The MN Sound Across Cultures and Religion

How the law of sympathetic magic applies. I’ll go back into why I ended up getting interested in this. As some of you might remember, I studied law and worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person leasing the property. But it’s in all the leases. That was always a little curiosity to me.

As was the fact in contract law — in English and in American contract law — for a contract to be valid, there needs to be an agreement, but there also needs to be what they call consideration. If I contract with you, James, to buy 12 widgets, you have to, for the contract to be valid, in some way pay me a deposit. This is the importance of the deposit. There’s this reciprocity.

I was very interested in this book which I read a couple of years ago by Marcel Mauss, who is one of those founders — in every academic discipline there are always a few founders who appear in the first paragraph of every book. When you look at the laws of sympathetic magic, Marcel Mauss is right there. That’s how I knew this was an interesting area to be in.

I noted when reading this seminal text — which some of you might have read as well — called The Gift, by Marcel Mauss: he talked about early Germanic law and early Germanic contract law, which probably then becomes part of English law, even though English law says it comes from Roman law, which is a distinct Indo-European tradition from the Italic as distinct from the Germanic.

In Germanic law, each contract, sale or purchase, loan or deposit, entails a pledge. One partner is given an object, generally something of little value — like a glove or a piece of money, a knife, or perhaps, as with the French, a pin or two. And this pledge is, in fact, imbued — this is Mauss writing — “this pledge is imbued with the personality of the partner who gave it. And the fact that it’s in the hands of the recipient moves its donor to fulfil his part of the contract,” or her part, “and buy themselves back by buying the thing.”

When I saw this, I thought: that’s interesting. What’s going on is, if James is letting me rent his property, his skyscraper in Manhattan, at a peppercorn rent, I give him this peppercorn. But actually in that peppercorn is my energy, my mana, my personality. And I’ve obviously got his, because I’m in the building itself.

What The Gift and Mauss’s book is about is he’s looking at various cultures and the exchange that in many different cultures — especially in Amerindian cultures — where early examples come from: the potlatch, which is this institution of a communal meal where you’re being hosted, or you’re hosting because your child is getting married and you have to host the whole village and give them food and drink.

That interested me because a lot of Irish mythological texts are about these big feasts. I always wondered what’s going on here. It appears as if there is this idea that when you partake of the feast, you’re taking something into you. Your energy, your mana, is being affected by what is coming into your body — just as it is by what’s coming into your mind from memes and from disinformation. And equally, of course, by what you’re giving into other people’s minds.

This is why in my profile I say: “Mana is permanent. Communicate positive mana.” Because what the Russians are doing is communicating such negative mana and driving us all nuts with it.

I discovered — which I’ve written about in my other project, not so directly relevant here — that there are heaps of different names for what I call mana, this phenomenon which many people have written about from the beginning. I’m just applying it to disinformation studies: why particular memes take hold, become contagious, and how to detect in particular innocuous artefacts of what I call Disinfolklore — stories — to detect in them the three archetypes that Iona has isolated, like a Nobel Prize winner: that Russia is invincible, that Russia is undefeatable, and that Russia has the right to intervene in its neighbours’ political destinies.

You can see that energy, that mana, in billions of different stories and items of Disinfolklore, voiced by everyone from Biden to people who aren’t pro-Russian. I have in the past talked about it — we hear it from our friends all the time, about Russia being invincible. Thankfully, what we’re seeing at the moment is this transition, this change in archetypal identity.

I don’t think if Russia does manage to take Pokrovsk, it’s going to disrupt the change in archetypal identity that appears to be taking place in the minds of — if not Donald, because obviously we know he changes with the weather — in the minds of everyone around Donald.

Someone said to me today, someone who two years ago we were always having intense discussions about Ukraine. He was always like, “Russia’s invincible, nothing will happen.” And now he’s arguing the opposite. That’s a really good indicator for me.

The different words for this in different cultures: in Chinese culture it’s called qi. It’s ki in Japanese culture. In Hindu culture it’s called prana, the breath. In Hebrew culture it’s called ruach. These are all varieties of what I call mana. Jung would talk about synchronicity — that’s what that album means, Synchronicity. Then there’s teleima, libido — Freud talked about libido. Nous — Aristotle or someone like that. Vis medicatrix naturae — a formative cause. Pneuma. Holy Spirit. Woden, actually, in Germanic culture, interestingly. Or chi energy.

A lot of different people have noticed what I call mana. But this was before the disinformation age, so they didn’t apply it to memes and what we’re dealing with in our timelines, in the information space, in the minds of our leaders and how they’re affected.

We, as people in the pro-Ukraine information space, have such an in-depth history of this up and down since 24th February 2022, where we’ve watched all the world leaders go through “we need to give Putin a climb-down.” We’ve seen this evolution of ideas and changes in archetypes in people’s minds. I think that gives us an edge, a huge dataset, a huge learning set for our algorithms, which a lot of other people don’t have.

This idea that when we write something that other people read, it changes them. And likewise, what they write changes you, and when you’re speaking to people. This is what I mean: I’m looking at this in a particular segment of how we spend each day, of our consciousness, of human history and human culture — disinformation and Disinfolklore is what I’m particularly interested in.

But its insights apply in all forms of communication, and it’s deeply embedded in our language. The M-N sound in “communication,” in “communal” — communal feast — the M-N sound in “meaning.” It makes sense to me that this sound and this idea of exchange and energy exchange was known and used by the first Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, as well. We’ve just lost sight of it. But that’s just a nice observation — it is embedded in the language, but you don’t need to be interested in that to find this a useful tool.

There was a lot of work done in the 19th century when the Polynesians were discovered to have this concept of mana. It’s important to know now: we know there was a lot of trade between India and Polynesia, between traders and Brahmin traders at the time. But the people in the late 19th century didn’t really understand this. In fact, it’s really only recently — I see stuff coming up in the last few months on looking at ancient DNA to try to work out migration patterns in the Pacific.

The meaning of mana in these tribes — this is classic 19th-century stuff, and I’ll quote: “The Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence, called almost universally mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside of common processes of nature. It is present in the atmosphere of life.”

What I started today with, talking about magic — what I’m trying to do is decouple the idea of magic from something otherworldly, and reconnect it to its initial and true meaning in our governance systems: magistrate, majesty, Magi, Magus, magister as distinct from minister. The magister is the master, and the minister ministrates to the master. We have this in our governance discourse when we talk about ministers. This is part of the same semantic field and signifying field in Indo-European communities across the world as magic.

Because of various cultural reasons, we associate magic with something otherworldly, the opposite of science. But in fact it’s intrinsic to the way we organise ourselves as societies. It’s quite useful when you come across this discipline, this aspect of cultural psychology, and you see the laws of sympathetic magic and you don’t think it’s about some great Hollywood illusionist. No — it’s about an aspect of being human and exchanging. “Sympathetic” in this sense is about exchange: pathos, pathetic — exchanging feelings.

When these 19th-century scholars — a lot of them were religious, missionaries in the sad sense — encountered this concept of mana, they were amazed by it. They thought: this is how the primitive mind works, and over thousands of years we became more advanced than them. That’s not interesting to me.

What is interesting is how fascinated this whole industry was by this concept of mana. No one seemed to notice, even some of the greatest minds, that M-N — the same sound — is in the language they were talking about: common, men, human. But they were really fascinated. And there were various attempts to connect this idea of mana with early Roman religion — numinism, for instance. Again, the M-N in numinism. There were lots of fights over it.

This is the idea that in early Roman religion, Italic culture, you have a god for everything. Here’s an example I picked up from Wissowa: you have the tumulus and sentinus who have given the child life and feeling. Ops, a deity, takes him up from the bosom of the earth. Vaticanus opens his mouth for the first wails. Levana lifts him off the ground. Cunina cares for him in the cradle. Potina and Educa give him drink and food respectively.

From the 19th-century perspective, they looked at these pagan Romans as having gods for absolutely everything — and there’s evidence that everything in the household had different household gods for every dimension of life. From our perspective, we look at these 19th-century missionaries in as bizarre a way as we look at these Romans.

What I think is the link with disinformation studies: when we’re looking at memes, these things which come alive in our minds, come alive in our culture, and are then transmitted — they become the object of contagion — this is really what we’re talking about. It’s the same phenomenon. The early Romans had hundreds or thousands of deities, which they later consolidated into a few — but underneath were just hundreds or thousands, as were in the Hittite and other early religious cultures.

When we see life in memes, when certain things catch fire, go viral — I think it’s the same phenomenon. What is common about it is mana. There’s an energy in this rock, or an energy in this deity that moves between us. I don’t mean protects us in a religious sense. I mean that it just moves between us.

I’m trying to connect these old manifestations of ideas of energy running between people with what we’re dealing with in the information space, but equally what we’re dealing with in our normal lives — when you’re feeling quite down and you bump into someone who just brightens your life: a child, a cat, a dog, your friend who always makes you laugh. What you’re really doing there is exchanging energy.

I’ve talked about it before from the biological sense: the mitochondria in our cells create the energy, and now we know they create all the energy which keeps us alive and transfer that energy between cells. So this model has a biological correlate as well.

That is really all I wanted to say. That’s what I set out to talk about four weeks ago, and now I’ve finished.As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the property. It’s in all the leases. So that was always just a little curiosity to me, as indeed was the fact in contract law, in English and in American contract law, for there to be a contract to take place, there needs to be an agreement. There also needs to be what they call Consideration. If I contract with you, James, to buy 12 widgets, you have to, for the contract to be valid, you have to in some way pay me a deposit. This is the importance of the deposit.

So there’s this reciprocity. I was very interested in this book, which I read a couple of years ago by Marcel Mauss, who is one of the, you know, in every academic discipline, there’s always a few founders who are in every, in the first paragraph in every book. When you look at the laws of Sympathetic Magic, Marcel Mauss is right there.

Finding Manuland

Finding Manuland takes us on mental journeys across the space between Ireland and India.

Finding Manuland moves us across time from 4,000 BCE until the present.

Our mental models of how the past and the present interact expand, through Finding Manuland.

We begin around 4,000 BCE with the Yamnaya community who lived between the Don and the Dniepr rivers of Ancient Ukraine. These Yamnaya created the first Indo-European language. They buried their dead, covered in ochre, with their knees flexed, in the hundreds of thousands of mounds that still remain in the lands between Ireland and India - Manuland.

Today, over half of humanity uses sounds and meanings first forged on the Ukrainian steppe. Immanent in the genome of most humans who live in Manuland is the mitochondrial DNA of our Yamnaya ancestors. Everyone who can understand these words in an Indo-European language, is the cultural descendant of this community of migrants who spread so successfully east and westwards across the Steppelands from Ancient Ukraine.

Decoding Trolls is the first to discover that immanent in almost every sentence we speak or think through an Indo-European language is an M-N- sound coupled with meanings that were first forged by our Yamnaya forebears.

This might just be a coincidence. Or the M-N- sound might be THE fundamental cryptotypic semantic signalling system undermining the matrices of metaphors through which we communicate today. M-N- might well be a permanent monument, remnant and reminder of the Yamnaya and indeed Mana - the Subtle Energy we exchange with humans and animals - anchored in almost every thought we have.

In any event, Mana, Woden, Nous, Holy Spirit, Prana, Ch’i, Ki, Libido, Mungo, Synchronicity, Anima Mundi, Orenda, Manitu, Wong, Tondi, … are all manifestations of the same phenomenon that was present in the minds of Yamnaya, as in all ancient and contemporary humans. If only we can connect again to Mana, and harness it to impact positively every interaction we have inside our communities.

Such are the ideas that Finding Manuland elucidates located in the space, time, and culture of Manuland.

So our story emanates from Ancient Ukraine, and terminates in the questions:

Why is this M-N- sound and its associated meanings so immanent in Indo-European culture? Can we know what this immanence means?

If Mana is what remains of us in others when we leave them, then, there is Mana. Mana’s permanent. Let’s communicate positive Mana. And Finding Manuland will help remind you of this, in every interaction you experience today with other sentient beings.

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