Like many African tribes, the Dogon people of the Republic of Mali have a dark past. They settled on the Bandiagara Plateau, where they still live, somewhere between the 13th and 16th centuries. Their homeland - 500 kilometers south of Timbuktu - is a desolate, arid, rocky land of cliffs and gorges dotted with small villages built of mud and straw.
Although most anthropologists classify them as “primitive,” the two million people who make up the Dogon and the surrounding tribes would disagree with this epithet. And they don't deserve it, except that their lifestyle has changed little over the centuries. Despite the fact that they are indifferent to Western technology, their philosophy and religion are rich and complex. Strangers who lived with them and learned to accept the simplicity of their life speak of them as happy, fulfilling people, whose attitude to life values has a thousand-year history.
Aliens from Sirius
The Dogon, however, made one startling claim: that they were originally trained and "civilized" by beings from outer space, in particular from the Sirius star system, 8.7 light years away. And they back up this claim with knowledge of astronomy that is incomprehensible to such a "primitive" and isolated tribe.
Dogon houses.
The Dogon know that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a companion star invisible to the naked eye that is small, dense, and extremely heavy. And this is absolutely true. But Western astronomers did not even know about its existence until the middle of the 19th century, and this companion was not described in detail until the 1920s, but only photographed in 1970 (this star, known as Sirius B, is so faint). This curious astronomical fact is the central tenet of Dogon mythology. It is enshrined in their most secret rituals, depicted in drawings in the sand, embedded in their sacred architecture.
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Interplanetary communication
In general, this was the most convincing evidence that in the relatively recent past of the Earth there was an interplanetary communication, one might say, a close encounter. The Dogon's degree of knowledge has also been scrutinized to determine if everything they say is true or if their information may have come from an earthly source - say, a visiting missionary. So how did the West learn about Dogon beliefs? In 1931, two of France's most respected anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlain, decided to make the Dogons the subject of extended research.
Marcel Griaule.
For the next 21 years, they lived almost permanently with the tribe, and in 1946, the Dogon priests invited Griaule to share their innermost secrets. He attended their rituals and ceremonies, and learned - as far as any Westerner could be - the extremely complex symbolism that stems from their central belief in the amphibious creatures they called nommo, and which came from an external tempo to civilize the world. (Griaule himself began to be revered by the Dogon to such an extent that at his funeral in Mali in 1956, a quarter of a million people gathered to pay tribute to him.)
The findings of these two anthropologists were first published in 1950 in a scholarly paper entitled The Sudanese System of Sirius in the journal De la Societe des Africainistes. After the death of Griaule, Germaine Dieterlain remained in Paris, where she was appointed general secretary of the African society at the Museum of Man. She published their joint research in a large volume entitled Le Renard Pete.
Top left: Shows the Dogon's orbit of Sirius B, as well as modern astronomical representation. Top right: Dogon image of the Nommo, their amphibious god. Bottom left: depiction of the Nommo ark ship, bottom right: depicting Saturn and Jupiter with its four main moons.
Elliptical orbit
These two works clearly show that the Dogon belief system is indeed based on a remarkably accurate knowledge of astronomy, mixed with a form of astrology. It is based on Sirius, as well as various stars and planets, which, in their opinion, revolve around this star. They also say that the companion of the main star, which they call Po Tola, is made of matter heavier than anything on Earth and moves in a 50-year elliptical orbit. All of these things are true. But Western astronomers only discovered the satellite of Sirius about 150 years ago. They noticed some irregularities in the movement of Sirius, and they could only explain this by the existence of another star next to him, which influenced the movement of Sirius with its gravity. In 1862, American astronomer Alvan Graham Clark finally saw the star while testing a new telescope and named it Sirius B.
However, it was still half a century from the first observation of Sirius features for the mathematical and physical explanation to be found for such a small object exerting such tremendous gravity. Sir Arthur Eddington in the 1920s formulated the theory that some stars are "white dwarfs" - stars at the end of their lives that have shrunk and become superdense.
Drawings of the Dogon.
The description exactly matched the Dogon story. But how could they have known this in the three years between Eddington's publication of the theory in a popular book in 1928 and the arrival of Griaule and Dieterlen in 1931? The two anthropologists were confused. “The problem of knowing how, without the tools at their disposal, people could know about the movements and some characteristics of virtually invisible stars has not been resolved,” they wrote.
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At that moment, another researcher appeared on the scene - Robert Temple, an American scholar in Sanskrit and Oriental studies, who was deeply fascinated by the two issues raised. First, could the Dogon understanding of astronomy be believed? And second, if the answer to the first question was yes, how could they get this knowledge?
Ancient wisdom
A careful reading of the source material and discussions with Germain Dieterlain in Paris convinced Temple after some time that the Dogon did possess ancient wisdom, which concerned not only Sirius, but the solar system as a whole. The Dogon said the moon was "dry and dead like dry dead blood." Dogon's drawing of Saturn had a ring around the planet. They knew that the planets revolve around the Sun, they knew about the four largest moons of Jupiter, first seen by Galileo. They correctly believed that the Earth rotates on its axis.
The Dogon believed that there were an infinite number of stars, and that there was a spiral force involved in the Milky Way, to which the Earth was connected. Much of this was included in Dogon myths and symbolism. It was said that objects on Earth represent what happened in the sky, but the concept of "twins" made many of the calculations unclear, so that the evidence cannot be said to be completely unambiguous. But with Sirius B in particular, the basic facts seemed undeniable.
Indeed, the Dogon deliberately chose the smallest but most significant object they could find - a grain of their main food crop - to symbolize Sirius B (Tolo means literally a star made from phonio seeds). They also called on their imaginations to help describe how heavy its contents were - "all earthly beings together cannot lift it."
Temple found their drawings in the sand particularly compelling. The egg-shaped ellipse can perhaps be explained as representing the "egg of life" or some similar symbolic sign. But the Dogon insisted that it meant orbit, a fact discovered by the great astronomer Kepler in the 16th century and certainly not known to African tribes. They also place Sirius exactly where it should be, that is, in focus near the edge of the ellipse, rather than in the center.
Like many ancient gods, Nommo was amphibious and spent most of his time in the water.
Nommo
So how did the Dogon get this unearthly knowledge? As for the Dogon priests, there is no ambiguity in the answer to this question. They deeply believe that amphibious beings from the planet in the Sirius system landed on Earth in ancient times and transmitted information to the initiates, who, in turn, transmitted it over the centuries. They call the beings Nommo and worship them as "the mentors of the Universe, the fathers of mankind, the keepers of its spiritual principles, the organizers of rain and the rulers of water."
Temple discovered that the Dogon also drew diagrams in the sand to depict the spinning, whirling descent of Nommo's "ark", which the explorer mistook for something like a spaceship. As Temple put it, “The descriptions of the landing of the ark are extremely accurate. The Ark is said to have landed on Earth northeast of the Dogon country, from where the Dogon claim they originally came.
The Dogon describe the sound of the Ark landing. They say that Nommo's "word" was thrown to him in four directions as he descended, and it sounded like an echo. The supposedly loud vibrating sound is what the Dogon are trying to convey. You can imagine that you are standing in a cave and keeping your ears to the noise. The descent of the ark must have sounded like the takeoff of a jet plane at close range.
Other descriptions that the Dogon priests used to refer to the landing of the "ark" relate how it descended on dry land and "raised a cloud of dust, swirling with the whirlwind that it caused. The force of the impact made the ground rough … it skidded."
Convincing evidence
Robert Temple's findings, first published in 1976 in The Mystery of Sirius, are both highly provocative and extensively researched. Thus, his findings have been used as evidence both by those who believe in extraterrestrial visits in the past to Earth and by those (including most scientists and historians) who believe that this idea is anti-scientific.
The Sumerian god Oannes also lived in a palace at the bottom of the lake after descending from the sky. Oannes and Nommo can be the same character.
For example, Erich von Daniken, whose books on the subject have now been shown to be based largely on distorted evidence, welcomed the Dogon beliefs as "compelling evidence … of ancient astronauts." A number of learned writers oppose him, among them the late Carl Sagan and Jan Ridpat, who believe that the case is by no means proven, and that Temple has rethought too much in the Dogon mythology.
Robert Temple himself, years after he first became interested in the topic, found nothing to be denied in the answer he gave to his publisher, who expressed his doubt in this way: “Mr. Temple, do you believe that? Do you yourself believe it? " Temple replied, “Yes, indeed. I was convinced of this by my research. In the beginning, I was just investigating. I was skeptical. I was looking for hoaxes, thinking it couldn't be true. But then I started to discover more and more details. And the answer is: Yes, I believe in it. " The main question is, could Dogon knowledge have been obtained in a more conventional way?