{"it":{"id":"TX032","kind":"text","sub":"Dogon (Mali)","name":"Dogon Sirius tradition","place":"Held in several collections","date":"oral; recorded 1931-56","oldest":"Griaule & Dieterlen 1950 'Un système soudanais de Sirius'; Le Renard pâle 1965","inst":"n/a","lang":"Dogon","src":[230,522],"tags":["Africa","Astronomy"],"sum":"In the 1930s and 1940s the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen studied the Dogon, a people of Mali who live about 300 kilometers south of Timbuktu. They reported that the Dogon believed Sirius had a dark, invisible companion with a 50-year orbit, very heavy and made of a metal not found on Earth.\n\nThat is close to modern astronomy. In 1844 the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel noticed that Sirius wobbled and put it down to an unseen companion. On 31 January 1862 Alvan Graham Clark and his father saw it while testing an 18½-inch lens. Astronomers took more than five decades to see that Sirius B was a new kind of star, a white dwarf.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the match. Sirius B cannot be seen with the naked eye, yet the reported Dogon lore gave its orbit and weight.\n\nThe mainstream view, which Carl Sagan favoured, is that a visitor brought the idea in the 1930s, perhaps Griaule himself, who had studied astronomy. In 1991 Walter van Beek led a team to the Dogon and found no trace of the detailed Sirius lore. Robert Temple goes further. In The Sirius Mystery, in 1976, he said amphibious beings from a planet around Sirius visited Earth thousands of years ago.\n\nWho first told the Dogon about Sirius B?","why":"Anthropologists reported Dogon lore about an invisible companion of Sirius, a star found only by telescope.","nfacts":2,"nsrc":9,"yt":"Read van Beek's 1991 fieldwork.","rel":["TX057"],"hook":"Dogon lore recorded in the 1930s gave Sirius an invisible companion with a 50-year orbit."},"S":{"230":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people"],"522":["Wikipedia: The Sirius Mystery","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirius_Mystery"]},"rec":{"id":"TX032","alias":["W11T05","W16T04"],"ms":[{"a":"SiriusB_predicted","v":"1844","u":"year","unc":"","by":"","yr":"1844","m":"astronomy","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W16M036","s":["W16S22"],"c":"Wikipedia The Sirius Mystery","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sirius_Mystery&oldid=1370790189"},{"a":"SiriusB_observed","v":"1862","u":"year","unc":"","by":"","yr":"1862","m":"astronomy","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W16M037","s":["W16S22"],"c":"Wikipedia The Sirius Mystery","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sirius_Mystery&oldid=1370790189"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA133","a":"Knowledge from amphibious visitors from Sirius.","who":"Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery (1976)","main":"Walter van Beek 1991 restudy (Current Anthropology 32) found no Dogon knowledge of Sirius as double star; contamination likely (Sagan, Ridpath).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people","st":"contradicted","n":"tested: Mukunda 1974 / van Beek 1991","nl":1},{"id":"AA202","a":"ancient/NHI-origin claims","who":"various (not itemised)","main":"Griaule/Dieterlen claim 50-yr Sirius B orbit knowledge; van Beek 1991 (Current Anthropology): informants disagreed which star Sigu Tolo is and said they learned of it from Griaule; Calame-Griaule rebuttal; van Beek: no Dogon outside Griaule circle had heard of sigu tolo/po tolo; none knew Sirius as double star","ms":"W11S33;W11S104","st":"contradicted","n":"van Beek 1991 (primary, Current Anthropology 32:139-167) fieldwork: Sirius-B knowledge absent even among Griaule informants; Calame-Griaule disputes.","nl":"1"},{"id":"AA252","a":"NHI/advanced-knowledge reading","who":"see claimant_index","main":"Sirius B predicted 1844, first observed 1862","ms":"W16S22;W16S08","st":"contradicted","n":"Van Beek found no double-star belief; contact explanations (Brosch; Ridpath 1978; Sagan 1979; Oberg 1982).","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[{"who":"Robert K. G. Temple","med":"book","ep":"The Sirius Mystery (Temple, 1976; 2nd ed 1998)","v":"Dogon knew Sirius B via contact with beings from Sirius","b":"S","s":["W11S119"]},{"who":"Ancient Aliens","med":"TV","ep":"Ancient Aliens #153 \"The Star Gods of Sirius\" (aired 2019-06-21)","v":"Episode title only; claim content not in source","b":"S","s":["W11S116"]},{"who":"Robert Temple","med":"book","ep":"The Sirius Mystery (1976; 2nd ed. 1998)","v":"Knowledge of Sirius B from Nommo amphibians","b":"S","s":["W16S22"]},{"who":"Ancient Aliens","med":"TV","ep":"Ancient Aliens \"The Star Gods of Sirius\"","v":"Blue, porous, nitrogen-rich stones allegedly retrieved (tested on show)","b":"S","s":["W16S01"]}],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[{"id":"W11T05","mw":"Griaule & Dieterlen; Ogotemmeli conversations Oct 1946 (33 days)","kn":"Griaule/Dieterlen claim 50-yr Sirius B orbit knowledge; van Beek 1991 (Current Anthropology): informants disagreed which star Sigu Tolo is and said they learned of it from Griaule; Calame-Griaule rebuttal; van Beek: no Dogon outside Griaule circle had heard of sigu tolo/po tolo; none knew Sirius as double star","pf":"disputed","st":"contradicted","sn":"van Beek 1991 (primary, Current Anthropology 32:139-167) fieldwork: Sirius-B knowledge absent even among Griaule informants; Calame-Griaule disputes.","b":"V","s":["W11S33","W11S104"]},{"id":"W16T04","mw":"Griaule & Dieterlen fieldwork as basis; Temple book St Martin's Press 1976, 2nd ed. 1998","kn":"Sirius B predicted 1844, first observed 1862","pf":"modern claim on ethnography","st":"contradicted","sn":"Van Beek found no double-star belief; contact explanations (Brosch; Ridpath 1978; Sagan 1979; Oberg 1982).","b":"V","s":["W16S22","W16S08"]}],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Walter van Beek 1991 restudy (Current Anthropology 32) found no Dogon knowledge of Sirius as double star; contamination likely (Sagan, Ridpath).","alternative_reading":"Knowledge from amphibious visitors from Sirius.","alt_proponent":"Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery (1976)","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Griaule's method vs van Beek's field restudy.","key_theme":"Sirius B (po tolo) dense companion, 50-year orbit; Nommo amphibious beings","language":"Dogon","physical_object_institution":"n/a","composition_date":"oral; recorded 1931-56","oldest_ms_date":"Griaule & Dieterlen 1950 'Un système soudanais de Sirius'; Le Renard pâle 1965","b":"S"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W11S119","t":"Wikipedia The Sirius Mystery","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sirius_Mystery&oldid=1370790189"},{"id":"W11S116","t":"Wikipedia: List of Ancient Aliens episodes","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Ancient_Aliens_episodes&oldid=1378379851"},{"id":"W16S22","t":"Wikipedia The Sirius Mystery","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sirius_Mystery&oldid=1370790189"},{"id":"W16S01","t":"Wikipedia Ancient Aliens","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_Aliens&oldid=1371296510"},{"id":"W11S33","t":"Wikipedia Dogon people","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dogon_people&oldid=1377942689"},{"id":"W11S104","t":"van Beek 1991, Current Anthropology 32(2):139-167 (text via iscte PDF)","u":"https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/203932"},{"id":"W16S08","t":"Wikipedia Dogon religion","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dogon_religion&oldid=1381605408"},{"id":"S0472","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: The Sirius Mystery","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirius_Mystery"},{"id":"VTX032-10","t":"Chandra X-ray Center (2000): Sirius Matters, Alien Contact","u":"https://chandra.si.edu/chronicle/0400/sirius_part2.html"},{"id":"VTX032-11","t":"University of Arizona LPL: Sirius, the Dogon and the companion star","u":"http://vega.lpl.arizona.edu/sirius/A5.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Bonnet-Bidaud, J.-M. 2001–02. “L’observation de l’étoile Sirius par les Dogon”. ANKH, Revue d’Egyptologie et des Civilisations Africaines 10/11. Author’s online copy.","u":"http://bonnetbidaud.free.fr/sirius/mali/Sanga1998all_cea.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"van Beek, W. E. A. 1991. Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule. Current Anthropology 32(2): 139–167. Open repository copy: https://pure.uvt.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/1002365/dogonrestudied.pdf","u":"https://doi.org/10.1086/203932"},{"id":null,"t":"Ridpath, I. 1978. Investigating the Sirius “Mystery”. Skeptical Inquirer 3(1). Full text via archived CSICOP copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20030217073018/www.csicop.org/si/7809/sirius.html","u":"https://skepticalinquirer.org/1978/10/investigating-the-sirius-mystery/"},{"id":null,"t":"Bond, H. E. et al. 2017. The Sirius System and Its Astrophysical Puzzles: Hubble Space Telescope and Ground-based Astrometry. ApJ 840: 70.","u":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10625"},{"id":null,"t":"Benest, D. and Duvent, J. L. 1995. Is Sirius a triple star? Astronomy and Astrophysics 299: 621 (abstract record).","u":"https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1995A&A...299..621B"}],"qs":["Who first told the Dogon about Sirius B?","Why did a later team find no trace of the lore?","How much can one researcher's questions shape the answers?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Dogon12.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dogon12.jpg","title":"Dogon12.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Devriese","cap":"Dogon people, Mali."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Bandiagara_escarpment_2.jpg/1280px-Bandiagara_escarpment_2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bandiagara_escarpment_2.jpg","title":"Bandiagara escarpment 2.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Ferdinand Reus from Arnhem, Holland","cap":"Cliff dwellings in the Bandiagara escarpment — in the Sahel region of Mali."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Brooklyn_Museum_1989.51.39_Nommo_Figure_with_Raised_Arms.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_1989.51.39_Nommo_Figure_with_Raised_Arms.jpg","title":"Brooklyn Museum 1989.51.39 Nommo Figure with Raised Arms.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"The Tellem are thought to have occupied the region of the Bandiagara escarpment until the sixteenth century. The human form with raised arms is a common pose fo"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Brooklyn_Museum_1989.51.45_Female_Figure_%285%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_1989.51.45_Female_Figure_(5).jpg","title":"Brooklyn Museum 1989.51.45 Female Figure (5).jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"Figures like this one were placed on ancestral altars as links to a deceased person's soul. It is likely that this figure represents a Nommo, one of the first c"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Brooklyn_Museum_1995.171.11a-c_Kanaga_Mask_in_Three_Pieces.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Museum_1995.171.11a-c_Kanaga_Mask_in_Three_Pieces.jpg","title":"Brooklyn Museum 1995.171.11a-c Kanaga Mask in Three Pieces.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"Masks may be used at funeral ceremonies to honor and commemorate the dead as they enter the ancestral realm. Dogon dancers perform with kanaga masks at dama cer"}],"sum":"# The Dogon and Sirius: The Invisible Star in a West African Tradition\n\nOn the night of 31 January 1862, in Massachusetts, the American optician Alvan Graham Clark and his father pointed a new lens at Sirius to test it. The lens was eighteen and a half inches across, the largest of its kind in the world at the time, and Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, made a demanding target. Close beside its glare Clark saw a faint point of light. Eighteen years earlier the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel had noticed that Sirius wobbled as it moved across the sky and had put the wobble down to an unseen companion. Now someone had seen it.\n\nThat companion, Sirius B, is about 9,200 times fainter than Sirius itself. It took astronomers until the 1920s to understand what it was: a white dwarf, the collapsed core of a dead star, with slightly more than the mass of our Sun, 1.018 times in Bond's figures, packed into something close to the size of Earth. Modern measurements by Howard Bond and colleagues, using Hubble images and a century of ground observations, put its orbit around Sirius at 50.13 years.\n\nSo when two French ethnographers reported in 1950 that a people in Mali spoke of a tiny, extremely heavy companion to Sirius that circled it every fifty years, the claim landed like a dare.\n\n## The Dogon and their ethnographers\n\nThe Dogon live on and below the Bandiagara cliffs of Mali, about 300 kilometres south of Timbuktu. The French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen worked among them from 1931. According to their account, the deepest astronomical teachings were revealed to them between 1946 and 1950 by a small group of initiates.\n\nTheir founding article, \"Un systeme soudanais de Sirius,\" appeared in the Journal de la Societe des Africanistes in 1950. In it Sirius has a companion called po tolo, named after a tiny grain, said to be the smallest and heaviest of all things and to circle Sirius in fifty years. In a fuller account published later, it is also \"l'axe du monde entier,\" the axis of the whole world. The British astronomy writer Ian Ridpath, reading the 1950 article, quoted a detail later writers often skip: \"The period of the orbit is counted double, that is, one hundred years.\" The great Sigui ceremony, held every sixty years, was tied to the same cycle. The teachings came with sand drawings, including figures for po tolo and for a further body the ethnographers called emme ya.\n\nIn 1976 Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery took the dare. He proposed that the knowledge had come from amphibious beings from a planet in the Sirius system who visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Dogon ancestral spirits called the Nommo, water beings in their myth, became the centre of that argument.\n\n## What the sky allows\n\nModern astronomy makes it possible to grade the claims one at a time. A fifty-year orbit around Sirius is right; Bond's 50.13 years shows how close it lands. A small, very heavy companion is right.\n\nA third body is another matter. In 1995 the French astronomers Benest and Duvent proposed a small companion, Sirius C, on a six-year orbit, based on apparent wobbles in the data. The 2017 Hubble study ruled out third bodies down to roughly 15 to 25 times the mass of Jupiter over most orbits and called the six-year perturbation \"categorically ruled out.\" If emme ya is read as a third star, the sky does not support it.\n\nAnd no one sees Sirius B without a telescope. The astrophysicist Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud, of the French atomic energy commission, calculated that it is about ten times fainter than the faintest star the eye can see, and lies just 3 to 12 arcseconds from Sirius, against the eye's resolving limit of roughly 90 arcseconds.\n\n## What later fieldwork found\n\nThe tradition's weakest point is not the sky. It is the ear. In 1991 the Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek published a long restudy of the Dogon in Current Anthropology. His team interviewed widely, including among people Griaule had worked with. \"That Sirius is a double star is unknown,\" he reported; \"astronomy is of very little importance in religion.\" And: \"No Dogon outside the circle of Griaule's informants had ever heard of sigu tolo or po tolo.\" Some informants disagreed about which star sigu tolo even was, and some said they had learned of it from Griaule himself. Griaule's daughter, Genevieve Calame-Griaule, published a rebuttal.\n\nThe context matters. Ridpath noted that French schools had operated in the area since 1907, that White Fathers missionaries arrived in the 1920s, and that excitement over white dwarfs was public by then. Carl Sagan favoured the idea that a visitor brought it in the 1930s, perhaps Griaule himself, who had studied astronomy. But Ridpath also found that the missionaries' summary reports make \"no mention\" of the subject. Nobody has documented a specific person passing modern astronomy to the Dogon. The case for contamination rests on opportunity, not proof. The record marks the claim of contact with beings from Sirius as contradicted.\n\n## The sympathetic witness\n\nThe most careful sympathetic voice is Bonnet-Bidaud's. In July and August 1998 he travelled to Bandiagara with Germaine Dieterlen herself, on her final field mission after more than sixty years of Dogon study. They visited sites Griaule had recorded. He measured a stone alignment and found azimuths of 74 and 110 degrees, against computed rising directions of 71 and 107 degrees for the dates in question. His conclusion was that the Dogon really did watch Sirius closely: \"Les Dogons observaient bien Sirius et pour cela ils avaient construit un observatoire.\" They watched Sirius, and built an observatory to do it.\n\nHe doubted the missionary explanation, noting that missions reached the area late and that the whole cosmology seemed to turn on Sirius. On the central question, though, he stayed open. Outside contact is \"plausible, meme peut-etre probable, mais il n'y a aujourd'hui aucun moyen de le prouver.\" Plausible, perhaps even probable, but there is today no way to prove it.\n\n## What is left open\n\nRidpath put the problem with the literal reading in one line: read literally, the legend is \"riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors.\" The doubled hundred-year count, the shifting third body and the folding of star and seed into one symbol all resist a simple astronomical decoding.\n\nYet three facts remain on the table. A fifty-year orbit is not an easy guess. The companion's extreme density was not known anywhere before the 1920s. And the Dogon did watch Sirius with real precision, from stones set to its rising. What would change the picture is simple to state. A dated Dogon object, drawing or recorded statement describing a companion to Sirius before 1862 would transform the case. A named teacher or officer documented explaining white dwarfs in Dogon country in the 1920s or 1930s would close it. Neither has been found.\n\nPicture the stones Bonnet-Bidaud measured on the plateau, two lines laid out by Dogon hands toward the point on the horizon where Sirius rises before dawn, a few degrees off true, waiting for the brightest star to come up beside a companion no human eye has ever seen there unaided."},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"oral","h":"Date: oral; recorded 1931-56","s":[307]},{"v":"Dogon","h":"Language","s":[307]}],"hs":{"307":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX032.webp","w":1024,"h":1536,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Dogon12.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}