The Sacred Power of the World: Dogon Cosmology as the Prototypical Heirocentric Universe
By John Knight Lundwall
According to the prolific classicist Hugh Nibley, the world of antiquity was sacrosanct in nature (Nibley, Temple, 15, 153-156). Anciently, religion, ritual, and cosmology were synonymous. You could not separate these components because each was an essential and reflective part of the heirocentric universe in which everybody and everything participated. No matter where we look in the past, even at cultures separated by language, time, and space: religion, ritual, and cosmology are interwoven into one grand fabric of thought and action.
Mircea Eliade agrees, asserting that ancient culture was prototypically cosmological, and thus all acts of the “primitive,” whether called “religious” or “ritualistic”, were a reflection of a deeply philosophical ontology that was by nature cosmological. Thus, every act of plowing, planting, harvesting, or ritual sacrifice, of trade and commerce, of sex and birthing, indeed, every human act, was a repetition of the mythical cosmogony which brought into the world the moment of first creation and first time. In this way, ancient culture perpetually renewed itself by replacing history with mythology. Furthermore, ancient religion, ritual, and cosmology (so often represented in a culture’s mythology) represented a highly sophisticated ontology where being was intrinsically defined in relationship to the cycles of nature and to mythic cycles of time.
Even Laura Grillo’s own graphical definition of religion cannot help but to repeat these patterns, showing that the initiate’s universe, with beliefs and rites, transcend through all planes of nature and cosmos until the individual has developed a relationship with each (see Appendix, pages 1-2). In this view, religion, ritual, and cosmology are all a synonymous, integral part of the initiate’s path.
Nibley, Eliade, and perhaps to a lesser degree Grillo, see in ancient, myth-making man a keen, philosophic mind that defines being and culture through a sacrosanct mythos highly detailed and reverently committed to nature, and particularly cosmology. Cosmology, of course, is the science of nature, especially as revealed in the macrocosm–the sun, moon, and stars, and the great cycles of time and space they create. Again, as Eliade declares, ancient religion sought to replicate these macrocosmic cycles in every aspect of living, and in sacred rituals which preserved the natural order. Black Elk, a chief of the Oglala Sioux, explains why this is so: “It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves” (Neihardt 160).
The sacred Power of the World is a real thing. The heirocentric cosmos reveals itself everywhere in nature. In fact, to be an authentic neophyte of the heirocentric universe is to be firmly rooted in the world–the world of above and below. This is not a feel-good metaphysics. Unlike the modern, new age spiritualism which offers the cannon of endless platitudes, charismatic kitsch, pop psychology, and ritual ersatz, cosmological religion is keenly aware of sacred science–the cycles of nature, recondite geometry, natural philosophy, and sacred number. Indeed, it is in these latter components that the essential messages of the heirocentric universe–the sacred Power of the World–exists.
We could turn to innumerable sources for ancient examples of this overarching cosmological worldview. Yet there exists a modern illustration which is slipping away under the pressures of modern economics and history. This case in point is the Dogon, a West African tribe in Mali living mainly along a 90 mile escarpment of canyon, cliffs, and plateau called the Cliffs of Bandiagara. The Dogon number approximately 300,000 and are well known for their ornate ritual masks, costumes, and dance. The Dogon live a meager, agricultural life growing millet, sorghum, sorrel, rice, beans, and tobacco. Dogon architecture is, at first sight, very unique, displaying a variety of odd, conical shaped huts, homes, and sanctuaries built from mud adobe and whose foundations are fastened to the sides of cliffs and in caves (see Appendix, page 3 for images of Dogon life).
To the casual Western observer, for all intents and purposes, the Dogon are a remnant of that “primitive” age where human beings eked out an existence with simplistic farming tools and interpreted unexplainable natural phenomenon by inventing pre-rational, pagan myth accompanied by a series of obscene ritualistic dances, rites, and sounds. Like a Darwinian Savage, the Dogon appear to the West as just another barbarous clan living in that great, dark blur on the map called Africa.
Of course, things are rarely as they appear, and this is especially true of ancient culture, even when it persists in modern times. According to British anthropologist Mary Douglas, the Dogon’s mythology is remarkably rich and centers around the idea of language. It is the “word” that manifests itself in every aspect of creation: “The constituent materials and morphology of speech are seen to correspond to those of cereals, of man, of woven cloth, of the whole cosmos. The same intricate harmony of images is drawn down and across from one level of experience to the next. Reading it is like gazing through a microscope at a flourishing form of life...” (Douglas 117). According to this eschatology the word is the manifestation of cosmic energy stewarded by the nommo, divine beings who are both part and participant of continual creation. For the Dogon, the word is not just speech, but also action and ritual. Speech, action, and ritual all reflect the primary interrelatedness the individual has with cosmos and vice versa. The grain of millet, the foetus in the womb, and the earth under heaven are all the same thing, differentiated only by a slight oscillation of the primordial word. Such an ontological understanding has enduring consequences. For the Dogon, to say something is to make and/or do it (Douglas 118).
Yet the converse is also true. Action emanates the word, which affects cosmos. “The human being is therefore a co-creator, and work is an ethical duty of cosmic proportion” (Grillo 8). Nature speaks as well, and according to Grillo the heart of African religion is in the action of “vigilantly maintain[ing] a harmonious relationship with the divine powers of the cosmos in order to prosper (Grillo 8). In Robert Pelton’s study of the African trickster mythos, Pelton cites Marcel Griaule, the leading authority on Dogon religion, asserting that the Dogon always remembers that “the condition of the person mirrors the condition of the universe, [and] everything which affects the one has repercussions on the other;... in some way all man’s actions and ... circumstances must be conceived as closely connected with the functioning of things in general” (Pelton 168).
Again we are reminded of Black Elk’s words, “for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves” (161). This statement reveals ancient ontology; it is wholly cosmological.
Using the Dogon as a prime example of ancient religion and ritual, we should expect to find this same ontological understanding throughout the ancient world, and of course we do. Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, and Far Eastern mythology all record the creation and recreation of cosmos through the word. Indeed, the earliest, written creation myth yet found is engraved upon the Shabaka Stone (at least 2700 B.C.); it declares that Ptah conceives in his heart and then speaks with his tongue the “god word” which forms all of creation (Doria and Lenowitz 3-7). This sentiment is repeated in the Book of the Dead (Gadalla 74). If Ptah is the god/creator by the word, then Thoth is the god of renewal by the same power--the Egyptian Logos. Thoth records all events of fate, marking and measuring through the word every act of cosmos. Thoth is always present in cosmogonic ritual, recording exactly what goes on, and by this we understand that the word, rite, action, and creation are fundamentally connected. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of creation also comes by way of the Word: “In the beginning was the Word... and the Word was God.... All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1,3).
Because the entire worldview of the Dogon is enveloped in an omni-relationship with nature, the Dogon are keenly aware that the cosmos is “... grounded in a fundamental divine order, [and] characterized by constant change and renewal” (Grillo 9). To arbitrate through the natural and sometimes violent cycles of constant change the Dogon, like so many other ancient religions, employ rituals of cosmogonic proportions: “a cosmogonic myth that recounts the sacrifice of a primordial being as the act that established order at the beginning of time can provide the model of a ritual sacrifice that aims at restoring social harmony” (Grillo 8).
Henry Pernet’s adroit study Ritual Masks shows that the Dogon mask is the living image of cosmogonic events. Pernet contradicts commonly held opinions that ritual masks are simple representations of spirits, ancestors, or deities, asserting that such interpretations are often superficial. Each mask, in fact, may have different and simultaneous interpretations revealed only through ritual initiations (53). Ethnologists roaming about the countryside rarely come away with any interpretation but the most basic (49). Yet the higher one comes into understanding of the ritual space and action, the greater one understands that the heirocentric universe is being represented in the mask, some of which are of “capital significance since they recall cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude” (53). The Dogon mask and accompanying ritual are representations/manifestations of the word. Wearing a mask and performing the rite associated with the mask re-establishes sacred time and space (Eliade), pronounces the creative word (Douglas), initiates the mask-wearer as a co-creator of the cosmos (Grillo), which provokes a cosmic harmony ideally at every level of nature (Griaule).
Such language sounds wholly theoretical. We are reminded that we are Westerners looking into (or out from) an alien world. But western religious ritual descends, in fact, from the same cosmological context that the Dogon vivify in their own rituals. The Christian rite of baptism is one of the most widely performed rites across the sects. The Christ-Logos declares, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Man must be born from the hudor, the primary element, just as the mount of first creation was born from the same substance (Genesis 1:9). Early baptisma was a complete immersion into and out the cosmogonic waters, a repetition of “capital significance since [it] recall[s] cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude”. The result of baptisma is literally a new existence, being born of the Spirit (pneuma), a vital power which animates the body establishing harmony between the initiate and nature. What Christianity enacts in the font the Dogon perform with the ritual mask.
Thus we see that Dogon ontology is rich and complex, sewn within the envelope of a cosmological network which binds all things in existence. As Eliade predicts, for the Dogon every act is a renewal of the cosmos–above and below. Like the Oglala Sioux, the Dogon build their villages after a cosmological structure, erect their homes according to the strict rules of nature (both biological and cosmological), and even when the Dogon mate there is a cosmological formula: “The mating of the human couple in the darkness of the inner room with its four posts is consummated on the earth-platform, placed so that the man faces west, lying on his right side, while the woman faces east. The bed, symbolizing the primal field... [which] is full of expectant life” (Griaule 140).
While Dogon cosmology reveals an ontological, natural philosophy, ancient cosmology goes well beyond ontological metaphysics. Scientists are just now discovering the universal preoccupation in ancient culture with astronomy. A new branch of science has been created as a result: archeoastronomy. Archeoastronomers have begun to show the detailed correspondences many temples and cities have with the constellations. Indeed, Andis Kaulins has published a recent work entitled, Stars, Stones, and Scholars, arguing that all ancient megalithic sites are astronomically based; most stone circles or alleys are in fact planispheres, and even ancient boundary lines between territories were made in correlation with constellations, so that an ancient kingdom was a projection of the starry firmament upon earth (1-6). Kaulin’s findings are difficult for the academic community. While astronomy was the first science of humankind (Kaulins 15), today astronomy is simply an intellectual distraction.
Marcel Griaule, who investigated the Dogon for many years, was astounded at the complexity of the Dogon Celestial Granary, the mythological first construction of the gods which the Dogon erect in every village. The Dogon Granary is based off the fundamental cosmogonic space: the circle and the square (Nibley, Temple 139-170). In celestial mechanics, these geometric figures represent simultaneous correlations (much like the ritual mask). The circle is the sun, the orbit of the sun, moon, and planets, the cycles of time, and symbolic regeneration. The square is the earth, indicating the four points of the compass and the four markers of time (equinoxes and solstices). The complexity of the Dogon Celestial Granary is beyond the scope of this paper (see Appendix, pp. 4-8 for a simple deconstruction with worldwide correlations). We can say, however, that the Dogon Granary is a representation, in its entirety, of the heirocentric universe, encoding within its design the earth, sun, moon, pole star, axis of the earth, the zodiac, the equinoxes and solstices, Venus, and a set of sacrosanct star groups, including Orion and the Pleiades (Griaule 30-35, 209-216). Furthermore, the Dogon Sanctuary, a place built to honor Ancestors, is made with the same circle/square construction, with symbols ripe with macrocosmic meaning, including: the rooster–announcer of the sun, the snake–symbol of regeneration (and perhaps the constellation Hydra?), the pall, or eight squared checkerboard–symbol of cosmic design, movement, and resurrection, and various other motifs including the Sun, Earth, Moon, and even the equinoxes and solstices (Griaule 99-103, see Appendix, p. 8).
Moreover, Dogon number symbolism inherent in their myth and sacred architecture reveals a very ancient, astronomically intact, cosmology extremely foreign to modern religion and rite (the very reason why it is not recognized). For example, the number eight is significant in Dogon myth and ritual. According to the Dogon, there are eight Ancestors, the world was created in eight days, the pall or garment of the dead is a checkerboard of eight squares, and the square roof of the Celestial Granary is eight by eight cubits in measure. Again, the sacred nature of this number in myth and rite is wholly cosmological and extends to every corner of the ancient globe. It is no small coincidence, as Gadalla points out, that when the ancient Egyptians wanted to find the area of a circle, they would find the equivalent square, prototypically the square with sides of eight (Gadalla 75). Furthermore, by squaring the circle one obtains geometric proportions equivalent to the earth’s and moon’s perimeter (Lundy 14), a coincidence not lost in the Dogon Celestial Granary whose roof of eight cubits contains in its center a round hole symbolizing the Moon (Griaule 32). Similarly, Venus has an eight year cycle, coinciding with the Earth’s orbit five times in eight years and imprinting a celestial pentagram (indeed, the origin of this symbol) woven into space like an elegant, celestial tapestry. Again, we find the planet Venus represented in the east stairway (symbolizing celestial ascent) of the Dogon Granary. The east is where the stars rise and where ancient astronomers would have looked to measure their movements.
Nor can we ignore the property of this number within the original decad (Schneider 265). One and eight form the only cubes thus making the number eight a replication and symbolic expansion of the One, just as the primal Dogon word realizes perfection on the eight utterance (day of creation). When we find the burial garment of the Dogon a checkerboard of eight squares, and this design replicated upon their Ancestor Sanctuary, we immediately are made aware of a numeric relationship between a first and second birth, a first and second creation. Suddenly, the Dogon shroud is lifted just enough for a peek into the cosmological teaching of resurrection, a teaching which seems omnipresent throughout all of Dogon symbol (see Appendix, p. 9).
The Dogon Granary and Sanctuary are the ultimate “center point” connecting heaven and earth. They are the physical representation of fiat lux, where creation in all its forms and words are made manifest. As Gadalla comments on the Egyptian temple, so it is with the Dogon: “The Egyptian temple was a machine for maintaining and developing divine energy. It was the place in which the cosmic energy, neter/netert (god/goddess), came to dwell and radiate its energy to the land and people” (Gadalla 127). The Dogon Celestial Granary, adopting the most ancient patterns of cosmological thought and design, is just such a place. It is no coincidence that ancient Memphis, with its esoteric rite, religion, and massive cosmology, was known as the “Granary of Egypt” (Doria and Lenowitz 3).
Yet critics of cosmological interpretations often cite “coincidence” as the mind behind number, geometry, and form. After all, could a society as “primitive” as the Dogon really have traditions which track the orbits of Venus, resolve the geometrical perimeters of the Earth and Moon, and establish a cosmology interwoven with astrophysics and ontological metaphysics? Surely these phenomena are nothing more than beautifully aligned happenstance. Isn’t it more sensible, critics argue, that the true heritage of ancient cosmology rests in something more mundane, like the cycles of agricultural seasons and immediate alleviation of physical needs?
Modern, industrial society exists under the prevalent illusion that culture forms under a one-way evolutionary pressure--history inexorably leads to progress. But as the sweeping ignorance of astronomical knowledge of the most basic type amongst even the most “educated” indicates (and this includes professionally trained anthropologists and archaeologists), knowledge is in the constant state of being lost. This fact is all too clear to John Simon, who has analyzed this phenomenon in American culture: “... a whole world of learning is disappearing before our eyes, in merely one generation. We cannot expect...to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people” (Berman, qtd. 41). The Dogon are no exception, as Griaule comments: “Owing to the ignorance of inadequate instruction of [the Dogon]...fancy appears to reign unchecked in the choice of the subjects, objects and figures represented [on the Dogon Sanctuary]” (Griaule 105); and the great Ogotemmeli laments that Dogon temples are no longer painted by the rules, much of the original custom and cosmology has been lost (Griaule 112). When the great priest Ogotemmeli passed away, one can assume a great deal of knowledge passed away with him.
We do not expect to find advanced mathematics a daily topic of discussion amongst the Dogon, just as we do not expect this to be the case amongst the people who study them. But what we do find, according to Mary Douglas and Marcel Griaule, is a surprising, highly advanced metaphysics, connected to a linguistic ontology (Douglas 118) and a wide, sweeping cosmology (Griaule 30-35). Griaule cannot help but to observe, “...there were many indications that, beneath the various ritual forms and patterns of behavior characteristic of the African peoples of these regions, lay hidden the main features of one religion and one conception of the organization of the world and the nature of man” (Griaule 218). This conception of the organization of the world is revealed in ancient religion and ritual and is wholly cosmological in nature. Furthermore, it is a highly advanced ontology, according to Eliade, and a mind numbing, macro-cosmic science, according to Nibley and Kaulins. The Dogon provide an exemplary look at an ancient world model, which embraced the cosmos completely and endured countless ages before modern civilization ever crafted itself into the pinnacle of the hunter-gatherer state: industrialization! We have forgotten the cycles of nature. The cosmos itself has become alien. In such an existence, the Dogon have much to teach us.
Works Cited
Berman, Morris. The Twilight of American Culture. New York: Norton, 2000.
Doria, Charles and Harris Lenowitz, editors. Origins: Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean. New York: Anchor Books, 1976.
Douglas, Mary. Implicit meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London, GBR: Routledge, 1999. pp. 116-130.
Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper Torch Books, 1959.
– Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual Within Life and Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1959.
Gadalla, Moustafa. Egyptian Cosmology: The Animated Universe. Greensboro, NC: Tehuti Research Foundation, 2001.
Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmeli. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
Grillo, Laura. “African Religions.” Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion. 2 vols. Macmillian Reference USA, 1999. pp 6-11.
Hall, Manly P. The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society Inc.,1988.
Kaulins, Andis. Stars, Stones, and Scholars: The Decipherment of the Megaliths. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing, 2003.
Lundy, Miranda. Sacred Geometry. New York: Walker & Company, 1998.
Neihardt, John G. And Nicholas Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 2000.
Nibley, Hugh. Ancient Documents and the Pearl of Great Price. Edited by Robert Smith and Robert Smythe. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1994.
-- Temple and Cosmos. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1992.
Pelton, Robert D. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: UP of California, 1980.
Pernet, Henry. Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1992.
Schneider, Michael S. A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1995.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, 1992.
Posted by john at February 24, 2006 04:49 PM
