The Advanced Star-Knowledge of the Dogon Tribe of West Africa
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
If what the Dogon say is true, all of human history could be upended.
Sirius, known as “The Dog Star,” due in part to its prominent place in the constellation Canis Major, is the brightest star in our sky, and as such has been the object of intense focus for a variety of civilizations and peoples throughout known history. The Ancient Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks all had a central place for the star in their various mythologies and rites. Sirius has also been an object of occult significance for various “secret” societies, such as the Freemasons and the Theosophists.
But the focus of this article is not the Ancient Egyptians, or the Freemasons, or the occult. It’s not even Sirius. For Sirius is known to modern science to be part of a binary star system, and as such is often referred to as “Sirius A.” Its partner star, a white dwarf—think small, dense, old, and hard to see—which dutifully orbits Sirius A, is called “Sirius B.” It is this star that is both our focus and the focus of a people in West Africa known as the Dogon.
The Dogon are an ethnic group located in Mali, numbering under a million and intriguing to anthropologists because of their rich culture, rife with complex mask-based choreography rituals and wooden sculpture. Furthermore, study of their culture is valuable to anthropologists because the Dogon were still living within their oral culture when their religion and beliefs were finally recorded by Westerners in the 19th century.
An intriguing element of Dogon culture is their emphasis on “twinness.” To the Dogon, everything in the universe was supposed to come in pairs. Twin births are highly celebrated, because they reference a far-off and ancient time where every birth was a twin birth. The Dogon believe that the souls of humanity used to be androgynous, with every person harboring both a male and female aspect. According to Marcel Griaule, an eminent French anthropologist who visited the Dogon numerous times throughout the 1930s and dedicated a huge part of his life to representing their symbolism and culture through his books, “Dogon religion and Dogon philosophy both expressed a haunting sense of the original loss of twin-ness.”
To the Dogon, Sirius B was the most important star in the sky, and its existence was consequential to every other star. They elucidated this to Griaule, who over time became a trusted outsider. To Griaule they dispensed a number of their esoteric and secret belief systems, and when Griaule passed away he was mourned widely among the Dogon.
““An atom gets cracked in the blackness of meditation, mysterious shit / call me Jay Dogon, I’m on some Sirius shit””
There’s only one strange hiccup: Sirius B is entirely invisible to the naked eye. It has been for all of human history; astronomers estimate that the last time the star would have been visible from Earth was 124 million years ago. By all facts and logic, the Dogon should have never known of its existence.
We only discovered Sirius B in 1862, after the invention of the telescope. And yet the Dogon know basically everything there is to know about it. The Dogon were aware of the relative size, shape, location, density, and orbit of Sirius B. Griaule and his partner Germaine Dieterlan together supplied a restrained comment: "The problem of knowing how, with no instruments at their disposal, men could know the movements and certain characteristics of virtually invisible stars has not been settled, nor even posed."
How is it possible that the Dogon knew what they knew when they knew it? Some, like Carl Sagan, believe the most viable explanation is cultural transfer. There’s a possibility some have suggested that the Dogon came into contact with astronomers that were in West Central Africa on an expedition in 1893. These astronomers would have had to share virtually every detail they could know about Sirius B with the Dogon. The Dogon had knowledge of the star that included even the most “the most unobvious and subtle principles” of its orbit, according to Robert K.G. Temple, who exhaustively explored the topic in his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery.
The Dogon knew that Sirius B’s orbital period around Sirius A was 50 years. They claimed that it took one year to rotate on its axis—a timeframe which modern astronomy has been unable to confirm or deny. They described the star as “infinitely tiny,” and at the same time they said “the star which is considered to be the smallest thing in the sky is also the heaviest.” This is a perfect description of the qualities of a white dwarf, which—as we know—is the category of star in which Sirius B resides.
The Dogon knew that Sirius A is not the center of the orbit of Sirius B, but is instead one foci of Sirius B’s elliptical orbit. It seems questionable that this detail would have been propounded to the Dogon had they come into contact with some European anthropologist or astronomer in the window of time after the telescopic sighting of Sirius B in 1862 and before Griaule’s arrival in West Africa.
The Dogon were also aware that the Saturn of our own solar system had a ring, and they knew of the four major Galilean moons of Jupiter. The Dogon were also well aware that it was the turning of the Earth that caused the sky to shift, unlike much of Europe until the Copernican Revolution in 1543.
How was it that the Dogon knew so much about the nature of the heavens? Well, how do they answer that? The Dogon say that the Nommos told them. The Nommos are semi-amphibious, hermaphroditic beings in Dogon mythology who came from the sky. They are smiilar to descriptions of the half-man, half-fish entity described by the Ancient Sumerians and known as Oannes, one of the Apalku or “Seven Sages” that feature prominently in writer Graham Hancock’s theory about the great culture heroes who reignited civilization after a great flood about 12-13,000 years ago.
The Nommos apparently landed on Earth on what the Dogon call “The Day of the Fish.” The Dogon told Griaule that the Nommos came from a world that orbited Sirius, and came to the Earth in a vessel that was “accompanied by fire and thunder.” That the Nommos were actually extraterrestrials from the Sirius system explains the Dogon’s wealth of astronomical information and tremendous fixation on Sirius B, which—as the invisible companion star to the seemingly more notable Sirius—should have never garnered such interest from the Dogon in the first place.
A Dogon carved-wood Nommo figure from Mali. Depicts typical Nommos features including upraised arms, elongated torso & head, almond-shaped eyes, and amphibious breathing structures.
The biggest question is simply this: were the Dogon aware of Sirius B before Western astronomers first saw it in a telescope in 1862 (or before Fred Bessel first conjectured its possibility in 1844)? If such is true, then conventional understandings of human history and the origins of civilization are entirely upended. We do know that the Dogon fascination with the Sirius system is at least centuries old by virtue of old Kanaga masks that are used to celebrate Sigui, a once-every-50-years festival celebrated when Sirius B completes its orbit around Sirius A.
Another way that the Dogon story could be confirmed would be the discovery of another companion star in the Sirius system. The Dogon state that such a star, which they called emme-ya, exists. This Sirius C would have to be a brown dwarf according to gravitational studies from 1995, if it exists at all. In the early 1900s a number of astronomers from the Union Observatory claimed to have seen this elusive third star, with one 1995 study concluding that Sirius C exists as either a small red dwarf or large brown dwarf. However, more recent scientific appraisals have claimed that the chance of Sirius C existing is low, with research and debate ongoing.
One final manner in which the Dogon story could be proved would be quite simply to wait. For the Nommos told the Dogon before they left that they would one day assuredly return to Earth. According to some sources, due to an alignment with the sun, Sirius itself will rain down purifying light that will reorganize the world, bringing blessings to the children of the Nommos and horrors and fire to those who behave rebelliously towards the divine creator Amma’s will.
I suppose for now we wait.
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