ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first thanks must go to my wife, Olivia, who has been an
excellent proof-reader and collater and who made the greatest number
of helpful suggestions concerning the manuscript.
Two friends who read the book at an early stage and took extreme
pains to be helpful, and devoted much of their time to writing out
or explaining to me at length their lists of specific suggestions,
are Adrian Berry of the London Telegraph, and Michael Scott of
Tangier. The latter gave meticulous attention to details which few
people would trouble to do with another’s work.
This book would never have been written without the material
concerning the Dogon having been brought to my attention by Arthur
M. Young of Philadelphia. He has helped and encouraged my efforts to
get to the bottom of the mystery for years, and supplied me with
invaluable materials, including the typescript of an English
translation of Le Renard Pale by the anthropologists Griaule and
Dieterlen, which enabled me to bring my survey up to date.
Without the stimulus and early encouragement of Arthur C. Clarke of
Ceylon, this book might not have found the motive force to carry it
through many dreary years of research.
My agent, Miss Anne McDermid, has been a model critic and adviser at
all stages. Her enthusiasm and energy are matched only by her
penetrating intuition and her skill at negotiation.
Others who have read all or part of this book and who made helpful
suggestions of some kind are Professor W. H. McCrea of the
Department of Astronomy, University of Sussex, John Moore of
Robinson & Watkins, Brendan O’Regan of the Stanford Research
Institute, Edward Bakewell of St Louis, and Anthony Michaelis of the
Weizmann Institute Foundation.
I am indebted to Adrian and Marina Berry for bringing me into touch
with A. Costa, and to A. Costa for generously supplying his splendid
photographs of the Dogon, some of which appear in this book, and
also for his introduction to Mme Germaine Dieterlen. I am indebted
to Mme Dieterlen for giving her permission and the permission of the
Societe des Africainistes of Paris (of which she is
Secretary-General) to publish in English the entire article ‘Un
Systeme Soudanais de Sirius’, which Mme Dieterlen wrote in
collaboration with the late Marcel Griaule.
Among those whom I have consulted on specific points in my research
and who have been extremely helpful are Geoffrey Watkins, Brigadier
R. G. S. Bidwell, O.B.E., the Hon. Robin Baring, James Serpell,
Seton Gordon, Herbert Brown, and Robert and Pauline Matarasso. I am
also indebted for help or encouragement of varying kinds to Fred
Clarke, Professor Cyrus Gordon, Robert Graves, Kathleen Raine,
William Gunston, Professor D. M. Lang, Professor Charles Burney,
Professor O. R. Gurney, Dr Irving Lindenblad, Dr Paul Murdin, Hilton
Ambler, Gillian Hughes, Carol MacArthur, R. Markham, Richard
Robinson, Dr Michael Barraclough, and Angela Earll.
In production of this book my British editor, Mrs Jan Widdows, and
my American editor, Thomas Dunne, have been cooperative, helpful,
and sympathetic. The cartographer Daniel Kitts has cheerfully
prepared maps and diagrams to requirements which were often
exasperating. Miss Mary Walsh showed ingenuity in picture research.
Stephen du Sautoy has also been helpful and shown a great deal of
imagination in connection with production of the British dust-jacket
design, allowing the author a considerable say in a matter which is
often barred to him.
I would like to acknowledge indirect debts to the African priests
Manda, Innekouzou, Yebene, and Ongnonlou, without whom the subject
for this book could not honestly be said to exist, since it probably
could never have been formulated.
Two early pioneers deserve especial
mention: the late Sir Norman Lockyer, who found ways to
consider together the previously separate fields of astronomy and
archaeology, and the late Thomas Taylor of London, who devoted his
life to the translation and exposition of texts which have survived
the centuries of malignity, abuse, book burnings, and slaughter
which for two millennia have been the fate of those who adhered to
‘the Great Tradition’ - nor did Taylor himself escape the
consequences of his position in pain and suffering.
Thanks are also due to the philosopher
Proclus for making public certain specific allusions to
secret traditions which he might have concealed.
r. K. G. t.
Back to Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Summaries follow each chapter in Part Two. The sheer amount of the
material dealt with makes it advisable for the reader to put it into
a smooth perspective by reading over these summaries which have been
prepared so that the reader may refresh his memory if he wishes. The
author can offer no apology for the complexity of the material, but
he can present these slight aids for its comprehension.
Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of all
illustrative material reproduced in this book. Should any error or
omission in acknowledgement have been made the author offers his
apologies and will make the necessary correction in future editions.
What is the Mystery?
The question which this book poses is:
Has Earth in the past been
visited by intelligent beings from the region of the star Sirius?
When I began writing this book in earnest in 1967, the entire
question was framed in terms of an African tribe named
the Dogon,
who live in Mali in the former French Sudan. The Dogon were in
possession of information concerning the system of the star Sirius
which was so incredible that I felt impelled to research the
material.
The results, in 1974, seven years later,
are that I have been able to show that the information which the
Dogon possess is really more than five thousand years old and was
possessed by the ancient Egyptians in the pre-dynastic times before
3200 B.C., from which people I show that the Dogon are partially
descended culturally, and probably physically as well.
What I have done, therefore, is to push back by over five thousand
years the terms of reference of the original question, so that it
now becomes more tantalizing than ever. But now that I have done
that, it becomes less easy to answer. The Dogon preserve a tradition
of what seems to have been an extra-terrestrial contact. It is more
satisfactory not to have to presume the preposterous notion that
intelligent beings from outer space landed in Africa, imparted
specific information to a West African tribe, then returned to space
and left the rest of the world alone.
Such a theory never really struck me as
possible. But in the beginning it did have to serve as a working
hypothesis. After all, I had no idea that the Dogon could have
preserved ancient Egyptian religious mysteries in their culture. I
also had no idea that the ancient Egyptians knew anything about
Sirius. I was in that state of ignorance so common among people who
know nothing more about ancient Egypt than that the Egyptians built
pyramids, left mummies, had a Pharaoh named Tutankhamen, and wrote
in hieroglyphs.
My own academic background concerned
oriental studies, but I never touched on Egypt except regarding the
Islamic period after a.d. 600. I knew almost nothing whatsoever
about ancient Egypt. If I had, perhaps I might have saved myself a
lot of time.
It took many, many months for two or three small clues to work
themselves around in my head long enough to force me to study
ancient Egypt and a whole range of subjects which I had never
previously tackled. I doubt if, even then, I could have been
persuaded to spend considerable sums of money such as the necessary
fifty pounds for the essential and out-of-print Wallis Budge
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, which consists of 1,356
pages and cannot even be lifted off the table by a ten-year-old
child.
But as fate would have it, I was
actually given one of these huge dictionaries, along with many other
essential books on the subjects with which I needed to become
concerned. This helped overcome my natural disinclination to erect a
camp bed in some scholarly library and move in for a couple of
years. I must therefore note my debt to my dear friend the late Miss
Mary Brenda Hotham-Francklyn for giving me in the
ninety-fourth year of her life what amounted to a sizeable library
of books, which were so interesting that I found it impossible to
neglect them, and the result is now before us.
This entire matter of the Sirius mystery first came to my attention
around 1965. I was working on some philosophical and scientific
problems with Arthur M. Young of Philadelphia, the inventor of the
Bell helicopter and more recently (1972) co-editor of and
contributor to the book Consciousness and Reality. Arthur
single-handedly taught me more science concurrently with my official
university studies from 1961-7 than an entire university faculty
might have done.
For while I was ploughing my way through
the Sanskrit language and other onerous subjects at the official
university level, I imbibed a considerable scientific education from
Arthur in company with a few friends from the university, with whom
I participated for years in a series of extremely stimulating
seminars and research projects supervised by Arthur Young and
occasionally linked to a philanthropic foundation which he had
established, entitled the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness.
Arthur Young had a particular passion for reading about mythologies
from all over the world, including those of obscure tribes. One day
he showed me a book entitled African Worlds, which contained several
chapters, each dealing with a different tribe, with its views of
life and its customs and mythology. There was a chapter about the
Dogon translated into English from the French of Marcel Griaule and
Germaine Dieterlen, the eminent anthropologists.1
Arthur pointed out to me a passage he had just read in this chapter,
in which these anthropologists were describing the cosmological
theories of the Dogon. I shall quote the paragraph which I read
then, which first brought to my attention this whole extraordinary
question, so that the reader will begin this subject just as I did,
with this brief reference:
‘The starting-point of creation is
the star which revolves round Sirius and is actually named the
“Digitaria star”; it is regarded by the Dogon as the smallest
and heaviest of all the stars; it contains the germs of all
things. Its movement on its own axis and around Sirius upholds
all creation in space. We shall see that its orbit determines
the calendar.’
That was all.
There was no mention by the
anthropologists of the actual existence of such a star which
revolves around Sirius. Now Arthur Young and I both knew of
the existence of the white dwarf star Sirius B which actually does
orbit around Sirius. We knew that it was ‘the smallest and heaviest’
type of star then known. (Neutron stars and ‘black holes’ were not
much discussed and pulsars had not yet even been discovered.)
We both naturally agreed that this was a
most curious allusion from a supposedly primitive tribe. How could
it be explained? I had to let the matter drop, due to other
activities and concerns at that time.
Approximately two years later in London, I suddenly was struck by
the irresistible urge to investigate this question. I was prompted
to do so by reading the rousing futuristic essays of Arthur C.
Clarke, whom I had come to know by then. By this time I could
not even remember the name of the African tribe, so I wrote to
Arthur Young for it.
He replied and kindly sent me a
photostat of the entire chapter I had seen in African Worlds. So,
armed with the knowledge that it was a tribe called the Dogon that I
was after, I bravely made my way to the Royal Anthropological
Institute to see what I could find out about this peculiar tribe.
The librarian went over the catalogue listings with me and I ran
into a problem: everything was in French, and I did not know French.
However, I persevered and found an article listed which included the
word ‘Sirius’ in its title. That looked promising (for nothing else
did). I asked for a photostat.
When I picked this up a week or two
later (in early November 1967) I was unable to make any sense of it,
of course. So I eventually found someone to translate it for me in
return for a fee. Finally I was presented with the material in
English - and it was quite as rewarding as I could have wished.2
For
this article dealt exclusively with the most secret of all the
traditions of the Dogon which, after years of living with them, the
anthropologists Griaule and Dieterlen had managed to extract from
four of their head priests,3 after a special priestly conference
among the tribe and a ‘policy decision’ to make their secrets known
to Marcel Griaule, the first outsider in their history to inspire
their confidence.
The most secret traditions of the Dogon all concern the star which
the Dogon call after the tiniest seed known to them, the botanical
name for which is Digitaria, and which is thus used in the article
as the name of the star instead of the actual Dogon name, po.
However, even in this article which
deals exclusively with this subject, Griaule and Dieterlen only
mention the actual existence of a star which really exists and does
what the Dogon say Digitaria does, in a passing footnote and in this
brief remark:
‘The question has not been solved,
nor even asked, of how men with no instruments at their disposal
could know the movements and certain characteristics of stars
which are scarcely visible.’
But even in saying this, the
anthropologists were indicating their own lack of astronomical
expertise, for the star, Sirius B which revolves around Sirius, is
by no means ‘scarcely visible’. It is totally invisible and was only
discovered in the last century with the use of the telescope.
As Arthur Clarke put it to me in a
letter of 17 July 1968, after he had suggested he would check the
facts:
‘By the way, Sirius B is about
magnitude 8 - quite invisible even if Sirius A didn’t completely
obliterate it.’
Only in 1970 was a photograph of Sirius
B successfully taken by Irving Lindenblad of the U.S. Naval
Observatory; this photograph is reproduced below.
In the article which I had obtained from the
Royal Anthropological
Institute, Griaule and Dieterlen recorded that the Dogon said the
star Digitaria revolved around Sirius every fifty years. It didn’t
take me long to research Sirius B and discover that its orbital
period around Sirius was indeed fifty years. I now knew that I was
really on to something. And from that moment I I have been immersed
in trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Arthur C. Clarke was extremely helpful during the next few
months. He wrote from Ceylon and was fairly often in London, so
he and I also discussed at great length many of the mysterious facts
from around the world which have since been given such public
prominence by the Swiss-German author Erich von Daniken in
his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods and its sequels. At first
I found myself preparing a book on all these exciting mysteries. (No
one had at that time heard of von Daniken.)
Arthur Clarke introduced me to one
interesting professor after another - each with a pet mystery all
his own. Derek Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at
Yale University, had discovered the true nature of the now famous
mechanical computer of approximately 100 B.C. found in
the Anti-Kythera
shipwreck at the turn of the century and unappreciated until it was
dropped on the floor in Athens, cracked open and they saw what it
was.
He also had found traces of Babylonian
mathematics in New Guinea and talked a lot about ‘the Raffles
shipwreck’.
Then there was Dr Alan McKay, a crystallographer of Birkbeck College
at the University of London, who was interested in the Phaistos Disc
of Crete, in a mysterious metal alloy found in a Chinese tomb, and
in the wilder stretches of the Oxus River. I found that, with people
like this around every corner, I was rapidly becoming distracted
from my true quest by so many glittering riddles.
I therefore abandoned all those mysteries and determined to
concentrate in depth on cracking the one really hard and concrete
puzzle that I had been initially confronted with:
how did the Dogon
know such extraordinary things and did it mean that the Earth had
been visited by extraterrestrials ?
The trouble with trying to undertake a serious investigation about
the possibility of extraterrestrial contact with Earth, is that a
lot of sensible people will be put off by the very idea. Then again,
a lot of the people who will enthusiastically receive my researches
with open arms are the sort of people one least wants to be classed
with.
I have therefore undertaken all the work
on this subject with a certain degree of reluctance, and if anyone
pressed me during several years to say what I was doing and they
extricated from me the confession that I was working on a book, I
did not say what it was about, but merely mumbled it was ‘about the
ancient Egyptians’ or, before that stage, ‘about the mythology of
some tribe in Africa - not very interesting, really’. This book will
inevitably, I suppose, put me in that most unenviable category of
‘those people who write about little green men from outer space’.
However, this is meant to be a serious
inquiry. I am tempted to apologize for the subject, but that would
be pointless.
It is important that this strange material be placed before the
public at large. Since learning was freed from the tyranny of the
few and opened to the general public, through first the invention of
printing and now the modern communications media and the mass
proliferation of books and periodicals and more recently the
‘paperback revolution’, any idea can go forth and plant the
necessary seeds in intellects around the world without the mediation
of any panel of approval or the filtering of a climate of opinion
based on the currently accepted views of a set of obsolescent
individual minds.
How difficult it is to keep in mind that this was not always the
case. No wonder, then, that before such things were possible, there
were secret traditions of priests which were handed down orally for
centuries in unbroken chains and carefully guarded lest some
censorship overtake them and the message be lost. In the modern age,
for the first time secret traditions can be revealed without the
danger that they will be extinguished in the process.
Can it be that
the Dogon came to realize
something of this when, through some powerful instinct and after
mutual consultations among the highest priests, they decided to take
the unprecedented step of making public their highest mysteries ?
They knew they could trust the French anthropologists, and when
Marcel Griaule died in 1956, approximately a quarter of a million
tribesmen massed for his funeral in Mali, in tribute to a man whom
they revered as a great sage - equivalent to one of their own high
priests.
Such reverence must indicate an
extraordinary man in whom the Dogon could believe implicitly. There
is no question but that we are indebted to Marcel Griaule’s personal
qualities for laying open to us the sacred Dogon traditions. I have
now been able to trace these back to ancient Egypt, and they seem to
reveal a contact in the distant past between our planet Earth and an
advanced race of intelligent beings from another planetary system
several light years away in space. If there is another answer to the
Sirius mystery it may be even more surprising rather than less so.
It certainly will not be trivial.
It should not surprise us that there must be other civilizations in
our galaxy and throughout the entire universe. Even if the
explanation of the Sirius mystery is found to be something entirely
different in the years to come (though I cannot imagine what), we
should bear in mind that, as we are definitely not alone in the
universe, the Sirius mystery will have served to help us speculate
along proper and necessary lines, and opened our innately lazy minds
that much further to the important question of extraterrestrial
civilizations which must certainly exist.
At the moment, we are all like fish in a bowl, with only the
occasional leap out of the water when our astronauts go aloft. The
public is becoming bored with space exploration before it has even
really begun properly. We even find that Congressmen need continual
injections of ‘space rescues’ and ‘satellite gaps’ in their tired
bloodstreams, like a heroin fix, in order to stimulate them in their
horrible state of lethargy to vote funds for the space programs
which so many of them consider a bore and lacking in excitement and
suspense.
The psychological impact of photographs of the Earth from space, a
giant and beautiful orb resting on nothing, pearled with clouds and
sparkling with sea, has begun to send resonances down the long and
sleepy corridors of our largely drugged psyches. Mankind is
imperceptibly struggling to the new and undeniable realization that
we are all in this game together.
We are all perched on a globe suspended
in what appears to be emptiness, we are made up of atoms which are
mostly themselves emptiness, and above all, we are the only really
intelligent creatures directly known to us. In short, we are alone
with each other, with all the fratricidal implications of such a
tense situation.
But at the same time as we are all slowly realizing these things,
the inevitable conclusion which follows upon all this is beginning
to make some headway with us as well. It has begun to occur to more
than a handful of exceptional people (exceptionally intelligent or
exceptionally insane) that if we are sitting here on this planet
fighting among ourselves for lack of any better distraction, then
perhaps there are lots of planets all over the universe where
intelligent beings are either sitting and stewing in their own juice
as we are, or where those beings have broken out of the shell and
established contact with other intelligent beings on other planes or
planets.
And if this is really going on all over
the universe, then perhaps it will not be all that long before we
find ourselves linked up with our fellows elsewhere - creatures
living beside another star out in that vast emptiness which spawns
planets, suns, and minds.
For years I have thought that those organizations which spend
millions of dollars on ‘peace’ and attempts to find out what is
wrong with human nature that it should indulge in so perverse a
thing as conflict, would be better advised to donate their entire
treasuries to the space programs, and to astronomical research.
Instead of seminars for ‘peace research’ we should build more
telescopes.
The answer to the question: ‘Is mankind
perverse?’ will be known when we can compare ourselves with other
intelligent species and evaluate ourselves according to some scale
other than one which we fabricate out of the air. At the moment we
are shadow-boxing, chasing phantoms. . . . The answers lie out there
somewhere with other stars and other races of beings. We can only
compound our neuroses by becoming even more introspective and
narcissistic. We must look outward. At the same time, of course, we
must look back relentlessly into our own past. To go forward with no
conception of where we have been makes no sense whatsoever.
There is also the probability that we
may discover mysteries about our own origins. For instance, one
result of my research, which began harmlessly with an African tribe,
has been to demonstrate the possibility that civilization as we know
it was an importation from another star in the first place. The
linked cultures of
Egypt and
Sumer in the Mediterranean area simply
came out of nowhere. That is not to say that there were no people
alive before that.
We know there were lots of people, but
we have found no traces of civilization. And people and civilization
are vastly different things.
Take for instance these words by the
late Professor W. B. Emery from his book Archaic Egypt:
At a period approximately 3400 years
before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the
country passed rapidly from a state of advanced neolithic
culture with a complex tribal character to two well-organized
monarchies, one comprising the Delta area and the other the Nile
valley proper.
At the same time the art of writing
appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts
developed to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points
to the existence of a well-organized and even luxurious
civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short
period of time, for there appears to be little or no background
to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture.
Now, whether or not one supposes that
there was an invasion of advanced people into Egypt who brought
their culture with them, the fact remains that when we get back to
that period of history we are faced with so many imponderables that
we can hardly say anything for certain.
What we do know is that primitive people
suddenly found themselves living in thriving and opulent
civilizations and it all happened rather abruptly. In the light of
the evidence connected with the Sirius question, as well as other
evidence which has either been dealt with by other authors or
remains to be tackled in the future, it must be entertained as a
serious possibility that civilization on this planet owes something
to a visit by advanced extraterrestrial beings.
It is not necessary to postulate flying
saucers, or even gods in space suits. My own feeling is that this
matter has not been dealt with in a sophisticated enough manner so
far. Bur rather than enter into mere speculation as to what
extraterrestrials landed in, etc., let us move on to the evidence
that at least indicates that they might have been here. In Part
Three we shall consider some details and clues that the
extraterrestrial visitors from Sirius, whom I postulate, may have
been amphibious creatures with the need to live in a watery
environment.
But all this gets into the speculative
areas which are such treacherous ground. It has always been my
policy, as well as my temperamental inclination, to stick to solid
facts. We shall see as we proceed just how solid the facts are, and
that is a strange enough tale for the moment. As usual, truth has
proved itself stranger than fiction.
The book which now follows poses a question. It does not present,
but merely suggests, an answer. In Part One the question is posed in
its original form, and in Part Two it is rephrased. But nowhere is
it answered with any certainty. The best questions are the ones
which often remain unanswered for a long time and lead us down new
avenues of thought and experience.
Who knows where the Sirius mystery will
lead us in the end? But let us follow it for a while.
At the very least it will be an
adventure. . . .
Notes
-
African Worlds, ed. by Daryll
Forde, Oxford University Press, 1954, pp. 83-110. I wish to
point out to the reader that in the article in African Worlds,
the French word arche is mis-translated ‘arch’ and should
instead be rendered ‘ark’.
-
The translation was, it turned out, extremely inept. The
article has been entirely retranslated by a professional
translator for inclusion in this book. It has also been vetted
by Mme Germaine Dieterlen herself, who has kindly given
permission for the publication in English of the entire article
written by herself and Marcel Griaule. It is to be found just
after Chapter One.
-
Photographs of these four tribal priests are reproduced in
Plate 2. I thought it particularly important that these original
native informants be seen by the reader. Apart from the fact
that their faces are extremely interesting, we owe these four
people a great deal. Without them the public at large might
never have known anything about the Sirius mystery, and the
entire tradition might, after its thousands of years on earth,
actually have sunk without trace.
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