The Call of Cthulhu describes Cthulhu as octopoidal and bat winged. The Cthulhu cult captives in the custody of Legrasse speak of Great Old Ones who ruled the earth ages before man. They were gone now, locked inside the earth and under the sea, but their great priest Cthulhu will bring them back when the stars were ready. Refer to Poseidon knowing the passages to the older gods banished by Zeus and company in Greek section. The Emma is a two masted schooner thrown off course toward a craft manned by Deep Ones - compare to Dogon Emma-ya.
The Cthulhu Mythos described Cthulhu's appearance as baleful, dread or worse. He sleeps imprisoned in a great towering monolith of R'lyeh, now sunk beneath the sea. In the "Elder Pharos: Fungi from Yuggoth," a tower (pharos) is described having a beam or beacon shooting out blue rays making shepherds whine in prayer. (See Sumerian section on Enki's ray and Dogon section on ray of Digitaria.)
In Whisperer in Darkness, a letter from Henry Akeley states that the Outer Ones from Yuggoth who visit earth mean no harm to men. They revere and have knowledge of Nyarlathotep (the Lovecraftian Hermes), Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath (the Lovecraftian androgynous Goat of Mendes). Akeley states that these Outer Ones were cruelly wronged and spied upon by a whole secret cult of evil men linked with Hastur and the Yellow Sign devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them. The Outer Ones are directed against those aggressors. Akeley believes many of his lost letters to Wilmarth were stolen by emissaries of this malign Hastur cult.
Nyarlathotep is the messenger and it is said he came to ancient Khem (Egypt) in the form of a black man but not a Negro. (See Black Rite of Osiris, Lord in Perfect Black.) In Haunter of the Dark, Dr. Dexter states he is afraid of an avatar of Nyarlathotep who in antique and shadowy Khem took the form of a man; see later on Nephren-Ka. He screams at the story's end "the three lobed burning eye." (See Egyptian section on Hermes the thrice holy and messenger and the eye-star.) In Lurker at the Threshold (Derleth) Dewart discovers Billington's documents to include several works by Hermes Trismegistus; Hermes is also mentioned in other stories.
In Lurker at the Threshold a passage reads "It had ye name Ossadogowa which signified ye child of Sadogowah." In The Seven Geases by CA Smith, Ralibar Vooz is sent by the sorcerer Ezdagor as an offering to Lord Tsathoggua. HPL also used the name as Tsathoggua in his stories crediting Smith for its invention. (See notes on mysteries of the Sod in Dogon section.) Also note the key syllable in Ezdagor is Dag as in Dagon. Dagon worship by Innsmouth natives is mentioned by Zadok Allen in Shadow Over Innsmouth. Sexual and cultural intercourse between Captain Obed Marsh and the Pacific South Sea Islanders of Ponape of a specific Deep One fish breed is supposed to have been the source of the Innsmouth "look" and their knowledge and reverence for heathen sea gods like Dagon and Cthulhu.
In The Dunwich Horror, the Necronomicon states that "the Old Ones are not in the spaces as we know them but between them...where they still tread....no one can behold them as they tread. (See Egyptian section on the spaces in which the works of Hermes were hidden.) Also, a key syllable of Ossadogowa is also Dog or Dag.
Arkham, a well known city invented by HPL and important in the CM would mean in Sanskrit "as far as the sun even to the sun (inclusively). Arkha means stellar.
Lin Carter (our once fearless leader Count Zarnak, no less...) makes frequent references to Polynesian folk lore as in The Dweller in the Tomb and Out of the Ages. In the latter he refers to obscure cults across the breadth of the Pacific. In the same story Professor Copeland's notes evince a need where he must have the Necronomicon passages concerning the Xothic data in complete form. Xoth is pronounced Zoth - the same word as Soth or Sothis. Xoth is a twin sun (Sothis, Sirius A and B) where Cthulhu and Idh-yaa (or Quum-yaa) conceived three sons. (One could call the Sirius Mystery the Sothic Mystery, or Sothic Cycle - Carter's stories are what he called the Xothic Cycle). Zoth-Ommog (note Zoth and Om syllables) is mentioned as Cthulhu's son from under the great waters off the Isle of the sacred stone cities; they lurk ever just beyond the threshold which they cannot pass. Carter also gives alternate spellings of Zoth-Ommog, presumably so we can figure out what it is intended to be. (See later.) The two other sons are Ythogtha and Ghatanothoa. Carter quotes a passage from the Necronomicon which states that the Elder Gods, after imprisoning Cthulhu, returned to their home in Glyu-Vho or Ibt al Janzah, the name Arabic astronomers of Alhazred's day used for the star we call Betelgeuse. A quote from the Necronomicon in Derleth's Lurker At the Threshold states that Glyu-Vho is the home of those who imposed the Elder Sign upon Cthulhu to imprison him beneath the sea. A clue as to the star Glyu-Vho is given: it is a winter star. (See Greek section on Sothis.) Xoth is mentioned as the ancient home of Cthulhu and his sons and is a double star. Cthulhu is clearly Nommo.
Brian Lumley's "Rising with Surtsey" mentioned Othuum, containing sounds like O Toom and Om. (See Greek section on Omphalos stones.) In Egypt, Toom was a god issued from Osiris in his character of the Great Deep Noot or Nut. He is the Protean god who generates other gods assuming the form he likes.
In Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu's activity arouses disturbances in sensitive, artistic and insane minds. (See the Dogon "bad day.")
In Out of the Ages, Carter has a freighter Eridanus sighting a new island unmarked on any chart which found certain articles from a prehistoric tomb. (See Sumerian section on city of Eridu.) Eridu as a name for Lord of the Waves and star Eta-Argo associated with Ea or Ia of the Eridhu. Eridanus is a constellation abutting Orion.
The frequency with which Ia is mentioned as an invocation in the CM stories goes without saying. Ia is a form of Ea which is an Akkadian name for the Sumerian Enki, whose sacred city was Eridu.
In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, HPL has Zadok Allen state, referring to the heterodox church of Innsmouth, "I heard what I heard and seen what I seen, Dagon and Ashtoreth, Belial and Beelzebub, Golden Calf and the idols of Canaan and the Philistines, Babylonish abominations." (See note on Ast at end of Egyptian section.)
Note also that HPL suggests that Shub-Niggurath has two sons, Nub and Neb. Nebo.
Nephren-Ka was the avatar of Nyarlathotep that appeared in Khem. A fragment of the Necronomicon from Robert Bloch's "Fane of the Black Pharaoh" states: "...the place of the Blind Apes where Nephren-Ka bindeth up the threads of truth." The Egyptian iconography of Thoth shows him as ibis or ape-headed.
The Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka was a corrupter of the religion of Egypt, a messenger of the Great Old Ones and heirophant of Nyarlathotep. He sought refuge underground when overthrown. He is supposed to have sacrificed his remaining attendants in a Faustian bargain with Nyarlathotep, giving him foreknowledge of coming events. The quote given above is described as a Hermetic text.
According to Dr. Robert M. Price (Ph.D. Theology)'s research, Neph as stated in the Egyptian means the creator, the spirit of god which hovered over the primeval waters. Ka means a person's soul or spirit-double which survives death. Ergo, Nephren-ka would denote either "soul of the spirit of God," or "double of the spirit of God." I.e., his visible manifestation on earth. Crypt of Cthulhu #58. That would be an avatar of Nyarlathotep (the God in this instance).
Note that Nephren-ka, this avatar of Nyarlathotep, can bind up threads, like the threads of the Fates, Clotho, Lakhesis and Atropos, who weave men's destinies of threads. This implies that Nephren-ka can consult some sort of tapestry or weave to know the truth, perhaps thereby foreseeing the future. A tapestry further figures in this story where the truths foreseen by Nephren-ka are written on underground walls covered by tapestries rolled back daily to uncover the day's events. Dr. Price states that the actual medium of the truth, the weave or tapestry, became garbled with wall covering for Nephren-ka's revelations. He also states that understanding the truth by being able to consult this tapestry was garbled or reduced to a mere forecast of future history in the myth of Nephren-ka. (See Egyptian section on the rite of the Lord in Perfect Black, the most secret and highest Egyptian rite.)
Many more stories were written (thousands of them) since this was compiled. This is old information. Don't scream at the typist.
END.
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REFUTATIONS OF THE DOGON INFORMATION
First, let's state this: If anyone means to say that Temple's account of the original anthropologists' work is inaccurate, they are mistaken. One of the anthropologists herself vetted the translation that appears in Temple's work (the other had died by that time). On the other hand, if they mean that the original work by the anthropologists is itself inaccurate, there are some good reasons to believe that it probably is. One might also point out that a revised edition of Temple's book appeared in 1998.
FROM
skepdic.com/dogon.html
The Dogon and Sirius
The Dogon are a people of about 100,000 who dwell in western Africa. According to Robert Temple (The Sirius Mystery), the Dogon had contact with some ugly, amphibious* extraterrestrials, the Nommos, some 5,000 years ago. The aliens came here for some unknown reason from a planet orbiting Sirius some 8.6 light years from earth. The alleged visitors from outer space seem to have done little else than give the earthlings some useless astronomical information.
One of Temple's main pieces of evidence is the tribe's alleged knowledge of Sirius B, a companion to the star Sirius. The Dogon are supposed to have known that Sirius B orbits Sirius and that a complete orbit takes fifty years. One of the pieces of evidence Temple cites is a sand picture made by the Dogon to explain their beliefs. The diagram that Temple presents, however, is not the complete diagram that the Dogon showed to the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who were the original sources for Temple's story. Temple has either misinterpreted Dogon beliefs, or distorted Griaule and Dieterlen's claims, to fit his fantastic story.
Griaule and Dieterlen describe a world renovation ceremony, associated with the bright star Sirius (sigu tolo, "star of Sigui"), called sigui, held by the Dogon every sixty years. According to Griaule and Dieterlen the Dogon also name a companion star, po tolo "Digitaria star" (Sirius B) and describe its density and rotational characteristics. Griaule did not attempt to explain how the Dogon could know this about a star that cannot be seen without telescopes, and he made no claims about the antiquity of this information or of a connection with ancient Egypt.*
Temple lists a number of astronomical beliefs held by the Dogon that seem curious. They have a traditional belief in a heliocentric system and in elliptical orbits of astronomical phenomena. They seem to have knowledge of the satellites of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, among other things. Where did they get this knowledge, he asks, if not from extraterrestrial visitors? They don’t have telescopes or other scientific equipment, so how could they get this knowledge? Temple’s answer is that they got this information from amphibious aliens from outer space.
Afrocentrists, on the other hand, claimed that the Dogon could see Sirius B without the need of a telescope because of their special eyesight due to quantities of melanin (Welsing, F. C. 1987. "Lecture 1st Melanin Conference, San Francisco, September 16-17, 1987"). There is, of course, no evidence for this special eyesight, nor for other equally implausible notions such as the claim that the Dogon got their knowledge from black Egyptians who had telescopes.
A terrestrial source?
Carl Sagan agreed with Temple that the Dogon could not have acquired their knowledge without contact with an advanced technological civilization. Sagan suggests, however, that that civilization was terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial. Perhaps the source was Temple himself and his loose speculations on what he learned from Griaule, who based his account on an interview with one person, Ambara, and an interpreter.
According to Sagan, western Africa has had many visitors from technological societies located on planet earth. The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. 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. Furthermore, there had been a good amount of discussion of Sirius in the scientific press in the '20s so that by the time Griaule arrived, the Dogon may have had a grounding in 20th century technological matters brought to them by visitors from other parts of earth and transmitted in conversation.
Or, Griaule's account may reflect his own interests more than that of the Dogon. He made no secret of the fact that his intention was to redeem African thought. When the Belgian Walter van Beek studied the Dogon, he found no evidence they knew Sirius was a double star or that Sirius B is extremely dense and has a fifty-year orbit.
Knowledge of the stars is not important either in daily life or in ritual [to the Dogon]. The position of the sun and the phases of the moon are more pertinent for Dogon reckoning. No Dogon outside of the circle of Griaule's informants had ever heard of sigu tolo or po tolo... Most important, no one, even within the circle of Griaule informants, had ever heard or understood that Sirius was a double star (Ortiz de Montellano).*
According to Thomas Bullard, van Beek speculates that Griaule "wished to affirm the complexity of African religions and questioned his informants in such a forceful leading manner that they created new myths by confabulation." Griaule either informed the Dogon of Sirius B or "he misinterpreted their references to other visible stars near Sirius as recognition of the invisible companion" (Bullard).
The only mystery is how anyone could take seriously either the notion of amphibious aliens or telescopic vision due to melanin.
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FROM:
dailygrail.com/misc/cop181299.html
Sirius Lie
by Filip Coppens
In 1976, two major books on extra-terrestrial visitation were published: Zecharia Sitchin's The Twelfth Planet and Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery. Of the two, the latter became by far more famous and even attained the status of a semi-scientific work, as many were impressed with the scientific-looking train of logic of the book. Temple stated that the Dogon, a tribe in Africa, possessed extraordinary knowledge on the star system Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, the star which became the marker of an important ancient Egyptian calendar, the star which according to some is at the centre of beliefs held by the Freemasons, the star which according to some is where the forefathers of the human race might have come from. Temple claimed that the Dogon possessed knowledge on Sirius B and Sirius C, companion stars to Sirius that are, however, invisible to the naked eye. How did the Dogon know about their existence? Temple referred to legends of a mythical creature Oannes, who might have been an extraterrestrial being descending on Earth from the stars, to bring wisdom to our forefathers. In 1998, Temple republished the book with the subtitle "new scientific evidence of alien contact 5,000 years ago".
Though Temple's work is now therefore definitely challenged, the core of the mystery remained intact. At the centre of this enigma is the work of Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, two French anthropologists, who wrote down the secret knowledge on "Sirius B" and "Sirius C" in their book The Pale Fox. 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. To recapitulate, Griaule was initiated in the secret mysteries of the male Dogon, who allegedly told him the secrets of Sirius' invisible companions. Sirius (sigu tolo in their language) had two star companions. This was revealed in an article that was published by Griaule and Dieterlen in the French language in 1950. In the 1930s, when their research occurred, Sirius B was known to have existed, even though it was only photographed in 1970. There was little if no possibility that the Dogon had learned this knowledge from Westerners that had visited them prior to Griaule and Dieterlen.
Griaule and Dieterlen published their findings on the Sirius companions without any reference or comment on how extra-ordinary the Dogon knowledge was. It would be others, particularly Temple in the sixties and seventies, who would zoom in on that aspect. To quote Ancient Mysteries: "While Temple, following Griaule, assumes that to polo is the invisible star Sirius B, the Dogon themselves, as reported by Griaule, say something quite different." To quote the Dogon: "When Digitaria (to polo) is close to Sirius, the latter becomes brighter; when it is at its most distant from Sirius, Digitaria gives off a twinkling effect, suggesting several stars to the observer." James and Thorpe wonder - as anyone reading this should do - whether to polo is therefore an ordinary star near Sirius, not an invisible companion, as Griaule and Temple suggest. The biggest challenge to Griaule, however, came from anthropologist Walter Van Beek. He points out that Griaule and Dieterlen stand alone in the world in their claims on the secrets of the Dogon. No other anthropologist supports their opinion - or claims. In 1991, Van Beek led a team of anthropologists who declared that they could find absolutely no trace of the detailed Sirius lore reported by the French anthropologists. James and Thorpe understate the problem when they say that "this is very worrying". Griaule had stated that about fifteen percent of the Dogon tribe knew about this secret knowledge, but Van Beek could, in a decade of research with the Dogon, find not a single trace of this knowledge. Van Beek was initially keen to find evidence for Griaule's claims, but had to admit that there may have been a major problem with Griaule's claims. Even more worrying is Griaule's background. Though an anthropologist, Griaule was interested in astronomy, which he had studied in Paris. As James and Thorpe point out, he took star maps along with him on his field trips as a way of prompting his informants to divulge their knowledge of the stars. Griaule himself was aware of the discovery of Sirius B and it is quite likely that he overinterpreted the Dogon responses to his questions. In the 1920s, before Griaule went to the Dogon, there were also unconfirmed sightings of Sirius C. Was Griaule told by his informants what he wanted to believe? It seems, alas, that the truth is even worse, at least for Griaule's reputation.
Van Beek actually spoke to the original informants of Griaule, who stated: "though they do speak about sigu tolo [interpreted by Griaule as their name for Sirius], they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some, it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that through a different position appears as sigu tolo. All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule." So whatever knowledge they possessed, it was knowledge coming from Griaule, not knowledge native to the Dogon tribe. Van Beek also discovered that the Dogon are of course aware of the brightest star in the sky, which they do not, however, call sigu tolo, as Griaule claimed, but dana tolo. To quote James and Thorpe: "As for Sirius B, only Griaule's informants had ever heard of it."
With this, the Dogon mystery comes to a crashing halt. The Sirius Mystery influenced more than twenty years of thinking about our possible ancestry from "forefathers" who have come from the stars. In 1996, Temple was quick to point out the new speculation in scientific circles on the possible existence of Sirius C, which made the claims by Griaule even more spectacular and accurate. But Temple was apparently not aware of Van Beek's recent research. With this new research of both Van Beek and the authors of Ancient Mysteries, we uncover how Griaule himself was responsible for the creation of a modern myth, which, in retrospect, has created such an industry and almost religious belief that the scope and intensity can hardly be fathomed. Nigel Appleby, in his withdrawn publication Hall of the Gods, which was, according to Appleby himself, tremendously influenced by Temple's book, Appleby spoke about how Temple believed that present-day authorities were apparently unwilling to set aside the blinkers of orthodoxy or were unable to admit the validity of anything that lies outside their field or offers a challenge to its status quo. He further wondered whether there was also a modern arrogance that could not countenance the possible scientific superiority of earlier civilisations. It seems, alas, that Griaule, a scientist, wanted to give earlier civilisations more knowledge than they actually possessed. And various popular authors and readers have since been led into a modern mythology, the "Age of the Dark Sirius Companion".
Filip Coppens
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FROM:
www.csicop.org/si/7809/sirius.html
Investigating the Sirius "Mystery"
Ian Ridpath
Did amphibious beings from the star Sirius visit the earth 5,000 or more years ago and leave advanced astronomical knowledge that is still possessed by a remote African tribe called the Dogon? This astonishing claim was put forward in 1976 by Robert Temple in his "ancient astronaut" book, The Sirius Mystery. An astronomer, familiar with the Sirius system, would say no, because astronomical theory virtually precludes the possibility that Sirius is a suitable parent star for life or that it could have habitable planets. But most of Robert Temple's readers would not know enough astronomy to judge the matter for themselves. Neither would they find the relevant astronomical information in Temple's book, most of which consists of brain-numbing excursions into Egyptology. (Isaac Asimov has been quoted by Temple as having said that he found no mistakes in the book; but Temple did not know that the reason for this, according to Asimov, was that he had found the book too impenetrable to read!*) Even the BBC-TV Horizon investigation on ancient astronauts (broadcast as part of the PBS "Nova" series in the United States), which did an otherwise excellent demolition job on the more extreme fantasies of Erich von Däniken, left the Sirius problem unanswered because of its extreme complexity. Yet an answer is needed, because the Dogon legends about a companion to Sirius are claimed to originate before any terrestrial astronomer could have known of the existence of Sirius B, let alone its 50-year orbit or its nature as a tiny, condensed white dwarf star, all of which the Dogon allegedly knew. So what is the truth about the Dogon and Sirius? Does astronomical and anthropological information omitted by Temple help us to resolve this most baffling of all ancient astronaut cases?
First, let's recap Temple's story. At the center of the mystery are the Dogon people living near Bandiagara, about 300 kilometers south of Timbuktu, Mali, in western Africa. Knowledge of their customs and beliefs comes from the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked among the Dogon from 1931 to 1952. Between 1946 and 1950 the Dogon head tribesmen unfolded to Griaule and Dieterlen the innermost secrets of their knowledge of astronomy. Much of this secret lore is complex and obscure, as befits ancient legends, but certain specific facts stand out, particularly those concerning the star Sirius, with which their religion and culture is deeply concerned. In the information imparted to the French anthropologists, the Dogon referred to a small and super-dense companion of Sirius, made of matter heavier than anything on Earth, and moving in a 50-year elliptical orbit around its parent star. The white dwarf companion of Sirius which answers to this description was not seen until 1862, when the American optician Alvan Graham Clark spotted it while testing a new telescope; the superdense nature of white dwarfs was not realized until the 1920s. But the Dogon Sirius traditions are at least centuries old. How can we account for the remarkable accord between ancient Dogon legends and modern astronomical fact?
Temple's answer, since espoused by Erich von Däniken (of course!), was that the Dogon were told by extraterrestrial visitors. A Dogon legend, similar to many other tales by primitive people of visits from the sky, speaks of an "ark" descending to the ground amid a great wind. Robert Temple interprets this as the landing of a rocket-powered spacecraft bringing beings from the star Sirius. According to Dogon legend, the descent of the ark brought to Earth an amphibious being, or group of beings, known as the Nommo. "Nommo is the collective name for the great culture-hero and founder of civilization who came from the Sirius system to set up society on the Earth," Temple explains in his book. The Nommo were amphibious, he presumes, because water would keep them cool and absorb short-wavelength radiation from the hot star Sirius.
Much of Temple's book is devoted to establishing that the Dogon share common roots with Mediterranean peoples. This explains the central place occupied by Sirius in Dogon beliefs, because the ancient Egyptians, in particular, were also preoccupied with Sirius, basing their calendar on its yearly motion. But is there any explanation of the apparent Dogon belief in life in the Sirius system?
First, let's look at what astronomers know about Sirius to see if it is at least theoretically plausible that advanced life might have arisen in its vicinity. Sirius A, the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth, has a mass 2.35 times that of the sun. Its white dwarf companion, Sirius B, has a mass of 0.99 suns. Stellar evolutionary theory tells us that the most massive stars burn out the quickest, so that originally Sirius B must have been the more massive of the two, before burning out to become a white dwarf. Probably Sirius B spilled over some of its gas onto Sirius A during its aging process, so that the original masses of the two stars were approximately the reverse of what we see today.
A star with twice the sun's mass, as Sirius B probably had, can live for no more than about 1,000 million years before swelling up into a red giant; this does not seem long enough for advanced life to develop. But had life evolved, it would have disappeared during the red giant stage of Sirius B, when any nearby planet would have been roasted by the star's increased energy output, followed by a stellar gale for at least 100,000 years as hot gas streamed from Sirius B to Sirius A. During this mass transfer the two stars would have moved apart, thereby destabilizing the orbits of any planets in the system. According to observations of Sirius B as analyzed by H. L. Shipman of the University of Delaware, Sirius B has been a cooling-down white dwarf for at least 30 million years. Sirius B is now emitting soft x-rays, so that life in the region of Sirius would not be very pleasant today. But in any case, Robert S. Harrington of the U.S. Naval Observatory has recently shown that planetary orbits in the "habitable" zone around Sirius, defined as the region in which water would be liquid, are unstable. So there are unlikely to be any amphibious beings living on planets in the Sirius system today, if indeed any such beings ever lived there.
Temple offers one prediction which allows a test of his theory. In his book he says: "What if this is proven by our detecting on our radio telescopes actual traces of local radio communications?" To help in my investigation of the Sirius mystery, I asked radio astronomers Paul Feldman at the Algonquin radio observatory, Canada, and Robert S. Dixon at the Ohio State University radio observatory, both of whom are carrying out searches for extraterrestrial signals, to listen to Sirius. They would normally have paid the star no attention, because of the extreme unlikelihood of its supporting life. In April 1977 both radio astronomers listened to Sirius on different wavelengths, without detecting any artificial signals.
With this information in mind, let's look more skeptically at the Dogon legend. Immediately, we encounter a surprise: the Dogon maintain that Sirius has two companions, not one. These companions have male and female attributes, respectively. It seems that they are not to be interpreted literally as stars, but as fertility symbols. Nowhere is this better shown than in a Dogon sand diagram of the complete Sirius system, shown in the illustration redrawn here from a paper by Griaule and Dieterlen. Its description, given in the caption from information by Griaule and Dieterlen, is clearly symbolic; Temple chooses to interpret it literally. On pages 23 and 25 of his book he gives his own modified version of this diagram, retaining the symbol for Sirius, one of the positions of Sirius B, and the surrounding oval; all else is omitted. He then interprets the surrounding oval meant to represent "the egg of the world," as the elliptical orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A, even though the symbol equated with Sirius B is drawn as lying within the oval, not on it. This is Temple's basis for saying that the Dogon "know" Sirius B orbits Sirius A in an ellipse.
The Dogon are also supposed to know that Sirius B orbits every 50 years. But what do they actually say? Griaule and Dieterlen put it as follows: "The period of the orbit is counted double, that is, one hundred years, because the Siguis are convened in pairs of 'twins,' so as to insist on the basic principle of twinness." The Sigui ceremony referred to is a ceremony of the renovation of the world that is celebrated every 60 years (not 50). And the "twinness" referred to here is an important Dogon concept which explains why they believe Sirius must have two companions.
Is there any astronomical evidence that Sirius has more than one companion star? Some astronomers in the 1920s and 1930s thought they had glimpsed a third member of the Sirius system, but new and more accurate observations reported in 1973 by Irving W. Lindenblad of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C., showed no evidence of a close companion to either Sirius A or Sirius B.
The whole Dogon legend of Sirius and its companions is riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors, at least if we try to interpret it literally. But what can we make of the Dogon statement that Sirius B is the smallest and heaviest star, consisting of a heavy metal known as sagala? Sirius B was certainly the smallest and heaviest star known in the 1920s, when the super-dense nature of white dwarfs was becoming understood; the material of which white dwarfs are made is indeed compressed more densely than metal. Now, though, hundreds of white dwarfs are known, not to mention neutron stars, which are far smaller and denser. Any visiting spaceman would certainly have known about these, as well as black holes.