Avi is a technical writer and gardener who lives in Philadelphia with his wife, young son and toddler daughter.
Laird Scranton is an independent software developer from Albany, New York. He is the author of several books and articles on African and Egyptian mythology and language.
Avi Solomon: Who are the Dogon?
Laird Scranton: The Dogon are a modern-day African tribe from Mali who seem to observe many interesting ancient traditions. In fact, their culture can be seen as a kind of cross-roads for several important ancient traditions. As just a few examples, they wear skull caps and prayer shawls, circumcise their young, and celebrate a Jubilee Year like ancient Jews, they observe the same calendars and establish their villages and districts in pairs called "Upper" and "Lower" like ancient Egypt, and they preserve a detailed cosmology that bears close resemblance to Buddhism, only expressed using ancient Egyptian terms.
Dogon granaries in North Africa. Photo: Robin Taylor
Avi: What got you interested in the Dogon?
Laird: I came across references to the Dogon in a book called "Unexplained" by Jerome Clark, one of whose chapters discusses the mystery of how the Dogon - without the aid of modern telescopes - may have acquired specialized knowledge of astronomy.
Avi: How do the Dogon embody and transmit their knowledge?
Laird: The Dogon have no native written language and have apparently transmitted their knowledge from generation to generation orally, with the assistance of a complex set of mnemonic symbols and drawings, beginning with a grand mnemonic aligned ritual structure called a granary. Although the Dogon religion is a secret or esoteric tradition — meaning that only initiates to the religion are allowed to learn its innermost secrets — it is open to any person (male or female, Dogon or non-Dogon) who sincerely wishes to pursue it. A Dogon priest is required to respond truthfully to any question that is deemed appropriate to the initiate's status, and to remain silent (or lie, if necessary) in response to any question that is deemed to be "out of order."
Avi: What is the significance of Dogon cosmological myths?
Laird: The Dogon see their myths both as an instructed civilizing plan for humanity and as a coherent description of the processes of creation — both cosmological and biological. These myths begin with what are essentially fireside stories that describe in general terms how the stars and planets were formed, and include many of the archetypical themes and storylines of classical mythology, such as the Greek notion of stealing fire from the gods. However, the next level of myth and symbolism is intimately intertwined with civilizing skills such weaving, agriculture, metallurgy, and so on. Each act of daily Dogon life carries with it a degree of cosmological symbolism, and so each daily act reinforces what a Dogon tribesperson learns about the processes of creation.
Avi: How did the Dogon know that Sirius had a companion star and the exact length of it's orbit?
Laird: The contention of the Dogon priests is that they learned it from revered ancestor or teachers, who were more capable and knowledgeable than the Dogon.
Avi: Could this knowledge have been transmitted to the Dogon by westerners?
Laird: A person could argue that the Dogon learned it from westerners, however in my opinion there are some significant difficulties with that point of view. First, both Dogon cosmology and their concepts relating to Sirius are given using ancient Egyptian words. For example, the great Dogon festival of Sirius — called the Sigi — is arguably the Egyptian word skhai, meaning "to celebrate a festival." In fact, in my books I trace virtually every key cosmological term of the Dogon to likely ancient Egyptian counterparts. Moreover, these words typically carry at least two levels of meaning, both of which can be shown to have existed in similar form in ancient Egypt. So the first difficulty lies with finding a western source that could have credibly given this information to the Dogon couched in ancient Egyptian words. Moreover, many of these same words are known to exist in the languages of other African tribes, so we would then have to explain how they came to be adopted in those languages.
Avi: Did the Dogon trick Marcel Griaule? Or did Griaule make up the Dogon mythology himself?
Laird: In his day, Marcel Griaule was the pre-eminent French anthropologist. He and his team studied the Dogon over the course of three decades, from the 1930'ss to the time of Griaule's death in 1956. Griaule characterized the Dogon religion as a closely-held secret tradition. In 1975, the Dogon became controversial when Robert Temple suggested that their Sirius knowledge could represent evidence of an alien contact. In the 1980's, Belgian anthropologist Walter Van Beek conducted a much briefer re-study of the Dogon, which turned up no evidence of Griaule's tradition. Based on this, Van Beek — rather than surmising that he might have failed to successfully penetrate what Griaule described as a secret tradition — concluded that the obliging Dogon priests had invented a cosmology to satisfy Griaule's questions. Van Beek also concluded that the Dogon granary was a form known only to Griaule.
In 2007 — fifty years after Griaule's death — my daughter returned from a visit to India excited to have seen aligned ritual structures called stupas that she felt resembled my Dogon granary. I pursued the resemblance and soon discovered that the cosmological symbolism of a Buddhist stupa is a point-for-point match with the symbolism reported by Griaule for the Dogon granary. In fact, the Dogon are known to have migrated to their current location from a region of North Africa that was a known home to ancient Buddhism. In other words, for Professor Van Beek to be correct, we'd have to believe the Dogon priests capable of having casually invented Buddhism. Likewise, the granary form that Van Beek concluded was known only to Griaule, was in fact familiar to large populations all across India and Asia.
Avi: How is the Dogon granary related to the Buddhist Stupa?
Laird: Each represents the Grand Mnemonic of their associated cosmologies — a structure whose plan recreates key shapes that relate both to the processes of creation and to the acquisition of civilizing skills. Both are based on the same basic plan, evoke the same series of geometric shapes in the same sequence and assign the same symbolism to those shapes. Both are tied to detailed cosmologies that define the processes of biological and cosmological creation, defined by matching symbols and concepts.
Avi: Can you give some significant examples of connection between Dogon and Egyptian words?
Laird: Each key term of Dogon cosmology comes packaged as a kind of bundle that includes: 1) Its pronunciation. 2) At least two logically-disconnected meanings, such that you cannot reasonably guess the secondary meanings simply by knowing the first. 3) An associated cosmological drawing. 4) A relationship to a stage of creation and/or mythogical character within the cosmology.
When proposing correlations between Dogon and Egyptian words, my intent is to demonstrate likely correlations between each of the bundle's elements.
While developing these matching sets of elements, I came to realize that the most consistent matches were to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary of Wallis Budge, not to the German Worterbuch that is preferred by many modern Egyptologists. The consensus is that Budge's dictionary is outdated and often unreliable — some Egyptologists go so far as to say that Budge could barely read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nonetheless, I realize that it would be unreasonable to suggest that Budge could have been grossly wrong about Egyptian words and yet still somehow in predictable agreement with the Dogon. And so I offer the body of interrelated Dogon words as new evidence to show that Budge must have been substantially correct in his understanding of Egyptian words of cosmology.
In my books I provide detail to support various Dogon/Egyptian word correlations. Examples include the name of a Dogon mythological character named Ogo, who plays the role of "light" in the Dogon creation myths, and the name of the Egyptian light god Aakhu. The Dogon counterpart to an atom is called po, while the Egyptian term for "mass, matter, substance" is pau. Components of the po are referred to using words such as sene, and sene bennu that are likely counterparts to the Egyptian words sen and sennu. The Dogon term bummo is a likely correlate to the Egyptian phrase bu maa, both the Dogon and Egyptian terms nu refer to water. The name if the Dogon creator god Amma is commonly correlated to the name Amen in the languages of various African tribes. The Dogon nummo is a likely counterpart to the Egyptian phrase nu maa.
I have attempted to correlate each key Dogon cosmological term to an Egyptian counterpart and supported those correlations with other "bundled" evidence - relationship to a common drawn shape, relationship to a matching mythological character, sharing position in the overall cosmology, and so on.
Avi: What are the Dogon parallels to Judaism?
Laird: I've mention that the Dogon wear skull caps, prayer shawls, circumcise their young, and celebrate a Jubilee year. They also have a tradition of ancestral families similar to the tribes of Judaism — one called Lebe (similar to the Levi in Judaism) and a priestly class called Hogon (similar to the Cohen in Judaism). The traditional symbolism of a Jewish altar and a Jewish chuppa are a close match for the Dogon granary and Buddhist stupa. Many of the Egyptian cosmological words are also Hebrew words — for example, a skhet is defined as a hut made of twigs and branches, similar to a sukkah. Budge often uses Hebrew words as a basis for comparison for pronunciation and meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphic words and the Dogon terms support these comparisons. Early in my studies, seemingly obvious parallels between Dogon words, symbols, concepts or rituals and those of Judaism helped convince me that the Dogon could be an important subject for study.
Avi: What wider speculations about the development of civilization can you draw from your comparative studies?
Laird: Each culture that I've studied who outwardly shares what I call "signature aspects" of this same cosmology understands it as an instructed civilizing plan, which they associate with knowledgeable teachers. Some explicitly claim that these teachers were non-human. Many - like the ancient Egyptians - state that they received their systems of writing, agricultural grains, or skills of metallurgy from "gods".
The suggestion is that there was - at some time prior to 3400 BC - a global Peace Corps - like effort to raise humanity up from the state of hunter-gatherers to a more civilized state.
From that perspective, the many striking similarities we see globally in ancient myth and symbol would be the surviving product of a shared system of instruction. Although many argue that cultures of similar capability and with access to similar environments and materials would naturally evolve similar themes and form, in my opinion these arguments beg the question of the often very complex symbolism that commonly attaches itself to those forms.
For example, the four faces of the pyramid-like Dogon granary are associated with the same four star groups as pyramids in the Americas, which were then used to regulate an agricultural cycle. Both cultures conceived of their pyramids as a woman lying on her back.
Perhaps most important is the notion, corroborated from culture to culture , that the system was instructed. One purpose of my studies has been to try to illuminate by way of comparison some of the very sensible aspects of that apparent plan.
Avi: What is the situation of the Dogon today?
Laird: The Dogon represent about 300,000 individuals today and are facing the many pressures of contact with more modern societies and technologies. Tourism has created an industry for them and provides a venue for their interesting traditional artwork. Even so, their inhospitable location in a hot, remote desert climate helps to maintain their independent identity. One can only hope that a cultural system that has proved its stability over periods of almost three thousand years in Egypt and perhaps an additional two thousand years, the Dogon will sustain itself in the midst of many modern pressures.
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"One can only hope that a cultural system that has proved its stability over periods of almost three thousand years in Egypt and perhaps an additional two thousand years, the Dogon will sustain itself in the midst of many modern pressures."
Let's hope so Laird. Their art, architecture and funeral masquerades remain a fascination for many, even to those of us with strong birth and cultural links to the continent
This is crazy, unscientific woo. I'm disappointed that you would publicize such nonsense. You should have consulted someone with a background in African archaeology, history, and ethnography.
@Zora point taken, but listening to so called experts, who often inhabit their own "expert world" spew their knowledge incessantly is like watching paint dry.
So odd that this was posted just now. I watched a recent addition to Netflix stream called The Secret Life of Plants the night before last which was concerned with a great number of, shall we say, fortean claims. I knew of it because of the Stevie Wonder album, which turns out was the soundtrack to the film (there was a book first, too.)
ANYway, the film details how the Dogon knew the specific orbit of a star around Sirius, even though they had no telescopes and the orbiting star is not visible without powerful ones. They claim this star was the seed that begat life in the universe (hence the plant connection.) Cut to a very modern-for-the-time (hilariously dated now) computer lab at an allegedly reputable astronomy outfit, which alleged that their lab was the first to accurately track said orbit, confirming that the Dogon were right all along. Mind-boggling, if true.
Hey, man; I dunno nothing, but if it isn't on the level, then this is a tremendously elaborate hoax without any obvious gain. "Follow the money?" What money? They've lived in the desert for centuries. It would seem the whole society is only concerned with metaphysics. Besides: Stevie Wonder did the music! Right?
I suspect that these claims that the Dogon knew something special about Sirius are a result of cultural contamination by the anthropologists.
First, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius), the fact that Sirius is a pair of stars was well-known before Marcel Griaule did his work:
"In 1844 German astronomer Friedrich Bessel deduced from changes in the proper motion of Sirius that it had an unseen companion. Nearly two decades later, on January 31, 1862, American telescope-maker and astronomer Alvan Graham Clark first observed the faint companion, which is now called Sirius B..."
The Dogon wouldn't have known this (unless someone had given them a nice 12 inch amateur telescope 50 years prior to the anthropological study), but Griaule could have.
Second, the orbit of the pair of stars is 50 years long. This just happens to be the same length as the interval between Old Testament Jubilees, which Griaule also claimed that the Dogon celebrated. So, the claimed knowledge of the orbit can be a coincidence, seeded either by actual Dogon knowledge of the Jubilee, or by the anthropologist's possible desire to synthesize many cultural threads within his research.
@Zora, you should try catching up on modern archaeology, start by googling Göbekli Tepe.
I'm always a little wary of the "ancient knowledge" of oral societies. I have a couple examples, and while anecdotes are not data, neither is oral history:
In about 1987 my father went to work on the San Carlos Apache reservation. Because he was working in, let's say, a social service dimension he bought literally EVERY book on Apaches. Some were racist monographs by people who considered them savages, some were well researched archeological tomes. Linguistic and cultural theory books, arts and crafts books, historical accounts from conquistadors, Spanish missionaries, territorial governments etc. etc.
According to the Apache religion / oral history, they have lived in the Southwest (Northern Mexico, Southern Arizona, Southern New Mexico) forever and have a series of places associated with their creation myths. However, according to historical evidence from the Spanish period and archaeological evidence the Apaches were in Texas a mere 500 years ago. Linguistic evidence suggest that they are part of the last migration out of Alaska before European Colonization began and that they traveled along the Eastern side of the Rockies until they reached Texas.
But, you say, that was 500 years ago! Half a millennium!
And our second anecdote:
About four or five years into working on the res, (and buying lots of art work / crafts) my father began to notice something strange. All of these Apache ladies who had been selling things like dolls, camp dresses, bead work and cradle boards (all for tourists) were now selling (sometimes in addition to, sometimes exclusively) dream catchers. Dream catchers are a plains tribe item, but had become popular with a certain new age type crowd. They were never part of the Apache craft repertoire, even when Apaches were being kept at Fort Sill Oklahoma. But when my father asked these women why they were making dream catchers, they were all affronted. Because you see, they had always made dream catchers. Their grandmothers had taught them how. Dream catchers had hung above their own beds at night. Dream catchers were Apache and those plains tribes had stolen them.
And this wasn't rigamarole for the tourists (which someone would often jokingly admit to my father - like the time they were selling baskets made in Korea to tourists), this was something they believed and they stuck to the story to this day.
Now I don't believe these people were lying. I believe that oral culture is highly mutable and posseses different ideas about history, memory and "fact" than a culture that depends on writing.
And finally, I find the idea that aliens came to earth, because humans were too stupid to figure out, after a couple million years of being human and 7 or 8 thousand years of planting and harvesting crops, that you planted stuff in the spring and harvested in the fall and also by the way, plants need water and irrigation systems and hey if you put a couple rocks on top of each other sometimes they'll stay and you can build things, so insulting it is almost impossible for me to say. Also, I find it charming that these 'impossibly advanced' cultures were almost entirely inhabited by brown people while Europeans were still mucking about in caves -- of course Europeans didn't need aliens, only dumb brown people. Ancient aliens is little more than a cover for racism of the highest order: people would rather believe that all humans are incapable idiots than some who don't look like them got to civilization first. Astounding.
"In fact, the Dogon are known to have migrated to their current location from a region of North Africa that was a known home to ancient Buddhism."
Oh yeah, that region of North Africa.
Just for giggles, let me just throw in that some ancient scholars and philosophers recorded that Sirius was reddish; when you look at it today, it clearly is not. Could one of its component members at one time been a red star? Who can say. To my knowledge, however, the Dogon do not mention this in their mythology. I tend to lean towards cultural contamination prior.
Boingboing, I am disappoint.
First the Dogon's ties to Buddhism are proved by the fact that "the cosmological symbolism of a Buddhist stupa is a point-for-point match with the symbolism reported by Griaule for the Dogon granary," and then two minutes later "a Jewish chuppa are a close match for the Dogon granary." So we can prove the Dogon are related to all these other implausibly distant groups because, um, some sacred spaces are similar to other sacred spaces? wtf? Anthropology FAIL.
Also, as a Buddhist, "In fact, the Dogon are known to have migrated to their current location from a region of North Africa that was a known home to ancient Buddhism" made me lol.
The source-of-Buddhism line made me go "huh?" too, but it's funny to see Buddhists jump in here all booty hurt (Buddhi hurt?) at the suggestion that some of their tenets might have a source that pre-dates Guatama sitting and meditating them up.
James Randi dissects this story very nicely in his book "Flim-Flam", written almost thirty years ago.
Dogon it, this is just more ancient-astronauts woo.
Well... as a Buddhist myself, the notion of Buddhism in N. Africa does seem weird. However, as someone with a BA and some grad work in Religious Studies, it doesn't. Religions are viral, and there is definite evidence of ancient travel between India and Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. Anyway, a quick google search on "Buddhism North Africa" didn't pull up tons, but it did provide enough for me to feel confident that there has been some reasonable scholarly discussion in this area. A recent, quite readable example thereof:
This has been debunked so many times it's getting really tiresome: http://michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabble/2011/06/the-sirius-mystery-you-dont-columbo-for-this-one/
Cosmic coincidence control pays special attention to those who pay special attention to it,
You can't prove languages are related just by looking for remotely similar words. You have to document regular sound changes from one to the other; this is the central method of historical linguistics.
For example, in modern German, a shift occurred from a t sound to an s sound in certain word positions. Other Germanic languages, like English and Dutch, had already split off before this occurred, and so do not show the shift. Thus German words "essen" and "aus" are equivalent to "eat" and "out."
It's easy to make unrelated languages look similar if all you're looking for are vaguely similar words. Conversely, related words may not look much alike until you trace all the sound changes. But if you want to convince me that "Hoben" is "Cohen," you'll have to show that all the initial "h" and "k" sounds switched, and that all the intervocalic "b" and "h" sounds switched. It wouldn't affect just one word; there would be a consistent pattern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change
I thought of "red Sirius," too. However, the Chinese never recorded Sirius as red, always as white:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993ChA%26A..17..223J
The most likely explanation for Ptolemy and others referring to Sirius as red is that the emergence of the star low on the horizon was used by the Egyptians to determine when the Nile was about to flood. As you might know from watching sunsets, objects low on the horizon often look red (the atmosphere is good at scattering blue light). Therefore, when the appearance of Sirius would have been most significant, Egyptians and their antecedents (Ptolemy, for instance) would have seen a red star; the monicker may have stuck, even if they knew it was white when it was higher in the sky. You can find a discussion of red Sirius here, although the comments are better than the article: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/01/resolving_the_red_controversy.php .
In any case, one should apply a lot of skepticism to ancient observations of nature. For instance, few people would suggest that all objects on Earth used to move predominantly straight up and down at constant speed, as Aristotle said they were wont to do...
They are primitives with no written language and a great deal of outside contamination and were hoping they stay the way they are???? I’m glad my people advanced before this inane attitude took hold.
If you base your theories of language and cultural relationships on comparing single words and word fragments you can "prove" any language is intimately related to any other language.
For example, the Japanese word for name is "namae". Just look at that! It's obvious that "name" and "namae" are just variations on the same word, so Japanese must be descended from ancient Anglo-Saxons who somehow wandered to Asia, or perhaps the entire English language and culture was derived from ideas imparted by a secret society of Shinto priests living underground in Yorkshire. (You never heard of them because they're secret, see?)
I knew a guy who was quite sure that Japanese must be related to his native Hungarian, IIRC because they both had a lot of word forms with "shta" endings.
TheDonna, your link was apparently suppressed by the Great Academic Conspiracy. Would you mind reposting it? That sounds interesting. I was aware of the Graeco-Buddhist history of Gandhara, now northern Afghanistan, but not of Buddhism making its way to the Middle East or North Africa.
A last thought: I'm more likely to accept someone from some academic specialty as an authority on software development than the other way around.
Awful interview.
* To our knowledge, there was no significant ancient "Buddhist" settlement in North Africa (some merchants? Probably. A small community in some trading centre? could be, but we don't have any proof of it. Bigger settlements? could be, but it is more difficult and we don't have absolutely any clue about this kind of settlement)
* No one knows for sure the origin of the Dogon people
* ... so, when you read something like "In fact, the Dogon are known to have migrated to their current location from a region of North Africa that was a known home to ancient Buddhism", you have a clear idea of the kind of guy you're dealing with.
And, of course, as has been pointed out, the "linguistic" arguments are nonexistent.
The Dogon are a pretty interesting bunch of people. When I was (much) younger, I was amazed by a short film featuring a Dogon hunter shooting in the bush using a Dogon-made flintlock with Dogon-made gunpowder. It's a pity to see such a culture treated in this dismal way...
Since Buddhism stems from Hinduism, I'd be pretty surprised to meet a Buddhist who didn't think that Shakyamuni Buddha was a follower of a multi-thousand year-old tradition.
Really? The Dogon and the Sirius companion star thing again?
This is an embarrassing entry to find on one of my favorite web sites. I expect more from you, Boing Boing. Try to pull it together, OK?
two things:
this guy is featured heavily in the 'documentary' series "The Pyramid Code", currently available via netflix streaming.. I am a little embarassed to admit that I watched the whole thing, as its definitely a steaming pile of sorts.
also, and to me more interestingly, the other night I stumbled upon this video of a free climber ascending a cliff above a dogon village - http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=isojdv36z0 - some of the 'granary' structures are shown and mentioned, as well as the 800-yr-old ruins of a lost 'pygmy' culture, situated 200 meters up the cliff face!
"You Don’t Need Columbo For This One"? Awwwww, too soon!
Actually, there's lots of documentation on the history of Buddhism in North Africa.
http://www.shrawasti.com/historical-interaction-between-the-islamic-and-buddhist-cultures
- Laird
Unfortunately, Randi also completely missed the apparent identity between Griaule's Dogon cosmology and Buddhist stupa cosmology.
- Laird
You're absolutely right, if your intent is to trace the etymology of a word from one culture to another. However, that's not the case here. It's perfectly legitimate for a Comparative Cosmologist to provide multiple points of evidence to demonstrate a likely correspondence between two cosmological symbols, two deities, two myths, and so on. So now imagine that you have two gods - one named Amma and the other Amen - who hold the same relative positions in their cosmologies, share the same icons, perform the same acts, bear the same relationship to other deities in their respective cosmologies,whose names are explicitly equated in other languages and carry matching second meanings.
My contention is that the evidence is enough to suggest a correspondence between the deities. Now, would anyone seriously argue that there is no reasonable relationship between the names?
- Laird
Compare what Griaule says about Dogon cosmology in his works with what Adrian Snodgrass says about a stupa in "The Symbolism of a Stupa." Then look up the symbolism of a chuppa in Judaism.
- Laird