Like countless African tribes, the Dogon people of the Republic of Mali have a shadowed past. They settled on the Bandiagara Plateau, where they now live, some time between the 13 th and 16 th centuries.
For most of the year, their homeland- 300 miles( 500 km) south of Timbuktu- is a desolate, arid, rocky area of faces and canyons, speck with small villages improved from mud and straw. Although most anthropologists would classify them as’ primitive’, the two million people who make up the Dogon and surrounding tribes would not agree with this epithet.
Nor do they deserve it, except in the sense that their way of life has changed little over the centuries. Indifferent though they are to Western technology, their doctrine and religion is both rich and complex.
Outsiders who have lived with them, and learned to accept the simplicity of “peoples lives”, be talking about them as a glad, fulfilled people whose attitude to the essential ethics of life years back millennia.
Guest FROM SIRIUS
The Dogon do, however, make one astounding claim: that they were originally schooled and’ civilised’by beings from outer space- solely, from the star system Sirius, 8.7 light years away. And they back up this claim with what seems to be extraordinarily detailed knowledge of astronomy for such a’ primitive’ and isolated tribe.
Notably, they know that Sirius, the brightest wizard in the sky, has a companion star, invisible to the naked look, which is small, dense, and extremely heavy. This is perfectly accurate.
But its existence was not even believed by Western astronomers until the middle of the 19 th century; and it was not described in detail until the 1920 s , nor photographed( so dim is this star, known as Sirius B) until 1970.
This curious astronomical fact forms the central precept of Dogon mythology. It is enshrined in their most secret rites, evoked in sand proceeds, built into their sacred building, and can be seen
in etches and patterns woven into their coverings- intends almost certainly dating back hundreds, if not thousands of years.
INTERPLANETARY CONNECTION
All in all, this has been held as the most persuasive evidence yet that Earth had, in its fairly recent past, an interplanetary tie- a close encounter of the educational kind, one might say.
The extent of Dogon knowledge has also been subjected to scrutiny, in order to establish whether all that they say is true, or whether their report may have come from an Earthbound source- a passing missionary, say.
So, how did we in the West come to know of the Dogon beliefs I There is just one basic root, fortunately very thorough. In 1931, two of France’s most respected anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, decided to make the Dogon the subject of extended study.
For the next 21 times, they lived almost constantly with the tribe; and, in 1946, Griaule was invited by the Dogon priests to share their innermost sacred confidentials.
He attended their practices and their ceremonies, and learned- so far as it was possible for any Westerner to do- the enormously complex symbolism that stems from their central sentiment in amphibious humen, which they called Nommo, and that came from outer pace to civilise the nations of the world.( Griaule himself came to be revered by the Dogon as much as their priests, to such a limited extent that at his funeral in Mali in 1956, a part of hundreds of thousands of tribesmen gathered to pay him homage .)
The findings of the two anthropologists were first be made available in 1950, in a cautious and scholarly newspaper entitled’ A Sudanese Sirius System’ in the Journal de la Societe des Africainistes.
After Griaule’s death, Germaine Dieterlen staying in Paris, where she was appointed Secretary General of the Societe des Africainistes at the Musee de I’Homme. She wrote up their joint studies in a massive volume entitled Le Renard Pete, the first of a proposed line, be made available in 1965, by the French National Institute of Ethnology.
ELLIPTICAL ORBIT
The two efforts make it overwhelmingly clear that the Dogon belief system is indeed based on a amazingly accurate knowledge of astronomy, combined with a structure of astrology. Lying at the heart of it is Sirius, and the various stellars and planets that they belief path around this starring.
They likewise say that its prime companion hotshot, which they announce po tola, is made of matter heavier than anything on Earth, and moves in a 50 -year elliptical orbit. All these things are true. But Western astronomers exclusively deduced that something puzzled was happening around Sirius about 150 year ago.
They had noted certain inconsistencies in its flow, and they could explain this only by postulating the existence of another hotshot close to it, which was disturbing Sirius’ pushes through the security forces of gravitation.
In 1862, the American astronomer Alvan Graham Clark actually recognized the perform when testing a new telescope, and called it Sirius B.
However, it was to take another half-century from the first observation of Sirius’ quirks for a mathematical and physical explanation to be found for such a small object exerting such big thrust.
Sir Arthur Eddington, in the 1920 s, developed the thought of certain aces being’ white-hot dwarfs’ -stars near the end of their life that have collapsed in on themselves and become superdense.
A BAFFLING PROBLEM
The description fitted the Dogon version precise. But how could they have learned about it in the three years between Eddington’s announcement of the hypothesi in a popular book in 1928, and the appearance of Griaule and Dieterlen in 1931?
The two anthropologists were baffled.’ The trouble of knowing how, with no instruments at their jettison, followers could know of the movements and certain characteristics of practically invisible wizards has not been settied’, they wrote.
At this spot, another investigate entered the scene- Robert Temple, an American scholar of Sanskrit and Oriental Studies living in Europe- who became profoundly fascinated by two questions raised. Firstly, was the evidence of the Dogon understanding of astronomy to be accepted? And secondly, if the answer to the first question was positive, how could they conceivably have come by this knowledge?
ANCIENT WISDOM
A careful read of the source material, and the dialogue with Germaine Dieterlen in Paris, persuaded him after a age that the Dogon were indeed the possessors of an ancient knowledge that concerned not just Sirius B, but the solar system in general.
They said the Moon was’ cool and dead like baked dead blood’. Their drawing of the planet Saturn had a ring round it( Two other exceptional cases of primitive tribes privy to this information are known .) They knew that planets revolved round the sunbathe, and recorded the movements of Venus in their sacred structure. They known to be the four’ major moons’
of Jupiter, first check by Galileo.( There are now known to be at least 14.) They knew correctly that the Earth revolves on its axis. And they guessed there was an infinite number of hotshots, and that there was a spiral force involved in the Milky Way, to which Earth was connected.
Much of this came down in Dogon myth and symbolism. Objectives on Earth were said to represent what went on in the skies, but the notions of’ twinning’ realise many of the calculations blur, so that it could not be said that the evidence was totally unambiguous.
But with Sirius B, in particular, the central happenings seemed unarguable. Indeed, the Dogon purposely selected the smallest more most significant object they could find- a grain of their crucial meat pasture- to symbolise Sirius B.( Po tolo conveys, literally, a wizard made of fonio grain .) They too strained their imaginations to describe how massively heavy its mineral material was:’ All earthly beings mixed cannot promote it.’
Temple obtained their beach drawings particularly obligating. The egg-shaped ellipse might perhaps be explained apart as representing the’ egg of life’, or some such symbolic significance. But the Dogon were insistent that it implied an path- a detail discovered by the great astronomer Johannes Kepler in the 16 th century, and certainly not known to untutored African tribes. They also employed its own position of
Sirius exactly where it ought to be, rather than where someone might naturally approximate – that is, at a focal point near the leading edge of the ellipse, rather than in the centre.
THE NOMMO
SO how did the Dogon come to have this unearthly knowledge? So far as the Dogon priests are concerned, there is no ambiguity whatsoever in the answer to this question. They guess intensely that amphibious humen from a planet within the Sirius system shored on Earth in remote occasions and passed on the information to initiates, who in turn passed it down over the centuries.
They call the animals Nommo, and love them as’ the monitors of the universe, the fathers of humankind, guardians of its spiritual principles, dispensers of sprinkle and masters of the water’.
Like countless old Deities, Nommo was amhibious, and spent most of his time in the spray
Temple found that the Dogon also selected sand layouts to evoke the spinning, whirling ancestry of a Nommo’ ark’, which he took to intended somesort of spaceship. As he situated it:’ The descriptions of the arrive of the ark are extremely precise.
The ark is said to have property on the Earth to the north-east of the Dogon country, which is where the Dogon claim to have come from primarily.’ The Dogon describe the sound of the arrive of the ark.
They say the’ word’ of Nommo was cast down by him in the four counselings as he condescended, and it sounded like the resound of the four large stone blocks being struck with stones by the children, are in accordance with special patterns, in a very small cave near Lake Debo. Presumably a earsplitting vibrating racket is what the Dogon are trying to convey.
One can imagine standing in the cave and harbouring one’s ears at the sound. The descent of the ark have been required to reverberated like a airplane runway at close range.’
Other descriptions that the Dogon priests used to refer to the landing of the’ ark’ tell how it came down on dry land and’ dispossessed a piling of dirt raised by the whirlwind it began. The violence of the impact roughened the foot … it skidded’.
CONCLUSIVE PROOF
Robert Temple’s judgments, first be made available in 1976 in his work The Sirius Mystery, are at once most inviting and extensively researched.
As such, his findings have been used as ammunition both by those who believe in extra-terrestrial visitations in Earth’s formative past, and by those( including the majority of scientists and historians) who guess the relevant recommendations is bunkum.
Erich von Daniken, for example, whose best-selling books on the subject have now been shown to be based, in the main, on contorted indication, has welcomed the Dogon beliefs, calling them’ irrefutable proof … of ancient astronauts’.
The Sumerian divinity Oannes too lives in a palace at the bottom of the lake after sinking from the sky. Could Oannes and Nommo be one and the same?
Against him range a number of science writers- among other issues the late Carl Sagan and Ian Ridpath- who repute the case is by no means proved, and that Temple has spoken too much into Dogon mythology.
Robert Temple himself, years after first becoming interested in the subject, found nothing to repudiate from in the answer he uttered to his publisher, who carried his central doubt about the manuscript thus:’ Mr Temple, do you believe it? Do you believe it yourself? ’ Temple answered:’ Yes, I do. I have become convinced by my own experiment.
In the start I was just probing. I was skeptical. I was looking for hoaxes, pondering it couldn’t be true. But then I began to discover more and more patches which fit. And the answer is: Yes, I believe it.’ The crucial question is whether the Dogon’s knowledge could have been obtained in any more ordinary, banal way.
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