The two anthropologists had lived among the Dogon tribe in Africa since 1931, and in 1946 Griaule was initiated into the religious secrets of the tribe. To quote Ancient Mysteries: While Temple, following Griaule, assumes that to polo is the invisible star Sirius B, the Dogon themselves, as reported by Griaule, say something quite different. To quote the Dogon: When Digitaria (to polo) is close to Sirius, the latter becomes brighter; when it is at its most distant from Sirius, Digitaria gives off a twinkling effect, suggesting several stars to the observer. This description of a very visible effect causes James and Thorpe to wonder as anyone reading this should do whether to polo is therefore an ordinary star near Sirius, not an invisible companion, as Griaule and Temple suggest. In reply Temple produces evidence for the great antiquity of the Sirius cult. Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. This is strange, because one would think that it would be a major discovery in anthropology. by Liam McDaid. If a European had visited the Dogon in the 1920's and 1930's, conversation would likely have turned to astronomical matters, including Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and the center of Dogon mythology. Webplanet earth. How is that the Dogan tribe has a culture that combines elements from 3 different ancient traditions "rituals of Judaism, practices of ancient Egypt, and a symbolic cosmology that's closely resembles Buddhism? MANY SKEPTICS WOULD LIKE TO THINK THAT ONCE SOMETHING IS debunked, that will be the end of it. van Beek, Walter E. A. History Debunked then goes on to demonstrate the type of pseudo-scientific nonsense this has lead to by providing a link to an Ethnomathematics paper and reading out its conclusion. for some unknown reason from a planet orbiting Bullard, Thomas. They know about the existence of the star Sirius B, a companion star to the brightest star in our sky, Sirius A. Journalist and skeptic James Oberg collected claims concerning Dogon mythology in his 1982 book UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries. A teacher named Marjorie Fish tried to corroborate Hills map by matching it to the Sun and nearby stars like Tau Ceti and Zeta Reticuli 1 and 2. Temples He says the references are there but recorded in riddles which he alone has been able to decipher. Also, in the 1980s and 1990s, anthropologist Walter van Beek could find no evidence that the Dogon possessed knowledge about Sirius B today.9 But more enlightening is the fact that Griaule studied astronomy in Paris and brought star maps with him to Mali. Dogon people are renowned for their knowledge about the Sirius Star system which dates back to 3200 BC, long before scientists discovered it in 1862 The traditional mythology of the Dogon is amazing. The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. Knowledge of the stars is not important "We have in the Dogon information a predictive mechanism which it is our duty to test, regardless of our preconceptions." The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. Clearly the Dogons (in common with many other cultures) were fascinated by Sirius, probably because its position in the sky was crucial to successful agriculture (it's the only star they have a name for.) The book presents the hypothesis that the Dogon people of Mali, in West Africa, preserve a tradition of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings from the Sirius star system. The author mentions that he could have made the book much longer but restrained himself "lest I blow this book up into a pufball of miscellaneous odds and ends" -- which prompted one reviewer to remark that Temple had stopped much too late to avoid that fate. They have a traditional belief in a heliocentric system and The two anthropologists who first studied the Dogon (Griaule and Deiterlen) conducted their research in the 1930s. Because Sirius B moves from 8 to 31 AU distance from Sirius A, it is unlikely that planets orbiting Sirius A would have stable orbits. There are no stable orbits around the less massive Sirius B which exceed three years. He shows a total ignorance or disregard for almost every fact in my book, and there is hardly a single thing in his review which is remotely accurate." A recent newsletter from my local astronomy association still found the Dogon and their mysterious knowledge of Sirius B worth mentioning. WebDogon and the Sirius Mystery. Were aliens, lost technology or something else entirely involved? The Dogon have a Webplanet earth. The Dogon People Revisited.. Just when multi-cellular life would began, Sirius A would become a Red Giant, crisping any nearby planets. Zeta Reticuli 2 (with about the same temperature and mass as the Sun) is another candidate. Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. Further, "The fact that the Dogon do not talk of another planet with rings beyond Saturn [i.e., Uranus, whose rings were discovered in 1977--and the rings of Jupiter weren't discovered until after Sagan's book was written, although they would have been clearly visible to any arriving extraterrestrial spacecraft] suggests to me that their informants were European, not extraterrestrial." WebThe Dogon understanding of astronomy was comparatively modern but has several known misconceptions - it entirely lines up with the European understanding as of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the discovery of relativity. According to Robert Temple (The Sirius Mystery), the Dogon had The star Sirius is certainly no stranger to mysteries. Whew! Using similar techniques other writers have "discovered" dozens of different, often contradictory "ancient secrets" about Atlantis, primitive Christianity, forgotten wisdom, ancient visitors and numerous other things. ;p7D) Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. (Photo by John and Keturah. Nigel Appleby whose book Hall of the Gods was withdrawn from publication has admitted to being tremendously influenced by Temples Sirius Mystery. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. The Dogon are a people of about 100,000 who dwell in western Africa. The second idea, championed by Afrocentrist historians, is that the Dogons either found out about Sirius B on their own or learned about it from the Egyptians. The tribe has a periodic Sirius festival called the "Segui" ceremony; each celebration lasts several years (the last was in 1968-72.) All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule. Van Beek states that this creates a major problem for Griaules claims. No other anthropologist supports their opinions. by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano. According to the Dogon, the instructor gods descended from Sirius and brought knowledge and wisdom. (Copyright Lee Krystek 1998) In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The immunity of pseudoscientists to criticism is well known to skeptics, yet I was curious. Sagan, York: Random House, 1995). The Dogon myths may or may not be related to these other putties (or even to Kepler's supernova, which has been seriously suggested.) Some of this information has been selectively interpreted by Temple to support his claims. Temple sees the existence of Sirius C as a vindication of one of his claims, although it should be remembered that multiple star systems are common (like Alpha Centauri, with its three stars). different civilizations thousands of miles or thousands of years apart and to other equally questionable tactics. The interval between ceremonies may be forty, fifty or sixty years. The good news is that two of the first five entries were from skeptical websites (CSICOP and Bob Carrolls Skeptics Dictionary). Temples solution referred to legends of a mythical creature, the god Oannes, who might have been an extraterrestrial, described as descending to Earth from the stars to bring civilising wisdom to the Dogon forefathers. double star (Ortiz de Montellano).*. Nor does he establish a connection between the Dogon creator Nommo and the star Sirius. MANY SKEPTICS WOULD LIKE TO THINK THAT ONCE SOMETHING IS debunked, that will be the end of it. What is interesting is that the Dogon knew about Sirius and its triple star system way before modern science found out its existence. The number "fifty" has great signifance in ancient myths. Of those websites, over 400 had been updated within the last three months. In 1952, Young was one of nine people present during the first contact with the Council, an event initiated by Andrija Puharich, the man who brought Israeli spoonbender Uri Geller to America. There is, And finally, even if Sirius B had been a visible red giant a few thousand years ago, how would the Dogon know that Sirius B was still there after it became a white dwarf? extraterrestrials, the Nommos, some 5,000 years ago. Readers of Skeptic are not so sanguine. Temple offered another line of reasoning. Sagan has recounted numerous examples from Arizona and New Guinea -- and other scholars have noted similar instances -- of the rapid assimilation of new stories, songs and lore into the eclectic mythology of Stone Age peoples. ch. A revised edition was published in 1998 with the new subtitle New scientific You dont have to watch too many Fantasy Channel (formerly known as the History Channel) specials on ancient astronauts before youll be told about the primitive African Dogon of Mali and their advanced astronomical knowledge bestowed, of course, by extraterrestrials. WebThe Dogon, the Nommos and Sirius B Artist's conception of the Dogon's legendary Nommos. A critical analysis has to investigate the accuracy of such claims, so as to judge the validity of the book's conclusions. ", A series of articles has appeared in the Griffith Observer, an astronomy magazin Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious % The Dogon also knew Sirius B was about the size of Earth and spun on its axis. It is a type of fuel that can lead to what Clay Farris Naff cleverly calls the neuron bomb. In this post, Michael Shermer asks, Is there a moral standard that stands above all the worlds religions that is based on some transcendent source?. their knowledge without contact with an advanced technological Its appearance in the dawn sky over Egypt warned of the impending Nile floods and the summer's heat and marked the beginning of the Egyptian calendar. The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark (New the Dogon. For instance, the anthropologist Walter Van Beek, who studied the Dogon after Griaule and Dieterlen, found no evidence that the Dogon considered Sirius to be a double star and/or that astronomy was particularly important in their belief system. G. Stein (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. The Nine also claim to be extraterrestrial beings from the star Sirius. The "mystery" that is central to the book is how the Dogon allegedly acquired knowledge of Sirius B, the white dwarf companion star of Sirius A, invisible to the naked eye. Based on Carrolls website (skepdic.com), the Dictionary is the definitive short-answer debunking of nearly every thing skeptical. But Fishs map used an arbitrary viewpoint in space. And if all this were not enough for the Sirians, recent studies have suggested the possibility of a third star (Sirius C) orbiting Sirius B, although it would be a very low mass star which so far has escaped detection.5 Stable planetary orbits may be very hard to find in the Sirian system. MANY SKEPTICS WOULD LIKE TO THINK THAT ONCE SOMETHING IS debunked, that will be the end of it. Temple's book is indeed extremely long and many other researchers have echoed Asimov's assertion that it is "unreadable." What is interesting is that the Dogon knew about Sirius and its triple star system way before modern science found out its existence. The main problem with the alleged antiquity of the Dogon "Sirius secrets" legend is that they are reminiscent of European Sirius speculations of the late 1920s. WebThe star Sirius is certainly no stranger to mysteries. These same myths, Temple claims, identify a planet circling that star as the home of Nommo, an alien creature who founded the Dogon civilization. WebThe Dogon reportedly related to Griaule and Dieterlen a belief that the Nommos were inhabitants of a world circling the star Sirius (see the main article on the Dogon for a discussion of their astronomical knowledge). The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. Try my free online Rune Readings! History Debunked then goes on to demonstrate the type of pseudo-scientific nonsense this has lead to by providing a link to an Ethnomathematics paper and reading out its conclusion. Myths and legends that are passed through generations are thousands of years old. Since Sirius B is a very dense white dwarf star about the size of Earth, it can only be seen in dark skies with medium-sized telescopes. And does the Dogon mythology ever really say that Nommo, the founder Temple, however, has stated in the reprint of The Sirius Mystery (1999) that he in no way supports what he refers to as "sinister cults" that have been inspired by his book. ", Temple replied in Fate: "The pattern published in my book was drawn by a professional cartographer who earns his living by drawing reliable maps for an international corporation." One example: "If a Sirius-C is ever discovered and found to be a red dwarf, I will conclude that the Dogon information has been fully validated." So it merely remains for any interested reader to check and see which of us is correct. this about a star that cannot be seen without telescopes, and he made no They point out that the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used spherical lenses6 (even though they are a bad choice to use in telescopes try seeing an image through a glass bead). What about Sirius? The Sirius mystery, though, remains of great interest to many researchers today. The other five are still seen as red but from the time of Arab astronomers to the present day Sirius has been blue-white. Legends of the Dogon Belief in a Long-Solved Mystery Resurfaces. You guessed it -- Sirius! Perhaps the source was Temple The Bad Archaeology page on the Sirius Mystery has summarize the basic details well: In 1976, Robert K G Temple (born 1945), an American living in the UK, published what was to become a seminal work of Bad Archaeology, The Sirius Mystery. September 1976 saw Also, why would the Dogan people not divulge where they received such recent knowledge of transfer if they had of gotten this knowledge from Europeans. WebAlso there is the fact that they described the Nommo as fish people and you find all kinds of half man/half fish - serpent imagery all over the Mediterranean. As the brightest star in the sky it was known and worshiped by ancient civilizations. The brightest star in the sky is Sirius, now called Sirius A. Sirius One additional disturbing note: That distance has been computed based on a true geodetic oblate spheroid, but even assuming a flat surface would only have introduced an error of a few tenths of one percent at most (Temple obviously didn't know that, or he wouldn't have asserted that measurements even less accurate than that were proof that ancients took Earth's sphericity into account.). (2004). Griaule, Marcel. Flim-Flam! He allegedly found the distances "to be nearly equal to one another" -- although no quantitative definition of "nearly equal" was ever offered. Pseudoarchaeology book by Robert K. G. Temple, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sirius_Mystery&oldid=1135262588, CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 23 January 2023, at 16:12. The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. [12] According to Oberg, the Dogons' astronomical information resembled the knowledge and speculations of late 1920s Europe, suggesting that the Dogon were influenced by European visitors before their mythology was recorded in the 1930s. knowledge of the satellites of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, among other Precise maps at the NASA space photo interpretation lab in Houston list "Behdet" as an ancient name for modern Damanhur, located today at 31.03 degN, 30.28 degE, i.e., more than a hundred kilometers away from where Temple locates his "Behdet" at 31.50 degN, 31.23 degE. But it seems that Griaule, a scientist, wanted to attribute to earlier civilisations more knowledge than they actually possessed. If so, I wonder why that passage was ever "worth pointing out" in the book in the first place. thousands of similar objects along with even heavier and denser objects such as neutron stars and black holes. sigui, held by the Dogon every sixty years. Finally, he asked me point-blank if I could point out any errors in it and partly out of politeness, partly to get rid of him, and partly because I had been able to read very little of the book so that the answer was true, I said I could not point out any errors. Laird Scranton makes it clear that he ruled out this possibility in this interview. Given that the French stayed in their territory for five weeks and had several local guides, it would not be surprising if they shared some astronomical knowledge during that time. Sirius was already the subject of a mystery concerning the traditional lore of the Dogon tribe of Mali, near Timbuktu in western Africa. The Skeptics Society is a non-profit, Sagan, Carl 1980. 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