NP - Dogon & the Sirius Mystery

[rich]

or Lovecraft, via the town of Sarnath and Dagon

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 10:48 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sounds like something Pynchon might be interested in...
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91J44f47WsI
>
>
> http://custodialsmackdown.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/the-fish-people-are-alive-and-among-us/
>
> The Dogons have a complex history, but a large part of their oral
> tradition includes stories about how a race of fish-like beings came
> down in a spaceship and imparted various forms of knowledge to them.
>
> They refer to this in their mythology sometimes as a single being
> called “Nommo” and sometimes as a group of beings called “the Nommo.”
> Dogons frequently describe the Nommo as having the upper body of a man
> and the lower body of a snake. And sometimes the Nommo is said to have
> a ram’s head with a serpent body.
>
> There are several different religious groups within the Dogon society.
> One of them honors a god called Lebe.
>
> The cult of Lebe, the Earth God, is primarily concerned with the
> agricultural cycle and its chief priest is called a Hogon. All Dogon
> villages have a Lebe shrine whose altars have bits of earth
> incorporated into them to encourage the continued fertility of the
> land. According to Dogon beliefs, the god Lebe visits the hogons every
> night in the form of a serpent and licks their skins in order to
> purify them and infuse them with life force. The hogons are
> responsible for guarding the purity of the soil and therefore
> officiate at many agricultural ceremonies.
>
> One of the things the Dogons learned from the Nommo was a lot of
> highly specific information about the star Sirius. Supposedly the
> Nommo came from that area of the galaxy and they told them that Sirius
> wasn’t just one star. It had a companion star that was a white dwarf.
> And there was another companion star that was a small red dwarf star.
>
> Western astronomers first began to suspect that Sirius had a companion
> after they observed that the star had a certain “wobble.” But Sirius B
> wasn’t discovered until 1862, and we didn’t know it was a white dwarf
> star until the 1920’s. Much later on, in 1995, French Astronomers
> Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent announced that they had discovered a
> second companion star -  a small red dwarf star now called Sirius C.
>
> So the Dogons were getting accurate astronomical information about
> Sirius from the Nommo
>
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