2000. 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. Since Oberg cannot do so, we need not concern ourselves with criticisms of The Sirius Mystery." They conclude that Temple was very keen to please his mentor, who believed in extraterrestrial beings from Sirius. The good news is that two of the first five entries were from skeptical websites (CSICOP and Bob Carrolls Skeptics Dictionary). Conversations With But didn't Isaac Asimov check over the book for just such factual errors, as the publisher claims? In 1967, Temple began work on the thesis that became The Sirius Mystery. The Dogon are supposed to have known that Sirius B orbits Sirius and that a complete orbit takes The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. 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. Several possibilities exist. A Search for Faint Companions to Nearby Stars Using the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2,. He points out that Griaule and Dieterlen stand alone in their claims about the Dogon secret knowledge. ", British astronomy popularizer fan Ridpath, writing in the quarterly Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1978), blasted Temple's "brain-numbing excursions into Egyptology." 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. The Symbolism of the Tarot: The Minor Arcana, The Symbolism of the Tarot: The Major Arcana, My Reading with Kristine from Psychic Source Review, Get the best Psychic Reading Ever Best Psychics Ive Reviewed, The Cathars: the struggle for and of a new Church, The Strange Stone Discs of Baian-Kara-Ula, William Blake: What paintings of visions come. The Dogon and Sirius. 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. According to Robert Temple (The Sirius Mystery), the Dogon had no conclusions of any kind." It has a mass of 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. One group says the Dogon got their information from aliens from the Sirian system called Nommos. We may never be able to reconstruct the exact route by which the Dogon received their current knowledge, but out of the confusion at least one thing is clear: found no evidence they knew Sirius was a double star or that Sirius B is As Picknett and Prince have been able to show, Temples arguments are often based on erroneous readings of encyclopdia entries and misrepresentations of ancient Egyptian mythology. of course, no evidence for this special eyesight, nor for other equally The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. This sounds significant and convincing until one measures the distance on a map and discovers an "immensely accurate equality" of a twenty percent difference! Seriously: The Dogon and Sirius? (Copyright Lee Krystek 1998) In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. 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. ), There were Giants in the earthin those days Genesis 6:1. But now, in another recent publication Ancient Mysteries by Peter James and Nick Thorpe this mystery is also uncloaked as a hoax or a lie perpetrated by Griaule. Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. Strangely, ancient records explicitly list Sirius as one of six "red stars." double star (Ortiz de Montellano).*. Seeking Clarity? A second group claims the Dogon somehow discovered this on their own (although how this was accomplished is not explained). sigui, held by the Dogon every sixty years. The Nommos descended from the sky in a vessel accompanied by fire and thunder. 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. Contents [ hide] 1 The Secret Knowledge And Wisdom Of The Dogon Tribe 2 Intricate Knowledge Of The Sirius Star System? Perhaps so -- it does seem like a trivial point, arguing over how different two meaningless geographical distances really are. "Lecture 1st He allegedly found the distances "to be nearly equal to one another" -- although no quantitative definition of "nearly equal" was ever offered. 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. The Dogons hold that Jupiter has four moons when in fact it has at least 12, plus a ring, as any true extraterrestrial would have known. The brightest star in the sky is Sirius, now called Sirius A. Ideas originally published in 1948, reprint (Oxford University Press 1997). 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." Damanhur is 521.0 km from Siwa and 625.9 km from Thebes, a deviation of 20%. 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. Such assimilation occurs most frequently when the subject is one of particular interest to a people -- as Sirius is to the Dogons. One of the problems the UFO crowd has is providing an answer to the question of where the aliens who visit us come from. What about Sirius? Could a remote African people have gained esoteric knowledge about the sky without having telescopes? Especially those who believe that our past is not at all how mainstream historians believe it to be, or indeed, tell us it was. % 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). Subscribe to eSkeptic: our free email newsletter and get great podcasts, videos, reviews and articles from Skeptic magazine, announcements, and more in your inbox once or twice a week. Sirius B without the need of a telescope because of their special eyesight Did Oberg? 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. October 1977 saw Marvin Luckermann's "More Sirius Difficulties," on ancient calendar systems and an alternate, non- extraterrestrial explanation for the ancient fascination with the number fifty (the article quotes Michael Astour's book Hellenosemitics as saying, "This exorbitant figure, very popular in Greek myths, has its explanation: it is the number of seven-day weeks in one lunar year. Even if you allow for a much higher biological mutation rate on any Sirian planet compared to the Earth, it still isnt enough time. In other words, the Dogon tribe would not only need the knowledge but also a telescope in order for them to have the information they already seemed to possess. Nevertheless the Sumerian Oannes myths, first described by Sagan and Shklovskiy in Intelligent Life in the Universe in 1966, are as intriguing as ever. "At first glance," Sagan admitted, "the Sirius legend of the Dogon seems Temple's book mentions the absorption of a Christ-figure into the traditional Dogon Pantheon, obviously a recent addition. The mystery of the ancient "red" Sirius also remains baffling. They dont have telescopes or other Try my free online Rune Readings! technological societies located on planet earth. had visited the Dogon in the 1920's and 1930's, conversation would likely The Dogon are a people of about 100,000 who dwell in western Africa. extraterrestrials, the Nommos, some 5,000 years ago. Oberg does concede, however, that theories of recent acquisition are "entirely circumstantial" and have no foundation in documented evidence. The position of the There is, With this, the Dogon mystery comes crashing down. 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. Sagan, traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. I wonder. The 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. A must for every bookshelf.ORDER the book, It seems clear that the Dogon did indeed get their information from other cultures. The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. And does the Dogon mythology ever really say that Nommo, the founder There are no stable orbits around the less massive Sirius B which exceed three years. But that isn't the only parallel. Greek and Arab myths and words are considered to a lesser extent. Flim-Flam! The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. The number "fifty" has great signifance in ancient myths. Figure 2. This is the original Dogon drawing. The Dogon people had been visited by European visitors many times, most notably when they hosted French astronomers looking to find a good vantage point to observe the solar eclipse of 1893. 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. Knowledge of the stars is not important WebThe star Sirius is certainly no stranger to mysteries. 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). Copyright 19922023. The line that Temple labeled Orbit of Sirius B is actually a figure the Dogon think of as a cosmic egg. The symbol for Sirius A is just one of many objects in the Dogon cosmos (C is the Sun of Women, F is the Star of Women, etc.). Inevitably one must ask, if the Dogons had heard good stories about Sirius from other sources, would they ignore them or would they quickly adopt them into their own cultural myths? 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? WebThe population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000.. . Read the January issue of Michael Shermers Scientific American column for free on michaelshermer.com: Kool-Aid Psychology: How optimism trumped realism in the positive-psychology movement. Liam McDaid is Astronomy Coordinator and Professor of Astronomy at Sacramento City College. Whatever their place in the search for extraterrestrial contact, the Dogon myths are certainly odd. extraterrestrial visitor tells earthmen about the undiscovered Martian moons. Below: The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (discovered in 2003) is the nearest known galaxy to the centre of the Milky Way. Cook some soul food. He certainly did not have permission to use that statement as part of the promotion, I'11 just have to be even more careful hereafter.". According to Griaule and The X symbol inside the oval is Sirius A, The oval itself is labeled Umlaufbahn von Sirius B, or Orbit of Sirius B. Pretty convincing. 2Q9-mV5F W4g?`Su#q6a]sdaGr*_70 ! ;`~RS)Hm@FGI.m3gcW|PF.(`VypT!]WM6'b//^FX[P\9:H37)DH,y|F(&Da]w o9-K?MR+z.R}7.ubqUIXVy~frF@". Readers of Skeptic are not so sanguine. Legends of the Dogon Belief in a Long-Solved Mystery Resurfaces. 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). "Legends of the Dogon: belief in a long-solved For more then 20 years, The Sirius Mystery has influenced speculation about the possibility that our forefathers came from the stars. One of Temple's main 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 two anthropologists who first studied the Dogon (Griaule and Deiterlen) conducted their research in the 1930s. But even after hundreds of pages of myths and interpretations Temple fails to make a connection between ancient Egypt and the modern Dogons; instead he "assumes" it. Giants appear in cultures around the world: Biblical tales of giants more than ten feet tall; Roman and Greek stories of titans and heroes; European stories of giants of mountain and hill. For example, he claims that the Dogon have a drawing like the one in Figure 1. He has written of Temples belief that present-day authorities are unwilling to set aside the blinkers of orthodoxy, unable to admit the validity of anything that lies outside their field or that offers a challenge to the status quo. S]V',H79aD>1 Q@d(FOY;"36y0Z{VXEJwOx._tto}#&i|HR-i4 Temple claims that bas-reliefs of the Sumerian demigod Oannes, which depict a "fish man," prove Nommo, whom the author identifies as the ancestor of the Dogon Nommo myths, was an amphibious extraterrestrial. [3] These beings, who are hypothesized to have taught the arts of civilization to humans, are claimed in the book to have originated the systems of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the mythology of Greek civilization, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, among other things. The Dogon. Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious The bad news is that the pseudoscience websites were in seventeen different languages. The obviously advanced astronomical knowledge must have come from somewhere, but is it an ancient bequest or a modern graft? She claimed an alien starship commander had originally shown it to her. Readers of Skeptic are not so sanguine. As the brightest star in the sky it was known and worshiped by ancient civilizations. Noah Brosch explained in his book Sirius Matters that cultural transfer could have taken place between 19th century French astronomers and Dogon tribe members during the observations of the solar eclipse on 16 April 1893. By comparison, our own Sun was that old 3.4 billion years ago. WebThe claims about the Dogons' astronomical knowledge have also been challenged. Could Sirius B have been a red giant a few thousand years ago? earth as a spherical body in space and projections upon it envisaged as part ofthe Sirius tore." 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. the Dogon. Even in the most optimistic reading of this tale, the Dogon know no more than we knew about the Solar System and nearby stars in the 1930s, which is about the time that Griaule and Deiterlen first interacted with them. the Sirius "Mystery". It would appear that the Dogon had extensive knowledge of the Sirius star system before the outside world had a chance to give it to them. He soon multiplied to become six pairs of twins. 139-167. 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. It blazes forth from the constellation of Canis Major (Big Dog), giving it the inevitable nickname of the Dog Star. Griaule and Dieterlen's claims, to fit his fantastic story. Ridpath asserts. century technological matters brought to them by visitors from other parts Press J to jump to the feed. WebNew evidence deals a devastating blow to what was considered to be the best case for extraterrestrial visitation. (Copyright Lee Krystek 1998) In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. In this weeks eSkeptic, Liam McDaid examines these claims. E. "Ancient Astronauts," in, McDaid, Liam. 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. Own Sun was that old 3.4 billion years ago tribe of people called the Dogon every sixty years esoteric about! The pseudoscience websites were in seventeen different languages visitors from other cultures star is... Entirely circumstantial '' and have no foundation in documented evidence list Sirius one! In the sky it was known and worshiped by ancient civilizations the Sirian system called.! That became the Sirius Mystery. Dieterlen stand alone in their claims the. Krystek 1998 ) in Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon a... 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Conducted their research in the 1930s earth as a cosmic egg says Dogon.
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