The star Sirius is the brightest in the northern hemisphere. It is a double star with an invisible partner called Sirius B. Sirius B is a white dwarf, smaller than the Earth but incredibly heavy and it travels around Sirius every 50 years on an elliptical orbit.
Astronomers have known all this for a long time. The big question is, how did a primitive African tribe also know it, thousands of years before the telescope was invented? Sirius B wasn’t even photographed until 1970.
The Dogon live in Mali, west Africa, and are thought to be descended from the ancient Egyptians. Their knowledge of Sirius wasn’t widely known until the 1930s when two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen, interviewed some Dogon priests.
Primative Tribe: Amphibious Creatures
They had a fascinating story to tell. Their legends tell of a race of people called the Nommos who arrived from the Sirius system thousands of years ago. They were amphibious creatures who resembled our mythical mermaids and mermen. The Egyptian goddess Isis was associated with mermaids.
Stories of the the highly advanced Nommos can also be found in other ancient people’s myths, such as the Sumerians and Babylonians.
As well as telling the Dogon about Sirius, the Nommos also provided information about our own solar system, including the fact that the planets orbit the sun, Jupiter has four moons and Saturn has rings. None of this was generally known until the invention of the telescope.
In 1977, Robert Temple wrote a book, The Sirius Mystery, which told the world of the Dogon and their legends. Scientists rubbished the story, claiming that Westerners must have discussed astronomy with the Dogon priests who incorporated the facts about Sirius into their own legends.
This is a comfortable theory but doesn’t explain much of the Dogon’s knowledge or the fact that their ceremonies involving the double star system date back many centuries. It should be pointed out that one of the Dogon’s beliefs is way off the mark. They claim that Sirius B occupied the place where our sun is now.
Primative Tribe: Third star
The Dogon believe that there is a third star in the system, which we could call Sirius C. This has not been discovered so far, but if it exists our ever-more powerful telescopes will find it. The Nommos are said to have come from a planet orbiting this third star.
The possibility of a Sirius C was postulated in the 1990s by French astronomers
Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent, in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.. They thought the star was probably of a type known as a "red dwarf" and only had about .05 the mass of Sirius B.
Many ancient traditions tell of visits to Earth by entities from outer space. Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary “father of magic” is said to have brought civilisation to us and then returned to his home among the stars.
Source:
- The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple. 1977 with a new edition in 1999. Arrow Books. Unmuseum.org/siriusb.
Brian Baker - My name is Brian Baker and I live in Manchester, England though I was born almost 70 years ago in Liverpool, 30-odd miles down the ...
