Dogon & the path to Digitaria
Charm and mystery of an ancient wisdom
My artistic career is completely linked to my artistic research, nothing would express and maintain a certain light that lasts, without the study of those ancient cultures that inspires me and gives me the traction I need to continuing in this productive path.
During my creative process, letting myself be guided by the music flow, I impulsively combined different mediums onto the two supports: House Paint, Natural Pigments, Oil Pastels, Sprays and Collages on canvas and wood.
In compliance with ancient tribal traditions, as the Dogon used pigments to color what became the subject of their incredible ritual dances, I applied natural pigments on the background layer.
Itinerary for your Spirit
Dogon, ethnic group of the central plateau region of Mali that spreads across the border into Burkina Faso.
There is some doubt as to the correct classification of the many dialects of the Dogon language; the language has been placed in the Mande- Gur, and other branches of the Niger-Congo language family, but its relationship to other languages of the family, if any, is uncertain.
The Dogon number about 600,000, and the majority of them live in the rocky hills, mountains, and plateaus of the Bandiagara Escarpment.
They are mainly an agricultural people; their few craftsmen, largely metalworkers and leatherworkers, form distinct castes.
They have no centralized system of government but live in villages composed of patrilineages and extended families whose head is the senior male descendant of the common ancestor.
3 october 1946, between the cliffs of Bandiagara, Mali.
After long years of refusals, the chief of the village tribe, Ogotemmeli, decides to reveal the mysteries of Dogon culture to Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, two ethnologists from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
The teaching of the Dogon is based on four stages of knowledge corresponding to our primary, secondary, and higher education.
Even with the ethnologists, they started with the first word, just in accordance with their teaching-spiritualism rules.
Later, they understood that they could be introduced to the third stage of knowledge. i.e. the superior, and they entrusted the tribal chief, Ogotemmeli.
The basket metaphor. The tribal chief speaks.
“This, which seems to you a simple basket, is actually the system of the world. The round base is the Sun, the square roof is the sky, this circle in the center of the roof is the Moon.
The ‘Nommo’, the eight ancestors of the Dogon, brought it to Earth containing the clay needed to build the granaries of our villages, which represent the universe.
In the granary, the stairs indicate the pairs of males and females who generated the Dogon, but also constellations and stars. To the north the Pleiades, to the south Orion, to the east Venus and to the west, the star with the great tail.
It all started with this basket.”
What the Dogon told the ethnologists about their cosmogony was proven in every festive ritual of the tribal tradition of the people.
Birth, baptism, collective rituals, totemic rituals etc, but the truly amazing thing about the knowledge of the Dogon, is astronomy.
“Earth rotates on itself and revolves around the sun in 12 months, Jupiter has 4 satellites, Saturn is surrounded by two rings and the galaxies expand in a spiral. There is intelligent life in galaxies.”
I think there is no need to explain that these astronomical notions are collected and included in the tribal traditions of this black African people, basic knowledge for Western astronomers, but which concern a much older era than the technologically advanced astronomer’s discoveries.
Everything reported by the Dogon with respect to celestial bodies is very ancient.
Thousands of years older than European astronomical discoveries.
Ogotemmeli continues: “There is a star, invisible to the eye, which revolves around Sirius B in 50 years, it is called ‘Digitaria’, it is extremely small, and is composed of air, water, fire and metal. Digitaria is so heavy that all the men in the world together could not lift it.”
The fact that the Dogon saw and see Sirius B is simply inexplicable.
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, and until 1850 it was unknown that it had a companion, Sirius B: a white dwarf, so heavy and dense, that it can emit very faint light, first photographed in 1970, that rotates around Sirius in circa 50 years.
Precise description, that of Ogotemmeli.
Dogon villages are a strange synthesis of prehistory and science fiction.
Each of them has secret recesses that only initiates can penetrate and all, through a web of paths, connect to Sangà, the Sancta Sanctorum of the Dogon religion.
The togunà, the house of the word, is the heart of the village. Thatched roofs resting on eight pillars representing the ancestors of the Dogon; the Nommo.
Before leaving the world, Ogotemmeli had one last startling revelation in store for European ethnologists.
“Digitaria is not the only companion of Sirio. The star N-Pia (Sorgo Femmina), is larger, four times lighter, and travels on a longer trajectory in the same direction.
Sorgo Femmina, is the seat of the souls of all living and future beings. They live immersed in the waters of family ponds.”
Dogon claim to have seen Sirius C, which they no longer see, and have given a precise representation of it. Ogotemmeli, this African Homer, died a few months after these last revelations, which only the initiates should know.
