A Don Hacks the Moon

A haven, and two objectives

Normally I find Finding Manuland a haven, a Garden of Eden, a means of escaping the world of geopolitics. Hardwired into Finding Manuland, at its very core, rest two objectives. One: I want to re-centre Ukraine in our species’ story of origins and in the Indo-European origins. I want to make it consistent with the truth, and with what archaeogenetics and other matters tell us today. I also want to remodel the last 6,000 years of history, as we mentally model that history. This is very central to Finding Manuland.

I have spoken before about how we can outflank a kind of ideologue. These are the ideologues who provide a philosophical justification for Russia’s activities in Ukraine. Justification is doing a lot of work there. That was in Outflanking Dugin. But I mainly keep that to my Disinfolklore project. That project is umbilically tied to Finding Manuland. Not least because mana as energy, the charge, the affective charge in memes, is very central to the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is also central to the method I try to use myself in making sense of our information space.

All that aside, I find a great sense of harmony and peace when I am on the road. When I am visiting archaeological sites. When I am looking at Hittite monuments. Recently I saw the most amazing Urartian monument. I have yet to talk about it and process it properly. And to be in spaces that were very important millennia ago. When I was in Kaneš, I looked at the place where the first writing in any Indo-European language was found. That writing is from 2000 BCE. I cannot communicate quite how that makes me feel. But I do try. That is the purpose of these podcasts.

So what?

There is also another aspect of Finding Manuland, and indeed the whole Power of Mana project. It goes right to its beginning. I was explaining this pattern that I had noticed to a friend of mine. I did not really understand the M-N- pattern in so many ordinary everyday words. This was around Christmas time in 2022. And they said, yeah, but so what? What use is it? The use I put to it is this idea of creating an entity, a mental entity, called Manuland. Manuland is a geographical space between Ireland and India containing all of those countries. Even those in my Turkic-language-speaking Finding Manuland episodes, as you might have noticed. All of those different countries have fought for all sorts of various different reasons. They have fought about differences over particular religions, which I might archetype as Indo-European religions. If they have a sense of collective identity, then perhaps we might find more reasons to unite and be in harmony. A collective identity which goes beyond the West or Christianity or the winners of World War II or Asia or Europe.

But of course I do not do this at the cost of truth, or historical truth. I do this using the truth as we find it. From archaeogenetics and archaeology and history and texts, whether those texts are in cuneiform on stone. Connecting us all genetically, culturally, linguistically through the Manuland project has an idea at its core. We can create a more harmonious community of individuals, defined by something positive. The analogy here is with the positive nationalisms that grew out of Herder’s insight in 1777. That was while the French were occupying part of Germany. The Franks were occupying part of Frankfurt. Ironic, of course. Originally the Frankish aristocracy from Germany had gone to what we call France and occupied it. Although the French kept their Romance language, which grew out of Latin, they took the name Frank.

Herder’s call

Herder called: where is our Shakespeare? With this call he said, look, let us unite the historic Germanic tribes. Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about them in 98 CE. To do this we need songs. We need common songs celebrating our common culture across the Germanic tribes that Tacitus had written about. This call launched the folklore and folk-song collec