Episode Details

My favourite subject, and it all begins in Kherson — whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community. A relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use in almost every sentence, the religions, the soul’s immanence in many Indo-European religions, including what I would characterise as Christianity and Buddhism. Created by this community, which is just amazing in itself, because most of us grow up with a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece, and then our cultures. It turns out this is not true. Greek and Italic culture, Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed inside a mixture of the Yamnaya community from this area in Kherson, Mykolaiv Oblast, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine — this has been an intersection point, an interaction point for millennia — out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaya from there after 2500 BCE, westwards near Odessa, just east of Odessa, and a community of people already there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected this for decades.

Jung explains why he believes archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity: he can’t understand where else they could have come from. He talks about the wildest migration theories, which we now know since the 2015 ancient DNA revolution are scientific facts — the genetic content of people from India to Ireland whose ancestry comes from what they call the steppe, what I call ancient Ukrainian.

For me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity. I realised, as many of us did, that there was a problem — whether it was former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They were perceiving, and perhaps many of us did this too before becoming aware of Ukraine’s importance, not only in our current moment but over time, that Russia was managing by monopolising the myth of Russia’s superiority over Ukraine, archetyping Ukraine as not a real country. Every time Vladimir Putin speaks, he’s re-archetyping Russia as this great power. Many of us and our friends perhaps still perceive Russia’s culture — Dostoevsky, ballet — as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine. I’m a great fan of those writers because they’re very insightful and helpful to us.

But I realised from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, without understanding it as archetyping at the time, that my mission was to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul. Certain communities after World War II managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, a founding member of the United Nations, which signed the UN Charter in 1945.

As I dug deeper and followed this path from working in eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnaya when property developers were destroying this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro. It made the front page of the New York Times. The local people were protesting, so in my capacity as a monitor, I went to discover what was going on. These property developers had destroyed a Yamnaya burial mound in which was buried the local monarch and various other people throughout the millennia, including the last person buried there — the head of the collective farm, believe it or not, around 1932. Delusions of grandeur, and continuity. Underneath the mound, when they destroyed it, was found a stone circle created by one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamnaya.

Through that, I began, from a position of extreme scepticism, to trace the linguistic journey of certain people carrying not just a language, not just words, vocabulary, sounds and meanings. There are about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European, or what I call ancient Ukrainian — the language spoken by the Yamnaya between 4100 BCE and 2500