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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