DOGON AND SIRIUS

Opening

The Dogon are a people of the cliffs and plateau of central Mali. In 1950, two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, reported that Dogon elders knew that the star Sirius had an invisible companion that circled it roughly every 50 years. That is true of Sirius B, a white dwarf invisible to the naked eye. In 1976 Robert Temple's book The Sirius Mystery argued the knowledge must have come from visitors from Sirius. Later fieldwork found no trace of it among the Dogon themselves.

Timeline

1862The American telescope maker Alvan Graham Clark sees Sirius B for the first time, a faint companion to the brightest star in the night sky.

1915Astronomers find that Sirius B is small but extremely hot and dense, one of the first known white dwarfs. Its orbit around Sirius takes about 50 years.

1931 to 1956Griaule carries out fieldwork among the Dogon, yearly from 1946. In late 1946 he spends 33 days in conversation with the elder Ogotemmeli.

1950Griaule and Dieterlen publish "Un système soudanais de Sirius," describing Dogon beliefs about Sirius and its companions, including a tiny star orbiting it in about 50 years.

1976Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery translates the paper and argues the Dogon received their knowledge from amphibious beings from the Sirius system.

1978The astronomy writer Ian Ridpath argues that "there are any number of channels" through which the Dogon could have learned Western astronomy before Griaule arrived.

1991The anthropologist Walter van Beek publishes a restudy. His informants disagree about which star is meant, but "all agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule."

Key figures

Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, whose decades of Dogon fieldwork produced the original report.

Ogotemmeli, the Dogon elder whose long conversations with Griaule shaped much of what Griaule wrote.

Robert Temple, whose book turned an anthropology paper into an ancient-astronaut classic.

Walter van Beek, who returned to the Dogon and could not find the Sirius knowledge Griaule described.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail is entirely in what anthropologists wrote down, and that is the problem. There is no independent Dogon record from before Griaule, and later researchers could not confirm his account. Griaule's own method, working through chosen informants and avoiding people with much European contact, has been criticised as shaping what he heard. His daughter defended him, arguing van Beek did not follow the steps needed to reach that knowledge.

Things you might not know

• Griaule also reported other "knowledge." He said the Dogon knew of Saturn's rings and Jupiter's moons, and critics noted errors in those claims too, such as the number of moons.
• Europeans were in the area early. One critic pointed to a French eclipse expedition in West Africa in 1893, decades before Griaule's work.
• Some astronomers looked for a third star. A 1995 study raised the possibility of a small extra companion to Sirius, but later work made it unlikely.
• A great ceremony is due. The Dogon Sigui ritual takes place about every 60 years. The last ran from 1967 to 1973, and the next is expected around 2027.

Competing explanations

Contamination. Western astronomy reached the Dogon through schools, missionaries, travellers or Griaule's own questions, and his reports mixed it with traditional belief. This is the mainstream view, and van Beek's restudy supports it.

Genuine ancient knowledge. Temple's view: the Dogon knew about Sirius B before Western astronomers could have told them, so the knowledge must have come from elsewhere. It depends entirely on Griaule's account being an accurate record of old belief.

Later life of the case

The Sirius Mystery became one of the founding texts of the ancient-astronaut movement and is still in print. Among anthropologists, the case is now a standard example of how a researcher's questions can shape the answers.

Finding

The strongest reading is that the Dogon "Sirius mystery" comes from Griaule's encounter with the Dogon, not from Sirius. Later fieldwork could not find the knowledge, the people it was found among said they learned it from Griaule, and there were plenty of earthly routes for it to arrive.

What still will not resolve: exactly what Ogotemmeli and the other elders told Griaule, and how much of it was old tradition, since only Griaule's version of those conversations was written down.