{"it":{"id":"TX057","kind":"text","sub":"Dogon (Mali)","name":"Nommo (amphibious ancestral spirits)","place":"Held in several collections","date":"oral; Griaule & Dieterlen 1930s-60s","oldest":"1950-65","inst":"n/a","lang":"Dogon","src":[255,539,522,599],"tags":["Africa","Sky beings"],"sum":"The Dogon speak of the Nommo, fish-like ancestral spirits, 'Masters of the Water'. In 1976 a book linked them to Sirius.","why":"It is the story that gives The Nommo its name, and it turns on who taught whom.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":4,"yt":"Compare Griaule with van Beek.","rel":["TX032","TX008"],"hook":"Griaule said the Dogon knew of a tiny star circling Sirius every 50 years. The puzzle is who told whom."},"S":{"255":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Nommo"],"539":["Wikipedia: Nommo","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nommo"],"522":["Wikipedia: The Sirius Mystery","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirius_Mystery"],"599":["van Beek 1991, Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Current Anthropology","https://doi.org/10.1086/203952"]},"rec":{"id":"TX057","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA153","a":"Amphibious beings from Sirius.","who":"Temple 1976","main":"Ancestral water spirits; Sirius link disputed (van Beek 1991).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Nommo","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[{"v":"teachers_of_civilization","ev":"Nommo 'Teachers'","n":"Griaule-only","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Nommo"}],"tl":[{"comp":"20th c. ethnography","old":"none (fieldwork)","pub":"Griaule & Dieterlen 1950","b":"S","url":"https://doi.org/10.1086/203916"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Ancestral water spirits; Sirius link disputed (van Beek 1991).","alternative_reading":"Amphibious beings from Sirius.","alt_proponent":"Temple 1976","mistranslation_or_dispute":"See TX032.","key_theme":"amphibious 'Masters of the Water' and 'Teachers'","language":"Dogon","physical_object_institution":"n/a","composition_date":"oral; Griaule & Dieterlen 1930s-60s","oldest_ms_date":"1950-65","b":"S"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0093","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Nommo"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Nommo","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nommo"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: The Sirius Mystery","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirius_Mystery"},{"id":"S2600","t":"van Beek 1991, Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Current Anthropology","u":"https://doi.org/10.1086/203952"},{"id":"VTX057-5","t":"Wikipedia: Dogon people","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people"},{"id":"VTX057-6","t":"JSTOR stable 2743641 (journal article on the Dogon and Sirius)","u":"http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743641"},{"id":"VTX057-7","t":"Griaule and Dieterlen, A Sudanese Sirius System (English translation, PDF hosted by M. S. Heiser)","u":"https://drmsh.com/PaleoBabble/Grialle%20Sirius%20Dogon.pdf"}],"sum":"# The Nommo: The Masters of the Water\n\nIn October 1946 a blind old hunter sat down in a village on the Bandiagara cliffs of Mali and began to talk to a Frenchman. His name was Ogotemmeli. He had learned what he knew from his father and grandfather, by mouth, over more than twenty years, and for thirty-three days in a row he passed it on to Marcel Griaule. What he described first was not a god or a hero but a pair of beings with green skin and green hair, human from the loins up and serpent-like below, with red eyes, forked tongues and arms that bent without joints. He called them the Nummo. He also called them Water.\n\n## The people of the cliff\n\nThe Dogon live on the central plateau of Mali, south of the great bend of the Niger, around the town of Bandiagara. Their country is split by the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone wall up to 500 metres high that runs for about 150 kilometres. Villages cling to its face and gather at its foot, near water. Their own traditions say the Dogon came to these cliffs from Mande, to the southwest, and that they retreated there over centuries rather than give up their religion to Muslim states around them. Today they number between 400,000 and 800,000 people.\n\nIn Dogon religion the creator is Amma. The Nommo, or Nummo, are the primordial ancestral spirits, sometimes called demi-deities. The word is said to come from a Dogon term meaning \"to make one drink.\" They are amphibious, hermaphroditic and fish-like. They carry three other titles that matter for what came later: the Masters of the Water, the Monitors, and the Teachers.\n\n## A sacrifice that seeded the land\n\nAs the creation story is told, the Nommo was the first living thing Amma made. Soon afterwards it multiplied into four pairs of twins. One of those twins rebelled against the order Amma had set. To restore it, Amma sacrificed another of the Nommo, cut up its body and scattered the pieces across the universe. Wherever a piece fell, the Dogon say, a Binu shrine was raised, which is why these shrines are spread across their territory. In one line Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen recorded, the logic becomes plain: \"The Nommo divided his body among men to feed them; that is why it is also said that as the universe 'had drunk of his body,' the Nommo also made men drink. He gave all his life principles to human beings.\" The Nommo is also said to be the origin of the first Hogon, the spiritual leader of a Dogon community.\n\nBehind this lies the theme Griaule heard everywhere: the loss of twin-ness. \"The Eight original Ancestors were really eight pairs,\" he wrote, and after them humans were usually born single. The Nummo were dual, male and female in one. The jackal, born alone and without a soul, brought disorder into the world. Ogotemmeli put it simply: \"The jackal was alone from birth, and because of this he did more things than can be told.\"\n\n## The man who wrote it down\n\nGriaule was not a casual visitor. Born in 1898, he had trained toward engineering, flown as a pilot in the French Air Force at the end of the First World War, and then turned to anthropology under Marcel Mauss. He first reached the Dogon on the Dakar to Djibouti expedition, which crossed Africa between 1931 and 1933. He came back in 1935, 1937 and 1938, and every year from 1946 until his death in 1956. He pioneered aerial photography and team surveys in the field. The talks with Ogotemmeli became Dieu d'Eau in 1948, published in English as Conversations with Ogotemmeli.\n\nGriaule wanted the deepest layer of the lore. According to the historian James Clifford, he sought out the informants best qualified to speak of tradition and deeply mistrusted converts to Christianity or Islam and people with too much contact with whites. That ambition is the hinge of the whole story, because in the late 1940s Griaule and Dieterlen wrote that they had been given further, secret teachings about the Nommo.\n\n## The secret version\n\nIn that version, the Nommo lived on a world circling the star Sirius. They came down from the sky in a vessel, with fire and thunder. On arrival they made a reservoir of water and dived into it, because they needed water to live.\n\nThe astronomy came with it. Griaule and Dieterlen reported that the Dogon named Sirius sigi tolo, the star of the Sigui, a great ceremony held about once every sixty years, and that they spoke of a tiny companion, po tolo, the Digitaria star, which circled Sirius every fifty years, and of a second companion, emme ya tolo. Sirius does have a companion: Sirius B, a white dwarf invisible to the naked eye, predicted in 1844 from the wobble of Sirius and first seen in 1862. Its orbit takes about fifty years. The two anthropologists set down their own puzzlement: \"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.\"\n\nIn 1976 Robert Temple's book The Sirius Mystery read the Nommo as real beings from the Sirius system who taught the arts of civilisation, and traced echoes of them in Egypt, Sumer and Greece. The amphibious teachers of a West African people became one of the most famous stories in modern speculation about the past, and they gave this site its name.\n\n## The mainstream answer\n\nMost scholars place the source much closer to home. The astronomer Ian Ridpath wrote in 1978 that the legend, read literally, is \"riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors,\" and that there were many channels by which Western knowledge could have reached the Dogon before Griaule arrived. Carl Sagan, in Broca's Brain in 1979, noted that the Dogon picture gave Saturn as the only ringed planet, the furthest from the Sun, which fits the European knowledge of the time rather than the sky as it is. Noah Brosch pointed to a French expedition led by Henri Deslandres that spent five weeks in the region to watch the solar eclipse of 16 April 1893.\n\nThe heaviest blow came from inside anthropology. Walter van Beek restudied the Dogon and reported in Current Anthropology in 1991 that, though people spoke of sigu tolo, \"they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant.\" Some said it was an invisible star that rises to announce the festival, another said Venus. \"All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule.\" Van Beek concluded that Griaule's forceful questioning may have produced new myths in the telling. Griaule's daughter, the anthropologist Genevieve Calame-Griaule, answered that van Beek had not taken the proper steps to earn esoteric knowledge and that his informants may have taken him for an official checking their Muslim orthodoxy.\n\n## What still does not close\n\nNeither side has the document that would end it. The journalist James Oberg, no friend of the extraterrestrial reading, put it most precisely: \"The obviously advanced astronomical knowledge must have come from somewhere, but is it an ancient bequest or a modern graft? Although Temple fails to prove its antiquity, the evidence for the recent acquisition of the information is still entirely circumstantial.\"\n\nThen there is the third star. A dynamical study in 1995 found that a small third body orbiting Sirius A could not be ruled out, with a stable orbit of up to about six years. Later infrared searches judged the chance low, though not zero. Temple had already staked his reading on it: if a red dwarf Sirius C were ever found, he wrote, he would consider the Dogon information validated. The sky has not yet answered.\n\nSo the story rests where Ogotemmeli left it: with beings that came from water, gave their bodies so that people could drink, and were remembered as teachers. If the details reached the cliffs in the 1890s or the 1930s, someone carried them there and someone wove them into a creation story that seemed already ancient. If they did not, then whose lesson were the Masters of the Water remembered for teaching?","qs":["Van Beek found the Dogon said they learned about the star from Griaule. How much can a researcher shape the beliefs he records?","Oberg called the case for recent contact circumstantial. What kind of evidence could settle where the Sirius story came from?","If the Sirius story came from Griaule, what does that say about outsiders retelling African beliefs?"],"gal":[{"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://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/PorteMali.jpg/1280px-PorteMali.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PorteMali.jpg","title":"PorteMali.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"BluesyPete","cap":"Gate of the Hogon hut in the village of Sangha - Ogol district - Pays Dogon - Mali"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1950-65","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[334]},{"v":"Dogon","h":"Language","s":[334]}],"hs":{"334":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Nommo"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX057.webp","w":1152,"h":1536,"o":"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"}}