(4140) Wed 4 Aug 93 9:19p From 'The Unexplained' No. 6. Published by Orbis Publishing, Great Britain. MEMORIES OF A DISTANT STAR? THE DOGON PEOPLE OF WEST AFRICA HAVE A DETAILED KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE THAT IS ASTONISHINGLY ACCURATE. WAS IT, AS THEY CLAIM, PASSED ON BY ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS? Like many 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 13th and 16th centuries. For most of the year, their homeland - 300 miles (500 km) south of Timbuktu - is a desolate, arid, rocky terrain of cliffs and gorges, dotted with small villages built from mud and straw. Although most anthropologists would class 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 philosophy and religion is both rich and complex. Outsiders who have lived with them, and learned to accept the simplicity of their lives, speak of them as a happy, fulfilled people whose attitude to the essential values of life dates back millennia. VISITORS FROM SIRIUS The Dogon do, however, make one astounding claim; that they were originally taught and 'civilised' by creatures from outer space - specifically, 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 star in the sky, has a companion star, invisible to the naked eye, which is small, dense, and extremely heavy. This is perfectly accurate. But its existence was not even suspected by Western astronomers until the middle of the 19th century; and it was not described in detail until the 1920s, nor photographed (so dim is this star, known as Sirius B) until 1970. This curious astronomical fact forms the central tenet of Dogon mythology. It is enshrined in their most secret rituals. portrayed in sand drawings, built into their sacred architecture, and can be seen in carvings and patterns woven into their blankets - designs 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 connection - 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 information 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? There is just one basic source, 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 years, they lived almost constantly with the tribe; and , in 1946, Griaule was invited by the Dogon priests to share their innermost sacred secrets. He attended their rituals 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 belief in amphibious creatures, which they called Nommo, and that came from outer space to civilise the world. (Griaule himself came to be revered by the Dogon as much as their priests, to such an extent that at his funeral in Mali in 1956, a quarter of a million tribesmen gathered to pay him homage.) The findings of the two anthropologists were first published in 1950, in a cautious and scholarly paper entitled 'A Sudanese Sirius System' in the Journal de la Societe des Africainistes. After Griaule's death, Germaine Dieterlen remained in Paris, where she was appointed Secretary General of the Societe des Africainistes at the Musee de l'Homme. She wrote up their joint studies in a massive volume intitled Le Renard Pele, the first of a planned series, published in 1965, by the French National Institute of Ethnology. >>>>> * SLMR 2.1a * When childhood dies, the corpse is called an adult. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ <<<>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ <<<<Originally From: [-RICH WOODS-] To: [-JOHN POWELL-] > Conference: [-0005 - F:BAMA-] @ [-XBN-] on [-01/07/94-] >---------------- > >Here is the info I have...... -Almost perfect rendition of the myth of the mysterious Dogon tribe deleted- And here, again, is what I discovered on the mystery by looking up a few facts. If there's a FAQ, something about this should be in it. [Begin included text] I did an hour's research on the Dogon mystery last night (not as big a deal as it sounds, I have a pretty decent collection of astronomy books and periodicals at home), I learned quite a bit. This may get a little long... Apparently the originator of the mystery is Robert K.Temple in the 1975 book, "The Sirius Mystery". He says that the Dogon have a traditional belief in Sirius B, which claim that it's made of a material called "sagala" (translation: "strong") "so heavy that all earthly beings combined cannot lift it". The Dogon also accept the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and are aware of the 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter and Saturn's rings. As in the previous reply, this was all discovered in the 1930s, when the Dogon were anthropologically investigated. Ok, so what did western civilization know about these things by 1930? Sirius B was discovered in 1862 (not 1962) by Alvan Clark as he was testing the new lens he'd made for Dearborn Observatory's 18 1/2 inch refracting telescope. He at first thought he'd found a defect in the lens, but he finally realized he'd discovered the companion star that had been suspected since 1844. From 1834 to 1844 F.W.Bessel had noticed a wavy irregularity in the motion of Sirius against the background stars, and had concluded that it had an invisible companion. The orbit of the proposed compainion had been calculated in 1851 by C.H.F.Peters. By 1910 astronomers began to realize that there were a class of stars, eventually called white dwarfs, which were very small and dim, yet very massive, which meant they had to be incredibly dense. In 1915 the first spectrum of Sirius B was obtained by W.Adams at Mt.Wilson, which is all that would have been needed to classify it as a white dwarf. However, I couldn't find any information on when it was indeed realized that Sirius B was a white dwarf. Saturn's rings and Jupiter's Galilean moons had been known since the invention of the telescope. By 1930 four more of Jupiter's moons had been discovered, however, the fifth was found as late as 1892 by E.E. Barnard, and the rest followed as photography came into use as an astronomical tool around the turn of the century. As for a third star, Phillip Fox reported in 1920 that the image of Sirius B had appeared to be double, using the same 18 1/2 inch refractor with which Clark discovered B. R.T.Innes in S.Africa and van den Bos, a renowned double-star observer, also reported the 3rd star. I should note here that these were visual studies, and the object in question is at the very limit of what can be observed with a telescope. In 1973 a study by I.W.Lindenblad at the U.S.Naval Observatory concluded that there is no astrometric (measurement of irregularities of motion against the background, probably on photographs) evidence for a 3rd star. My conclusions: Nothing extraordinary need be invoked to account for the Dogon's knowledge. Someone probably gave the Dogons the information, probably after 1920. I admit there are inconsistencies: anyone astronomically knowledgeable enough to know about Sirius B would most likely have known about the additional moons of Jupiter, but then again, so would any hypothetical visitors from beyond. Also, why did the Dogons claim that this was part of their traditions? By the way, I could not confirm the Dogons knowledge of a 3rd star. This is unfortunate, as it would prove beyond doubt that they were given all this information by someone, as the modern study showed no such star. [End included text] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here's some information I have on the Dogon and their mythology. I don't remember who transcribed this: ----- The following texts are from THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD: AN ATLAS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, by Francis Hitching. The Dogon South of the Sahara desert live four related tribes of Africans whom the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen studied from 1946-1950, living mainly with the Dogon people and inspiring such confidence that four of their head priests were persuaded to reveal their most secret traditions. There is no doubt that what the two scientists were told was authentic; so highly respected were they by the Dogon that when Griaule died in 1956, 250,000 Africans from the area gathered in tribute for his funeral in Mali. Drawing patterns and symbols in the dusty soil, Dogon priests showed that they had inherited from ancient times a knowledge of the universe that was unbelievably accurate. The focus of their attention was the star Sirius, the brightest in the sky -- in fact, a binary star; around Sirius A, the star we can see, revolves Sirius B, a "white dwarf" star of great density which is totally invisible to the naked eye, and was seen for the first time in 1862 by the American Alvan Clark when he peered through the largest telescope then existing, and spotted a faint point of light; being 100,000 times less bright than Sirius A, it was not possible to capture it on a photograph until 1970. Yet the Dogon not only knew about this star, but also many of its characteristics. They knew it was white, and that although it was "the smallest thing there is," it was also "the heaviest star," made of a substance "heavier than all the iron on Earth" -- a good description of Sirius B's density, which is so great that a cubic metre weighs around 20,000 tons. They knew correctly that its orbit round Sirius A took 50 years, and was not circular but elliptical; they even knew the position of Sirius A within the ellipse. Their knowledge of astronomy in general was no less astonishing. They drew the halo that surrounds Saturn, which is impossible to detect with normal eyesight; they knew about the four main moons of Jupiter; they knew that the planets revolved around the sun, that the Earth is round and that it spins on its own axis; incredibly, they were sure that the Milky Way is a spiral-like shape, a fact not known to astronomers until well into this century. They also believed that their knowledge was obtained from extra-terrestrial visitors. Amphibians from Sirius ...this star (called Sirius B by modern astronomers) has formed the basis of the most sacred Dogon beliefs since antiquity. So how could they have learned so much about it? There seem only two conceivable possibilities: either they used some form of divination or distant viewing, as in psychic experiments being carried out today; or, as the Dogon themselves believe profoundly, visitors from a planet attached to Sirius B landed on Earth and passed on the knowledge themselves. This is the solution which the historian Robert Temple has explored in a remarkable book "The Sirius Mystery," in which he makes out a persuasive case for the Dogons being the last people on Earth to worship extra-terrestrial amphibians who landed in the Persian Gulf at the dawn of civilization, and whose presence can be detected in drawings and legends of the gods of ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece. He describes how the Dogon call the creatures Nommos, who have to live in water. They are said to have arrived in an ark, and drawings in the dust portray "the spinning or whirling descent of the ark." They describe the noise of thunder that it made, and a whirlwind of dust caused by the violence of its impact with the ground. Other legends tell of "spurting blood" from the ark, which may refer to its rocket exhaust; the Dogon also seem to make a distinction between the ark that actually landed on earth, and a star-like object in the sky that may represent the main inter-stellar spaceship. All this might just be science fiction curiousity were it not for the extraordinary scholarship that took Robert Temple back to the origins of the Dogon in Libya, and from there to the undoubted parallels between their Nommo and the amphibian god of Babylon, Oannes, a superior being who with his companions was to have taught the Sumerian mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, social and political organization, and written language....Surviving fragments of the "Babylonian History" written in Greek by a priest named Berossus, describe Oannes closely: "The whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and it had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice, too, and language, were articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day....When the sun set, it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious." Having established the parallel between the two gods, Robert Temple makes a closely-argued case that Oannes and the Sirius connection is at the heart of the Classical "mystery religions" that have so far defied explanation because they were deliberately recorded in coded form; initiates of the mysteries were forbidden to reveal the arcane knowledge they had been taught. But various clues were written down to indicate the link with Sirius -- for instance, the repeating motif of 50 representing the orbital period of Sirius B, and a dog-headed deity or other dog-associations representing Sirius A, the "Dog Star." Temple recounts many legends that back up his theme, and because these were originally intended to be elusive, it is not surprising that they have many other interpretations. But it is hard to disagree that a Sirius factor is present in many of them. Moreover, there is a rich fund of material in Greek myth that tends to support his theory, but is not included in his book.