The voice and hallucinogenic words of Ireland's preeminent pre-Christian deity, Manannán, come down to us in one of Ireland’s oldest poems the 7th or 8th century of the Common Era (CE) Imram Brain / Voyage of Bran:
"Bran deems it a wondrous beauty/
In his coracle across the clear sea:
While to me in my chariot from afar
It is a flowery steppe on which he rides about..."
Some of the earliest writing we can read in Ireland is in the Ogham script.
It’s written evidence that the Early Irish pre-Christian name for a Deity is cognate with the Indic Deva.
That very early example of readable writing found in Ireland was an Ogham script inscription found in Kilkenny but referring to the Bandon River in Cork thus: Loígde after the Primitive Irish deity *Loigodēvā.
The currency into which these different signs in different languages (together with their meanings) is converted is the word “deity.”
*Deiwos as an ancient Ukrainian / proto-Indo-European word stemming from day/sky/shine is the only theological word that is attested in every Indo-European language family.
The basic word for ‘god’ in Proto-Indo-European appears to have been *deiwo ́s, itself an o-stem derivative of *dyeu- ‘sky, day’ < *dei- ‘shine, be bright’ and it is widely attested across the Indo-European groups, e.g. OIr d ̄ıa, Lat deus, Lith die~vas, Hit sius, Skt deva ́-, all ‘god’ in turn; in both Slavic and Iranian, e.g. Av dae ̄va-, the word means ‘demon’, a result of a religious reformation that degraded prior deities to demons to make way for the new religion preached by Zarathustra. (The change, which began in Iranian, presumably spread to Slavic during the long period of prehistoric cultural exchange, centered on [Ancient Ukraine and] the south Russian steppes, between Iranian and Slavic.)1
As such, it is certain that even the word for God, as well as its meaning, stemmed from the migrations of the first core Indo-European language speakers from what is today’s eastern Ukraine by 2,500 BCE. Without understanding this, we miss one of the major evolutionary vectors of which early Christianity consists.
The only people who could understand a bible expressed in Indo-European languages like Latin and Greek had minds already structured in accordance with the grammar, syntax, roots of verbs and words that had grown out of the first Indo-European language and cultural community in what is today Ukraine - for references see:
Manannán and Loígde, therefore, connect Celtic Irish culture (that early Christians tried to appropriate and which the English invaders tried to eradicate) to that of other great Indo-European cultures.
Manannán/Erimon in Ireland, Mannus in Germanic, Menua in Armenia, Magnus in Scandinavia, Manu in Indic, Numitor/Numa (Rome), Mycenaeans (Greece),… The first human self-sacrificing founders of great Indo-European cultures.
Christianity is but another Indo-European layer sandwiched between further Indo-European layers in Ireland - as in every other Indo-European culture, Ireland underwent and is undergoing permanent waves of migrations from across Indo-European civilisation ~ see for example:
Yet, the Christianisers took pre-Christian monuments, mounds, sacred wells and woods, often destroyed them, and built their churches atop them.
So one can’t help feeling a certain sense of sadness rather than celebration on St Patrick’s Day.
Patrick himself was probably Pretenic (a Celt from a culture that today is confined to Wales and Scotland on the island of Britain). He first came to Ireland as a slave. Yet returned again as a voluntary immigrant.
"abducted as a teenager and enslaved in the far west of Ireland...Slaves... under constant threat of violence and sexual exploitation. Patrick's writings are the only first hand account of the experience of slavery to have come down to us from antiquity."
So given this hitherto invisible immanence and the reason why it came to be (migration and migrant are of course M-N- sounded signifiers too), it’s hardly surprising if we find other hitherto invisible immanences across Indo-European culture; such as this Sacred M-N- sound:
And yet the Ancient Ukrainian / Indo-European immanence inside what used to be called Roman Catholicism but today is more widely known as Christianity is more widespread than many of us think. And in the next episode I’ll set out the evidence of Indo-European migrations into Judea / Canaan for which we have written records - particularly after the Ancient Egyptian Amarna Letters of ~ 1,400 BCE onwards and the first international treaty which we still possess between the Indo-European Mitanni and ancient Egyptians…
Continued:
Continued from:
First in series:
Mallory, J. P., and D. Q. Adams. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, UK, 2006. Print.