Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1

Finding Manuland is not just one trip. It’s a programme for a lifetime of journeys. I will bring you on the journeys — intellectual journeys, but mainly geographical journeys — across the lands which stand between Ireland and India. So let’s call it an atlas. It’s an atlas of Manuland, that area between Ireland and India — an atlas which is organised by sound. West to east is only the order of walking, or driving, or thinking. The moon is a hypothesis held inside it.

And it’s an atlas and a harness at once — a permanent skeleton meant to outlast any single journey. A skeleton that runs between Ireland and India, with infinite journeys in between. It could be a travel agency; it could be tour guides. If you’re interested in linguistics, it could be about linguistics, bringing you to the places which are of interest to you. If you’re interested in archaeology, or just a particular country which is or was an Indo-European country, then Finding Manuland is for you.

So this is a frame which is already standing, so that each visit made is one vertebra slotting into it. Not a new skeleton every time, but one spine growing a bone at a time, across a lifetime, with no fixed end. That’s the point of calling it a harness. Finding Manuland is a harness, not just for my life, or my artistic practice, but for yours. It’s an itinerary. The shape holds whether the next journey happens next spring or in ten years. And the eastern edge of the journey, and the western edge, and the southern edge, and the northern edge are all part of the same journey.

The Three Elements: Mana, Language, and Journeying

Every episode of Finding Manuland has three elements. I say them at the top of each episode, and throughout the episodes, so they become like a mantra — and they are also the method.

Mana, meaning energy. I’m exchanging my energy with you. You can hear it in the timbre of my voice. You, by listening and interacting, are taking it in, and you are giving back. We are exchanging our Mana. But I am also exchanging my Mana with the places I’m talking about, and the ideas I’m talking about, and the last 6,000 years of our language.

The second element is the language: the MN sound and its neighbour sounds, followed across the Indo-European family from Ireland to India, and back to the ground where the family began, in ancient Ukraine.

And journeys — voyages, mental and physical. The uprooting and rebuilding of mental models. My aim is to change your mental model of history, of human culture, of our culture, in the way that mine has been. Or let me put that another way: my aim is to communicate to you how my mental models have been transformed, as I have been on this infinite journey, which began in Mons in eastern France in November 2021 — which I’ve written about in the first Finding Manuland non-podcast episode.

The Sound the Language Element Follows: MN

The thing the language element follows across half the world is a sound. I began with the sound MN, in Mons in eastern France, in November 2021. MN, M-N: the pair of nasal consonants that recur in word after word from Ireland to India. Human, mind, moon, meaning, karma, measure, memory, month — all have MN inside them. And, most tellingly, the name of the founding figure in branch after branch of our language family.

The founder who carries the sound turns up in six of eight living Indo-European branches: Indic Manu; Iranian Airyaman; Hellenic Minos; Germanic Mannus; Menua, the great builder-king of Urartu, the kingdom under Ararat, whose successor state is Armenia; and at the western sea edge, Celtic Manawydan from Wales, and Manannán — and Éremón, Ireland’s first High King.

Rome’s first lawgiving monarch — M-N in Roman and in monarch — Numa, is not a seventh. He is the same sound run backwards, N-M: the mirror, rather than another copy. And Numitor, his grandfather — grandfather of Romulus and Remus — carries this reversal too. The mirror struck twice. One name like this could pass for chance. Six of