Serer Religion

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In the flat country between the Sine and the Saloum, where the rains arrive on a schedule the sky itself posts, the first act of the agricultural year is an act of reading. Before a single seed goes into the ground, the farmer waits for a star. When Yoonir clears the eastern horizon before dawn — the brightest point in the whole vault, the star astronomers call Sirius — the season has turned. The flood is coming, the soil will take seed, the year may begin. Yoonir is not a calendar device borrowed from the heavens; it is the heavens speaking in their own register, and the one who plants by it is keeping faith with an order set down at the beginning of things. That order has a single author, and his name is Roog.

Senegal in West Africa; the Serer homeland of the Sine and the Saloum lies in the west-central part of the country — NordNordWest, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Roog, the one who does not come down

Roog — written Rog in some hands, and called Koox, Kooh, Kopé Tiatie Cac, or Kokh Kox in the Cangin languages spoken by the western Serer — is the supreme being: the sole, uncreated creator from whom everything proceeds and to whom everything returns. The Serer name him Roog Sene, a phrase that carries the sense of Roog the Immensity, Roog the Merciful. He is the source of life and the term of it. Nothing stands beside him as a rival or a peer; the religion is, at its apex, strictly monotheistic, and a long tradition of scholarship on the Serer — most weightily the four decades of fieldwork Father Henry Gravrand gathered into La Civilisation Sereer — settled on exactly that reading: Roog has no equal.

Yet this single god is, by his own nature, unapproachable. Roog sees, knows, and hears everything, and he interferes in nothing. He is incorporeal and without anthropomorphic form, holding within himself both a female and a male nature, so that one may address him in whichever aspect the moment calls for. He keeps no temple. There is no shrine to Roog, no idol, no festival raised to him directly; to make an image of him is held to be blasphemy. The Serer do not pray to Roog. This is not neglect but theology: a creator of such immensity is not the kind of being one petitions over a sick child or a failed harvest. He is too high, too entire, too far above the traffic of need. The distance is not a flaw in the relationship — it is the relationship. What the religion supplies, then, is a way across the distance, and the bridge is the dead.

The pangool

Between the unreachable Roog and the household stands the pangool (singular fangool) — the ancestral and saintly spirits who are the genuine working center of Serer devotion. They are the spirits of forebears who lived rightly, of the founding figures of lineages and lands, of the old custodians; through them, and only through them, the living reach toward the divine. To the pangool the Serer carry their prayers, their thanks, their requests, their grief. The word names the office exactly: in the Serer tongue fangool also means serpent, and the pangool are widely figured as snakes — often as two coiled serpents — an image of vigilance, of continuity across generations, and of the threshold between the world of the living and the world of the dead, which a snake, at home in the earth and at home above it, is fit to keep.

The pangool are propitiated, not commanded. Offerings are brought to them at the foot of certain trees, in groves and forests, at family and community shrines: fruits, vegetables, the first crops, milk, and the sacrifice of domestic animals. The shrines are tended by an old priestly class, the lamanes — the land-masters whose authority over territory and ancestry made them the natural keepers of the pangool cult. Serer practice distinguishes kinds of pangool by what they require: the blood or red pangool, served with the sacrifice of cattle or with alcohol; the milk pangool, served with milk; the water pangool, who dwell in rivers and pools. Alongside the human pangool stand lesser gods and goddesses, the assistants through whom Roog’s governance reaches into the visible world — so that the structure is a single transcendent creator above, a court of subordinate powers and a great company of intermediary ancestors below, and the human petitioner addressing always the near, never the far. This is the characteristic Serer move, and it is what makes the religion both rigorously monotheistic in its source and densely populated in its practice: the one God is honored precisely by not being approached, and the pangool carry what the worshipper cannot carry himself.

The cosmic egg and the somb

The world Roog made, the Serer cosmogony holds, was not conjured from nothing. Before the world there was the cosmic egg — not a thing Roog created at a stroke but an integral expression of his own omnipresence, holding within it the undifferentiated stuff of everything to come: the turbulent waters, the vapors, the latent earth. Creation was an ordering of this potential rather than a summoning of it. From the egg came a primordial swamp, chaotic water out of which solid land slowly gathered and set, drawn into form by the rotational force Roog exerted upon it — the cosmos turned, quite literally, into being.

At the center of the account stands the somb, the tree the botanists call Prosopis africana, which the Serer hold as the first tree and the Tree of Life, the sign of immortality. The seeds of the vegetable world, fashioned within the divine egg and lodged in the somb, were flung outward across the new earth when the somb burst — a mythic rupture that scattered the diversity of growing things into the world. The egg, the swamp, the turning, the tree that breaks and seeds the land: the whole sequence is one of emergence and ordering, water becoming ground and ground becoming garden, and it is no accident that the star which announces the same thing every year — the flooding that makes the ground fertile again — is woven into it. Yoonir’s heliacal rising, the morning when Sirius first reappears low in the east, is read as the renewal of that first ordering, the beginning returning on schedule, and around it the agrarian world of the Sine-Saloum sets its labor.

This Sirius association belongs to the Serer in their own right, keyed to flood and seed and the Senegambian farming year. It should not be folded into the separate and far more contested claim made about the Dogon cosmology of the Bandiagara escarpment — the assertion, advanced through Marcel Griaule’s mid-century fieldwork and later inflated into ancient-astronaut speculation, that the Dogon possessed knowledge of Sirius B. That episode is disputed and most likely contaminated by the inquiry itself; the Serer Yoonir is a different matter entirely, a star read agriculturally by a farming people, and the two should be held apart.

The soul, and the long road home

Death, in the Serer reckoning, is not a terminus but a turning. The soul is immortal, and it travels. The Serer hold to reincarnation — ciiɗ in their language, a word that names at once the reincarnated, the dead who seek to return, and the pre-foetal spirit waiting to be born. The principle is put with great economy: to be born is to die, and to die is to be born differently. But the return is not automatic, and not everyone walks the road. Only the soul that has lived a righteous life may enter Jaaniiw, the dwelling of good souls; only from Jaaniiw can a soul reincarnate, and only such a soul — having become, in effect, a human fangool — is able to intercede with the divine for those still living. The dead who matter to the cult, in other words, are the dead who earned their place, and the living petition them in the confidence that they have arrived where prayers can be passed upward.

What earns that passage is conduct, measured against an ideal the Serer call jom — a word reaching toward honor, dignity, self-mastery, a sense of one’s worth and one’s obligations. To have kept jom across a life is to have lived in accord with the order Roog set down, and so to be fit for Jaaniiw and the return. The soul, on this view, must come back to its truest and purest form for ciiɗ to run its full course, and whether it does is decided by how the life was lived. The architecture of the afterlife and the architecture of ethics are the same architecture: the cosmos rewards the well-lived life with continuance, and the ancestor who continues becomes, in turn, a rung on the ladder by which the next generation reaches Roog. This is why the Serer dead are the reincarnation-bound intercessors on whom the whole devotional system rests — and why the soul, for the Serer, is the thing the entire religion is finally about.

The saltigue and the night of Xooy

Knowledge of all this — of the order of the seasons, the temper of the pangool, the reading of signs — is held and exercised by a class of seer-priests, the saltigue. They are diviners and rainmakers, masters of an inherited science of prediction, and once a year, in the village squares of the Serer country in west-central Senegal, they gather for the great public rite of divination called Xooy, held just ahead of the rainy season. Through a long night, one saltigue after another steps into a marked circle and delivers his prophecies before a packed and rapturous crowd — the coming rains, the harvest, the illnesses and remedies of the year, the accidents and deaths and reversals the months will bring — to the drumming, the songs, the proverbs and riddles that keep the gathering in suspense until daybreak. The Xooy is at once the community’s almanac, its oracle, and its theater; it concentrates into a single night the conviction that the future is legible to those trained to read it, and it carries the Serer cosmology forward by performance rather than by book. In 2013 it was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a formal acknowledgment of a transmission that had never needed one.

A faith that did not convert

The Serer carried this religion through centuries in which the surrounding country turned, by stages, to Islam — and through long stretches they declined to turn with it. The kingdoms of Sine and Saloum, ruled in their classical period by the Guelowar dynasty (the line of maternal aristocracy whose princes governed from roughly the fourteenth century), became strongholds of the old faith, and the Serer aristocracy and peasantry alike resisted forced conversion with a tenacity that left its mark on Senegalese history. The most famous moment came on 18 July 1867, at the Battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune — also called the Battle of Somb, after the very tree of the creation account. The marabout leader Maba Diakhou Bâ carried a jihad into the Serer kingdom of Sine; the forces of Maad a Sinig Kumba Ndoffene Famak Joof, the King of Sine, met it and broke it, and Maba was killed on the field. The day is remembered among the Serer as the day Sine kept its gods.

Coexistence, rather than absorption, became the long pattern. Many Serer in time entered Islam — including its mystical Sufism in the great Senegalese brotherhoods — and many did not, and the indigenous religion persisted as a living thing in the villages of the Sine-Saloum rather than as a memory. The deeper claim of the tradition is that it never had to choose between heaven and the field. The proof of it lies scattered across the Saloum: the burial mounds the Serer call podoom, and the vast megalithic landscape of the Senegambian stone circles — Sine Ngayène, Wanar, and the rest, a sacred terrain in use across more than fifteen hundred years and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2006, raised by builders many archaeologists identify with the Serer and their funerary forebears. Stone set in the earth for the honored dead; the dead become pangool; the pangool carry the prayers up toward Roog — the whole religion is written into the ground of the country.

A circle of laterite pillars at Sine Ngayène, the largest of the Senegambian megalithic sites and part of the funerary landscape inscribed by UNESCO in 2006 — Tobias 67, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Carved laterite monoliths at Sine Ngayène, a sacred terrain raised over many centuries by builders many archaeologists associate with the Serer and their funerary forebears — Tobias 67, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

And the country still reads its star. When the rains have failed too long and the saltigue have spoken, when the somb stands black against the dusk and the year hangs on the next dawn, the Sine-Saloum farmer rises before light and looks east for Yoonir. If the great star has cleared the horizon, the wait is over: the flood will come, the ground will open, and a man may bend to put the first seed of the season into soil that the creator turned out of chaos and the ancestors have kept in trust.

Sources and scholarship

The documentation of Serer religion rests above all on the long ethnographic labor of Father Henry Gravrand, the French missionary-anthropologist who reached Senegal in 1948 and spent more than thirty years among Serer communities. His multivolume La Civilisation Sereer — beginning with Cosaan (the origins), published in Dakar by Nouvelles Éditions Africaines in 1983, and continuing with Pangool: le génie religieux sereer (NEAS, 1990) — remains the foundational corpus, and it is from Gravrand’s synthesis that the now-standard description of the religion as monotheistic, with Roog above all and the pangool as the graded means of access to transcendence, principally derives. A biographical and bibliographic overview is maintained at Wikipedia’s entry on Gravrand. Marguerite Dupire’s Sagesse sereer: essais sur la pensée sereer ndut (Paris: Karthala, 1994) complements Gravrand with a closer study of Serer Ndut thought, ethics, and cosmological reasoning; it is reviewed in the scholarly record at JSTOR.

The living practice has been documented by international institutions as well. The Xooy divination ceremony is described in detail, with its saltigue, its drumming, and its seasonal timing, in the dossier maintained by UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program, which inscribed it in 2013. The megalithic and funerary landscape of the Serer country is documented by the UNESCO World Heritage Center’s listing for the Stone Circles of Senegambia, inscribed in 2006. General encyclopedic syntheses of the religion’s doctrine — Roog and his Cangin-language names, the pangool and their serpent imagery, the cosmic egg and the somb, ciiɗ and Jaaniiw, and the resistance crystallized at Fandane-Thiouthioune in 1867 — are gathered at the Wikipedia entry on Serer religion, which serves as a useful map to the underlying primary and secondary literature.

→ Related: Divination · Reincarnation · Soul · Dogon Cosmology · Islam · Sufism