Dogon
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[edit] Definition
The Dogon culture is an agricultural society settled in Mali, in Western Africa. They gained world fame mainly because of their apparently abnormal knowledge of the star Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris).
[edit] The Sirius myth
French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen studied the Dogons people from 1931 to 1952. In 1950, they published an article about Dogon cosmology. The Dogon say that Earth and the other planets rotate and orbit around the Sun; that Jupiter has four satellites and Saturn has rings. But the most astonishing feature of the Dogon universe is Sirius, the brightest star in night sky and a prominent figure in Dogon culture: they say around Sirius, orbits two small, invisible, extremely dense and heavy stars made of some mineral unavailable on Earth, orbiting the main star every 50 years.
Sirius is a binary system: besides the visible star (Sirius A), there is Sirius B, a white dwarf, a very small and dense stellar body produced from the gravitational collapse of a dead star. Sirius B orbits Sirius A approximately every fifty years. The Dogon myth resembles the data obtained by scientific astronomy at levels beyond coincidence. This fact is used by Robert Temple for elaborating the theory that Dogon gained this knowledge from advanced extraterrestrial visitors. According to Temple, there is a Dogon tale about amphibious beings, the Nommo, descending from some kind of ark, identified by Temple as some spaceship from a planet orbiting Sirius. This is the main subject of Temple's book, The Sirius Mystery.
[edit] Discussion
The rest of Dogon cosmology and mythology is quite conventional, and completely incompatible with advanced alien astronomy. For example, Dogons say the Earth was created from a pair of eggs. One needs a very creative imagination for seeing some astrophysical metaphor here. (By the way, the egg as a constituent element of the Universe, or the Universe itself, is present in various mythologies around the world, very few of them somehow related with extraterrestrials.) They also have no relevant or amazing information on planets beyond Saturn, the most distant planet to be visible with the naked eye.
Carl Sagan, in Broca's Brain, writes that Dogon society in fact did have contacts with an advanced civilization: Western Europe. Sirius B was discovered, described, studied and explained during the second half of 19th century and the first third of 20th century, and the scientific progress on Sirius B was well-known by educated people. On the other half, Dogons are well connected with the outside world, and they had plenty of opportunities for gaining their information on Sirius. They live near important trade routes in Western Africa, so they could easily contact foreign merchants or seamen knowledgeable on astronomy and Sirius. Colonial The French government established its own schools in the Dogon area since 1907 and the first missionaries contacted Dogon in about 1920.
Perhaps during the first years of 20th century, Sagan suggests, some European traveler established contact with Dogons and told them this interesting fact about the star which is so important in their mythology. When the first organized anthropological expeditions reached Dogon lands by 1930, they had already merged the European "myth" of Sirius B with their own cosmology. Supporting this scenary, Sagan cites three well documented examples of isolated societies who were contacted by Westerners and somehow assimilated foreign knowledge or folklore into their cultures.
Another explanation for the Dogon myth is that they didn't have such myth. Anthropologists studying Dogons after Griaule and Dieterlen haven't found any stories concerning Sirius' mates, not at least the way Griaule presented it and certainly not the story told by Temple. Some scholars hold the opinion that Griaule forced his informants in such a way he could get a Sirius myth, making Griaule himself the "alien" from an advanced civilization who contacted Dogons.
It should be noted how closely the Dogon's knowledge or supposed knowledge matches the knowledge of Western astronomers at the time when the myth was collected. For example, the Dogon are credited with knowing about the rings of Saturn, which were known to Western astronomers when Griaaule collected the myth, but they did not mention rings about Uranus, which have only more recently been discovered. Again, the Dogon supposedly identified Jupiter as having four moons. This was the number known to Western astronomers at the time Griaule wrote; today, astronomers have identified sixteen moons of Jupiter. Hence the Dogon seem to show knowledge of Western science textbooks in the 1920s rather than knowledge of the actual structure of the solar system.
Much of the Dogon Sirius myth has been elaborated by Temple. It is worth noting that in The Sirius Mystery, Temple says Sirius has only one companion star. Temple presented a very simplified version of the original Dogon diagram published by Griaule. Concerning the supposed "aliens", the Dogon myth doesn't say specifically that the Nommo come from Sirius; this is a very loose supposition from Temple based on a rather ambiguous fragment of Griaule's work.
At best, the Dogon myth serves as a good example of cultural diffusion and how myths and folklore of societies are susceptible of being influenced by external individuals.
