Nommo

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The ark came down spinning. It turned as it fell, through a burst of fire and a roll of thunder, and it carried eight beings the color of still water — human above the waist, and below the waist the smooth taper of a fish. They came in pairs: four couples, twinned two by two, and each one already doubled in itself, male and female in a single body. When the vessel struck the earth the eight did not scatter across the country. They dug a hollow, they filled it, and they went down into the water they had made, so that the world had its first pool and its first ancestors in the same moment. What they brought with them was everything a world would need to begin — eight small grains for the fields, the fire and bellows of the smithy, a granary built to the shape of the sky, and, folded through all of it, the Word.

These are the Nommo, the ordered water-twins of the Dogon of the Bandiagara cliffs in Mali. They are the second thing in the account of creation and, in a sense, the first thing that can be lived with: Amma the sky-maker stands too far back to be approached, and it is the Nommo, his ordered first-born, who come down into the reach of human life and teach it how to be kept.

The name and how it reaches the record

The word carries its meaning at the surface. Nommo — also written Nummo, and plural in some tellings as Nommos — is glossed from a Dogon verb sense meaning to make one drink, so that water sits inside the name itself. It is a fitting etymology for beings who are the substance they govern. They are described as amphibious and hermaphroditic, fish-like creatures with a humanoid upper torso and, below, the coiling lower body and tail of a fish or a serpent; they are the color of water and they live in it, and among their titles, as gathered in the reference record of the tradition, are Masters of the Water, the Monitors, and the Teachers. Their maleness-and-femaleness is not a defect to be resolved but the whole point of them. To the Dogon a created thing is complete only when it is twinned, paired, doubled; the Nommo are that completeness made visible, the pattern against which everything single and solitary is measured and found wanting.

The account in which they descend is one of the most elaborate in the ethnographic record of Africa, and the manner of its arrival there is now part of the account itself. The dense architecture the world knows — the eight ancestors, the numbered twins, the seventh as the giver of speech, the sacrifice that founds the shrines — reaches print chiefly through two French ethnographers. Marcel Griaule worked among the Dogon from 1931, and in October 1946, at the ritual village of Sanga, a blind elder named Ogotemmêli summoned him and, over thirty-three consecutive days, laid out the ordered cosmology piece by piece. Griaule published the result in 1948 as Dieu d’eau, later translated as Conversations with Ogotemmêli. His long collaborator Germaine Dieterlen carried the system further in Le Renard pâle (The Pale Fox), the first volume of which appeared in 1965. Between them these two books gave the Nommo to world literature.

They also gave the Nommo a problem. When the anthropologist Walter van Beek restudied the Dogon and published Dogon Restudied in 1991, he found that much of the numbered esoterica in Griaule’s synthesis was unknown to ordinary Dogon outside the small circle of Griaule’s own informants. The dispute has not been settled by consensus and is treated at length in the accounts of Amma and the Dogon; what matters here is only the boundary it draws. The Nommo as a name, as an object of living devotion, as the water-twins honored under the cliffs, belong plainly to the tradition. The exhaustive scaffolding around them — this ancestor did this, that seed corresponds to that star — should be read as a reconstruction assembled in a particular room between a particular elder and a particular listener, valuable and partial, and not as unmediated Dogon fact. Van Beek’s defenders and Griaule’s answer each other still: some hold that Griaule tapped a restricted initiatory teaching that ordinary farmers would not know; others that his eager and leading questions helped build the very system he recorded. The name survives the argument. The number of the ancestors and the exact order of their gifts vary from telling to telling, and are best held loosely.

What the water-twins teach

Strip the scaffolding away and a clear shape remains, and it is a shape about order. In the Dogon world creation does not run smoothly at the first attempt. Amma’s making is disturbed by a single incomplete being who tears prematurely from the cosmic egg — Yurugu, the pale fox, born alone, unpaired, dry, and rebellious, the source of imperfection loosed into the world. Against that dry singleness the Nommo are set as the corrective: twinned where he is single, moist where he is dry, ordered where he is disorder, speaking where he gnaws in silence. Amma made the Nommo first, and after their making they underwent a transformation and multiplied into four pairs of twins — the eight primordial ancestors who become the fathers-and-mothers of the Dogon line. The whole later history of the people is, in this frame, the slow repair of Yurugu’s first rupture, worked through the ordered gifts the Nommo carry down.

The ark is the vehicle of that repair, and it is packed like a seed. It brings the eight grains the Dogon cultivate, and among them the tiny fonio — po in Dogon, the smallest cultivated seed of all, held to be the germ of the whole world, the first thing Amma made and the pattern from which the rest unfolds. It brings the crafts and the knowledges: agriculture and healing, divining and iron-working, woodcarving and weaving, the whole tool-kit of a settled life. And to the first and eldest of the ancestors it brings a granary — a storehouse built, in the telling, from a clay-lined basket shaped like the universe, its stepped sides and its stored grain answering to the stars and the ordered directions, so that the humble building where a family keeps its millet is a working model of the cosmos. To fill the granary correctly is to keep the world in order in miniature. The Tellem granaries still standing in the high caves of the escarpment, and the ones the Dogon build below them, both carry that freight of meaning: a store of seed is a store of order.

Above every other gift stands the Word. Speech in its ordered forms is the thing that most separates the Nommo’s world from Yurugu’s, and in the tradition it is conferred in stages, the fullest of it given by the seventh of the ancestors, the one called the Master of Speech. To him is credited the bundle of arts by which a human life is made articulate and clothed — weaving above all, but also music, dress, and language itself, the loom and the voice understood as two forms of the same ordering act, thread crossing thread as word follows word. Weaving is speech in this scheme, and cloth is a sentence; to weave is to say. The Nommo do not merely bring things. They bring the capacity to arrange things, and speech is the first arrangement.

It is worth pausing on the form itself, because the shape of the Nommo is an argument. The double body — man above, fish below — is not a monster’s body but a complete one, and it says two things at once. The upper half is human and can speak and can teach; the lower half is water and can never be parted from it. A Nommo out of the water would be a contradiction, which is why in the account they dig their pool before they do anything else: they arrive already needing the element they govern. Their hermaphroditism carries the same doubled logic. To be male-and-female in one body is, in this scheme, not to be neither but to be both, lacking nothing, needing no partner to be whole — the state of a thing before it is broken into the halves that ordinary creatures must spend their lives seeking to rejoin. Twinship, moisture, and the completeness of the doubled body are three names for one idea, and the Nommo hold all three. The Dogon prize twin births, and where a child is born single the tradition provides small rites and paired objects to restore, symbolically, the missing twin. The whole of this reaches back to the water-spirits: the ideal is not the solitary hero but the pair, and the Nommo are the first and perfect pair, the measure of every completeness the world afterward falls short of.

There is a darker gift folded into the bright ones, and it is the deepest of them. Order in this world is not free. In the account Amma takes one of the Nommo progeny and sacrifices it, dismembering the body and scattering the pieces across the land, and where each piece falls a binu shrine is founded, so that the map of the sacred sites is the map of a divided body. The sacrificed Nommo, in the phrasing Griaule recorded from Ogotemmêli, “divided his body among men to feed them”; as the universe had “drunk of his body,” so the Nommo in turn made humankind drink. The being whose name means to make one drink becomes at the last the drink itself. The water-twin is also the offering: the moisture that orders the world is given by being poured out, and the world is nourished on the substance of its own principle of order. Here the triad of the Dogon powers closes its circle — Amma the remote creator, the Nommo the ordering water, and Lebe, the first ancestor to die and return as the earth-serpent in whom the soil itself is made sacred. Sky, water, earth; and between them the Nommo are the moving, teaching, self-spending middle term.

The Sirius legend and the living devotion

No spirit in the African record has been carried further from its home ground than the Nommo, and the vehicle was a single, spectacular claim. In 1950 Griaule and Dieterlen published a paper, “Un système soudanais de Sirius,” reporting that the Dogon held a hidden astronomical knowledge: that the Nommo had come from a world circling the star Sirius, and that the Dogon knew Sirius to be accompanied by a tiny, dense, invisible companion — the star modern astronomy calls Sirius B, a white dwarf too faint to see and not photographed until 1970. A quarter-century later the British writer Robert Temple gathered the claim into The Sirius Mystery (1976) and swung it toward the stars, arguing that the amphibious Nommo were literally visitors from the Sirius system who had seeded the knowledge in antiquity. The book made the Nommo famous in a register their keepers never asked for — as evidence, in the ancient-astronaut literature, of contact from another world.

The claim does not survive its own examination, and the sober treatment is to name it as a controversy rather than adopt it as a wonder. Van Beek’s restudy found no Dogon outside Griaule’s informants who had heard the star-names the system turned on, and none who understood Sirius to be a double star; where the knowledge appeared at all it appeared to have been introduced, not inherited, raising the likelihood that Griaule’s questions supplied the answers he received. Griaule and Dieterlen themselves had said only that they could not explain how the Dogon came by the knowledge — they made no interstellar claim; that was Temple’s enlargement, and astronomers, Carl Sagan among them, declined to follow it. The honest position leaves the Nommo where they belong: not as astronauts and not as proof of anything about the sky, but as the water-spirits of a coherent theology, whose migration into the tabloids of the marvelous says more about the twentieth century’s hunger than about the cliffs of Bandiagara. The details of the wider Griaule dispute and the Sirius affair are set out at fuller length under Amma and the Dogon; it is enough here to mark that the sensational reading is a historiographic problem and not a fact.

Beneath and around all of that, the Nommo have never left the country of the cliffs, and there the past tense does not apply to them. Many Dogon today are Muslim, and many are Christian, and the older devotion lives on alongside the world religions rather than under them — a family that prays at the mosque may still keep the granary in order and honor the water-spirits at the appointed times, and the priests of the shrines are living men with living duties. Their order is read on the ground each night by the pale fox himself: the diviners lay out grids of squares on the sand at the edge of the village, set out bait, and in the morning read the future in the tracks Yurugu has left across the ordered cells — the disorderly one made to speak, under conditions, in the language of the order he broke. The binu shrines still hold their fragments of the scattered body, tended by their priests, whitened with millet-porridge and the blood of offerings. And once in a long human lifetime the whole escarpment prepares the Sigui, the great renewal rite whose cycle turns roughly every sixty years — attested in 1787, 1847, 1907, and the cycle that ran from about 1967, with the next turn expected around 2027 — when the masks of the awa society move in procession down the cliff villages one after another, and the towering serpent-mask is carved anew. The masks themselves, in the tradition, were the gift of the andumbulu, the little bush-spirits who came before and taught the first Dogon how to carve and how to dance them. The rite is described here only from the public record and its interior left to its keepers; what belongs in the open is its meaning. It recalls the beginning, the primordial time the ark opened and the first speech was given. As Robert Temple’s Nommo climb toward Sirius in the paperbacks, the Nommo of the Dogon stay in the water under the rock, named at the shrines, tracked across the divining tables, and remembered every sixty years when the water came down through fire and the world first learned to speak.

Dogon (or ancestral Tellem) figure with raised arms, identified as a Nommo, its surface built up by an accretion of sacrificial substances; wood, Mali. Brooklyn Museum (1989.51.39), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

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