songwriter and recording artist Bono has spoken about the moments when, as he put it, “God walks into the recording studio.”
In Power of Mana we go deeper into the meaning systems underlying the words and sounds of which Bono’s idea of a deity is composed.
Nevertheless, when I found out two years after I had discovered the Power of Mana that Jones had discovered Indo-European languages while translating the Laws of Manu or Manusmriti, shivers went up and down my spine.
It was unexpected too that my own law degrees from Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall would help me better understand Jones’s work, as well as the sources in early Roman law that help elucidate Rome’s Numen religion. We’ll indeed come back to this stuff again later.
I would notice that it was impossible even to express fundamental human emotions without using words and sounds that had first been uttered by the ancient Ukrainians who’d built the mound / mane to cover up their Old European / pre-Indo-European forebears’ stone circle.
It was as if there was a hitherto invisible mund (protector) of ancient Ukraine’s patrimony in almost every sentence we ever uttered, just like the hidden manna in the Book of Exodus:
“The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.’”As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna with the tablets of the covenant law, so that it might be preserved. The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan… To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no human will know unless they receive it [from me].”
That recording studio deity also appeared at the moment I discovered the “mana” inhabiting all objects that late nineteenth century scholars of religious practices in the Pacific assumed signified power, authority, prestige; an immanent life force or active principle permeating reality among indigenous people they had encountered in Tahiti, New Zealand and Indonesia’s islands. These Pacific Ocean dwellers were in contact with Indo-Europeans from the Indian sub-continent from earliest times - this is how Bali became Buddhist.
What the Manna stored with the “with the tablets of the covenant law, so that it might be preserved” means is that after it was noticed M-N- is everywhere, a retrospective rationale was introduced for how this came about.
In Power of Mana my starting point is noticing the M-N- and Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd sounds and Cryptotypic systems are everywhere (note how Manusmriti even contains both sounds!) in Indo-European culture. Then I work backwards to illuminate what might be going on. We do not invest intentionality (Mens Rea) into some deity who planted these two Cryptotypes. We postulate what might be going on, to explain this verifiable empirical phenomenon. I call it the Mana reminder (yes! M-N- is even in Reminder) system immanent in Indo-European culture, geography and language). Fundamental semantics. Reversion to the Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system! Even Moses noticed this (or at least the authors of Exodus did).
The closest modern metaphor I have found for how M-N-’s energy reappears repeatedly in cognates in almost every sentence is the Norse cultural meme of trolls.
In Scandinavian folklore, trolls persistently pop up mysteriously in stories, over the millennia, to elucidate otherwise inexplicable inscrutabilities. “Soul,” “spirit,” or “Geist” also capture the idea too of the “manna” (in the sense of “spiritual nourishment”) or “mund” (a very ancient inheritance from the Germanic into the English language, in the sense of guardianship or power) inside M-N- and its Cryptotypic system’s meanings as well as all of its cognates (so far in this text, the first time a word and/or meaning that’s imbued with a cognate of M-N- appears, I have written it in bold characters).
For the past two-hundred-years, through multi-channel cultural embedding we’ve been indoctrinated by the idea that our cultures’ origins are in ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Or, if we’re India-aware, we might have some sense that India’s ancient Sanskrit language is a part of our cultures’ origins too.
This ideology has been mainstreamed throughout thousands of different cultural and institutional memes.
The significance of those 2015 and 2019 peer-reviewed ancient DNA studies mentioned in the previous Finding Manuland episode…
is that they proved as beyond-reasonable-doubt correct long-held hypotheses of archaeologists, comparative linguists and scholars in comparative mythology that the homeland of Indo-European culture had been in eastern Ukraine.
The land which forged the Common Source that Jones had intuited was there.
Continued:
Continued from:
First in series:
This text is taken from: The Works of Sir William Jones. With a Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth [John Shore], London, printed for John Stockdale and John Walker, 1807, 13 vols. in-8°, vol. III, pp. 24-46 [copy preserved in the Library of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, shelfmark: 138.407-419].