Episode Details

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.

Germany or India: Which came first?

Let’s use the Finding Manuland method to see which of these two great Indo-European cultures arrived first into history?

Hint: It’s a trick question, and I’ll reveal all at the end:

On the way there though we’ll run through the staples of Finding Manuland method:

Mana, Language and Journeying: that’s the components of every Finding Manuland podcast!

I'm Decoding Trolls and this is the Finding Manuland podcast. As ever, we'll go through the three elements in the Finding Manuland podcast method.

We look at Mana, the M-N- in Mana meaning “energy.” The energy we exchange as a function of being sentient beings.

The second element is language and linguistics. So the M-N- element in Indo-European languages, which we can trace back to at least 4100 BCE, when the first Indo-European language was spoken in southern Ukraine.

The third element is: journeys. Mental and physical journeys. My aim in Finding Manuland is to change your mental model of history, of human culture, of Indo-European culture. If you can understand the words I'm saying today, then you are an Indo-European. You speak an Indo-European language either as your first your native language or you have learnt it.

The second part of this the third element in the Finding Manuland method is the physical journeys we embark upon in every episode. I spend my time journeying in the space between Ireland and India and going to places in search of insights about the M-N- sound immanent in almost every sentence we speak. To places looking for the remnants in today of our last 6,000 years of culture.

So I try to communicate all that to you. Most of our podcasts are a mixture to a greater or lesser degree of those three elements, Mana, language and journeying. Mana, language and voyaging.

Today we're going to use the M-N-sound to look at which came first, India or Germany. Which came first, Manu, India's first human, or Manus, Germanic culture's first human. This is a story which is very dear to my heart because it was noticing this supposed coincidence between the fact that India's first human was Manu (and I think I probably learned that from a Lonely Planet guide from traveling in India in the 90s), and then realizing that actually in Germanic culture (and the clue is in the MN sound in Germanic, Allemagne culture) was Mannus, its first human.

So that question had occurred to me decades ago. And it came to the fore when I tell the story in the very first episode of Finding Manuland, (which you will find in a textual version on powerofmana.net).

I tell the story of how I was returning to my diplomatic posting in Ukraine in November 2021, just before the full-scale invasion, and how I came to the town of Maine in eastern France. I kept on going through different M-N-sounding towns around there.

Out of that journey, I discovered, actually, that there is this great community of Indo-Europeans called the Menapii, for whom the Manche is named, which is what the English call the “English Channel.” The French call it the Manche, because the Menapii ruled out of Cassels, which is this amazing hilltop town. It's on a mound, and it's beside another mound in eastern France. Out of that journey and out of that realisation that there's something going on, something M-N- going on in this area - We've got Mons (which is in today's Belgium). We've got Maine. Amiens. We've got lots of different places names that have M-N immanent within them. A phenomenon which I'd also noted elsewhere.

Since then, I've discovered, there's thousands of place names in Ireland, includin