Dogons. The mystery of the Abyss of the African tribe

The Savages of Africa… In 1931, the famous French ethnographer Professor Griol visited West Africa. I studied one of the unremarkable tribes called the “Dogons”. It was in the Sudanese lands of the bend of the Niger River (today the territory of the Republic of Mali). The Dogons did not stand out among their neighbors in terms of civilization, but the professors were surprised and interested in the unusual oral traditions and myths of the tribe. For the first time in Africa, he came across detailed stories about the origin and structure of the universe. Without primitive animism, I learned about the Dogon’s long — standing ties with space.

For many years, step by step, Griol and his colleagues began to gain the trust of the aborigines. They slowly initiated the “white people” into their innermost secrets of cosmogony. Not all of them, not at once. The “initiates” were Griol himself and his assistant, the future professor Germaine Dieteren. This is how the formation of the universe took place according to the Dogon legends:

“In the beginning of all things there was Amma, the God who rested on nothing. Amma was a ball, an egg, and the egg was closed. There was nothing else besides him.”

Amma is something immobile, strongly compressed and very dense in the Dogon language.

The world inside Amma was still without time and without space. Time and space have merged into a single whole. But the moment came when Amma opened his eyes. At the same time, his thought came out of the spiral, which, whirling in his womb, marked the future expansion of the world.

The whole world is spinning in a spiral. It was Amma who created an infinite number of stellar worlds, forcing them to twist into such a shape (most fully formed galaxies, as is known, have exactly the shape of a spiral). Another place in the Dogon mythology was: Fixed stars are stars that do not revolve around other stars. Planets and satellites of planets are stars that rotate, describing circles around other stars.

From the immediate environment of the Solar System, the Dogons were well aware of Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter, which were observed without telescopes. But Venus… has a satellite, they said. Science does not know about this. Talking about their cosmogonic knowledge, the Dogons rather smartly drew symbols and diagrams in front of the French, who were falling into a stupor, very understandable to modern people. Extremely difficult for the worldview of primitive people.

Jupiter was depicted as a large circle, where four small circles were placed. Satellites. These were exactly the brightest of the 16 planetary-type bodies that Galileo was able to see in 1610. The Dogons drew Saturn in the form of two concentric circles. To clarify, the outer contour is a ring.

Sirius. This is where the most amazing discovery awaited scientists. In the Dogon mythology, this particular luminary occupied a central place. This is a star system, which had a major impact on the development of life on Earth and is the basis of the foundations of the universe.

The system consists of Sirius proper, a second star (Sirius B) and a third star (Sirius C). The Dogons explained that all three “additional” celestial bodies are so close to the main star that it is difficult to see them. But Sirius B revolves around the main Sirius with a frequency of one revolution per 50 years. When she gets as close to him as possible:

it starts to shine very brightly, and when it moves away from it, it begins to twinkle itself, so that it seems to the observer as if Sirius B has turned into several stars.

This periodicity of the Sirius glow has been confirmed by astronomers (49.9 years), and so far they have discovered only the second of the stars mentioned by the “African savages”. The existence of “Sirius C” has not yet been confirmed, the topic is being discussed. Another mystery of the Dogon cosmogony concerned the immutable fact that Sirius B is not visible to the naked eye. No one, until the end of the XIX century, even knew about its existence (except for extremely knowledgeable Dogons).