Episode Details

Welcome to the Power of Mana podcast. This is the Finding Manuland version, episode one: The X Energy. I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland.

Since this is episode one, let’s begin with an introduction. I’m going to do something very conventional in terms of podcasts: I’m going to set out what I’m going to do, and then I’m going to do something slightly differently — I’m going to tell you about the journey I embarked upon which led to the discovery of mana.

This podcast is about mana, which is energy — or the X energy, as many have called it. It’s what the ancient Chinese culture called qi. In ancient Japanese culture, it is called ki. In ancient Indian culture, it’s called prana — from around 3000 BCE, around the time the first Indo-European migrants from ancient Ukraine reached India. In Hebrew culture, we talk about ruach. These are all equivalent to mana.

Chi, ki, prana, ruach — mana is the X factor, the X energy. Teleama. Libido — Freud talked about libido. Synchronicity. Nous. Vis medicatrix naturae, in Hippocrates. Aristotle spoke of the formative cause. Erasistratus spoke about pneuma. Christians talk about the Holy Spirit. In Germanic culture, we use the term Woden — our Wednesday is even named for this: Woden’s day. The Sufis speak of baraka. Polynesians, as I do, speak of mana.

I do not speak of mana because the Polynesians speak of mana. However, what the Polynesians talk about using the moniker mana is the same phenomenon. Polynesians started using mana to describe this energy around 600 in the Common Era. This is significant, and we’ll come back to why in a bit.

Avicenna spoke of anima mundi — so again, there’s an MN sound in there, as Carl Jung noted. All of these terms are for this same phenomenon that I call mana, or that others call the X energy or X factor. There are so many different names for this energy in human culture.

It’s a fifth force in nature, which I have for the first time in human culture detected as being also implanted in our language and in almost every sentence we speak or think. This is the second element of what the Power of Mana podcast is about.

We cannot understand mana or energy without understanding language. Finding Manuland is about a particular Indo-European vision of this energy, this mana, which we exchange as a function of human beings. The clue is in the word human — it has the same sound, MN.

I’ve looked into the question of how and why this MN sound is so immanent in almost every sentence we speak in Indo-European languages and what this might mean. I’m going to share this journey with you. This is what Finding Manuland is about. I’ve been looking into why the MN sound is so immanent in our language for several years now.

Some other people call mana, or this MN sound, the X energy. It has all these different names in different global cultures: prana, qi, Woden, ki, ether, ruach, nous, numa, mungo in Africa, zogo in Africa, atua in Polynesia, libido.

In Power of Mana and in Finding Manuland, we’re going to focus on just