52 BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY

No 20. The Sirius Mystery

There is a certain class of book that strictly speaking one needn’t read and maybe even shouldn’t read, lest it drive you whimpering to the safety of the apple cellar or to serial bungee-jumping or worshipping Diane Abbott, or yet worse; and yet the book remains curiously irresistible. Here we treat of one such. In 1976, Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery, which as we recall was a hefty volume in black covers and none-too-large print. The book attracted both scathing criticism and a certain cult following, and a dozen years later Temple followed it with a revised and updated edition (the one we examine here) that, to its detractors, did not markedly improve on the original but lowered Temple deeper into the hole he had already dug for himself. The cult following merely expanded, if the dreaded Internet is any guide. One question the book provokes is how and/or why it should so divide opinion, although we confess that its attraction for its devotees is a mystery in itself – for reasons that will become apparent – and we won’t spend too much time on that. Nonetheless, it’s a book that should be in every fortean’s library, as an example of how not to proceed with any investigation. It is a kind of tragedy, for Temple’s researches are wide, deep, and appear to be erudite; his conclusions are entirely off the mark, because his premises, logical and factual, are so profoundly mistaken. A mountain of labour; a mouse of evidence – and a dead one at that.

Temple’s thesis is as follows. He discovered that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule had, by his own account, penetrated the innermost secrets of the lore of the Dogon, a West African tribe living south of the River Niger in Mali.

According to Ogotemmeli, his sole informant, the Dogon regarded the star Sirius – the brightest in the night sky – as central to their system of beliefs, and were aware that it had an invisible, very dense, companion. This surprised Griaule (and captured Temple’s imagination) because although this knowledge was allegedly ancient to the Dogon, Western astronomers had not even speculated upon the existence of a companion star (Sirius B) until 1844, from calculations based on perturbations of Sirius A. This was confirmed in 1862 when Sirius B was first seen through a telescope. It was identified as a white dwarf in 1915, and first photographed in 1970. Yet it was central to Dogon mythology, and they knew too about its 50-year orbital cycle. So how did the Dogon learn about it?

Griaule also learned of the Dogon’s secret creation myth, which involved creatures called the Nommo. These – at least in Temple’s interpretation – came from the Sirius system, and were amphibious. Temple proposes that the Nommo visited Earth in the distant past, where they not only kick-started the Sumerian and Egyptian civilisations, but provided this arcane information about Sirius B – albeit in coded form – to humans; and the Dogon had it from the Egyptians.

And that is about it, and Temple manages to fill the best part of 650 pages justifying his belief. It is exhausting stuff, full of irrelevant digressions: we get a couple of pages of Temple telling us about his acquaintance with Arthur M Young – designer of the first Bell helicopter, and eccentric philosopher – before we get to the reason why he’s germane to the story. (Temple cannot bear to drop a name you may have heard of without flaunting his acquaintance with said luminary.) But it was always worse than that.

Temple provides a long introduction to his revised edition, in which he claims that the CIA have been on his case for years, trying to wreck his relationships with distinguished members of NASA, stealing manuscripts of key documents, and generally trying to ruin his career. One has to wonder why they would bother. He also expends much time and many pages on a proposal that the Nommo are currently parked on or even in Phoebe, a moon of Saturn that happens to have a retrograde orbit. He thinks it may be artificial, perhaps hollow, and is perfectly round, with “a smooth surface without craters or other lumps or bumps”. It is neither. It looks (if anything) like a misshapen, much-abused potato, and there’s nothing strange about its density.

Temple’s odd speculations include the thought that the Mars Orbiter probe didn’t malfunction after all, but sent back a stream of secret data about the red planet, while he says brightly of the infamous ‘Face on Mars’ image “it looks pretty convincing, doesn’t it?” Well, no it doesn’t (Temple asks many questions to which the answer is “No”), and high resolution images from a later survey proved the point. All this is in the introduction to the revised edition. Stranger things are to come.

His subtitle notwithstanding, Temple makes two fundamental scientific errors in his book. First is the classic presumption of believers in the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis that the emergence of life on other planets will infallibly result in the evolution of intelligent life, and scientifically and technologically accomplished life at that. There is, any sane Darwinian will tell you, nothing inevitable about intelligent life – evolution is an altogether chancy process, not a progression from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ creatures, although some later Victorians thought so. And any half-literate student of history can tell you that the development of science and technology is the product of no

less contingent events in the culture of Western Europe (hint: Martin Luther has much to answer for). His second fundamental error is his failure to address the basic nature of the Sirius star system. Sirius itself is only about 250 million years old and may last only a billion more; and the stars themselves (one excessively hot, the other cold and dim) are well outside the age and temperature range considered conducive to life on any associated planet. Further, Sirius B’s orbit is not symmetrical around Sirius A, so any such planet(s) would have an unstable orbit, such is the nature of celestial mechanics – and that’s not favourable to the emergence of life either: the state of any water would be unstable too, and might well be entirely boiled away. (There is an excellent, detailed summary of all these difficulties by Prof Liam McDaid at www.skeptic. com/eskeptic/10-01-13/#feature.) Various well-informed persons pointed out these problems not long after Temple’s first edition, but they seem mysteriously to have escaped his attention for the second.

The Dogon, Temple says, also have a tradition of a third star (‘Sirius C’) in the system. Of this, he says, there is now “scientific proof”, basing this absolutist statement on a 1995 paper by Daniel Benest and JL Duvent, who more cautiously framed the results of their gravitational studies with the title “Is Sirius a Triple Star?” Their hypothetical candidate was a brown dwarf, and it remained (and remains) undetected. Temple had predicted a red dwarf, but let’s not be picky: he had his ‘proof’. Other astronomers later ran the numbers again, and questioned Benest and Duvent’s conclusions. In 2013, an analysis was published of a visual search and produced the conclusion that the likelihood of Sirius C being present is extremely low (just so you know). This upsets the idea that the Dogon possessed esoteric knowledge about the Sirius system.

In his quest for how the Dogon acquired their alleged knowledge, Temple trawls through every legend and language he can think of in and around the ancient Middle East and at some points wanders as far as China. Much obsessed by Sirius B’s 50year orbit, he devotes an entire lengthy chapter to instances of the number 50, which does indeed crop up all over the ancient world, and in which he sees signs and token of Sirius B. Our take on this was to recall the non-literal biblical habit of referring to a shortish long time as 40 days (e.g. Jesus in the wilderness), and a very long time as 40 years (e.g. the Hebrews in the desert), and the modern Greek expressions ‘ Avrio meth’ ávrio’ – literally, the day after tomorrow, but which everyone understands as ‘Sometime this week – maybe’; and ‘ S’eíkosi ’méres’ – literally, in 20 days’ time, but understood as ‘No idea when, really, just keep asking.’ It’s been suggested that the number 50 is so common for large sets of things or people in the ancient Middle East because it’s the number of seven-day weeks in a lunar year. Well, maybe. We are treated to the histories of various mythical personages’ 50-strong progeny, the sowing of dragons’ teeth (“And teeth are bone!” Temple exclaims triumphantly, inconsequentially, and quite wrongly) and all manner of other stuff involving the ‘sacred 50’. One of the more startling conclusions Temple reaches through his backwards reasoning is that Jason and his 50 Argonauts, of Golden Fleece fame, landed up in Egypt and made their way to Mali, and are the true ancestors of the Dogon. Not a lot of people know that, and it would no doubt surprise those respectable tribespersons no end.

Now, back to the original sources. This is where Temple really comes unstuck. Anthropologists have been, let’s say, bemused that following the publication of Griaule’s 1948 paper on the Dogon and their secret lore, in 1965 he (posthumously) with his student Germaine Dieterlen published Le Renard Pâle, which without explanation presented an entirely different account of Dogon creation myths and associated legends, based this time on four further informants. Temple does not notice the discrepancy. Most remarkable about these accounts, however, was that every facet of Dogon life was shot through with these myths and legends – making Dogon culture unique, indeed anomalous, in Africa. Naturally, this raised questions – more bluntly, suspicions – among anthropologists.

In 1978, Walter van Beek began what started as an investigation into the relation between religion and survival strategies among the Dogon. He visited the tribe for up to three months at a time over the next 11 years. “For this theme, an evaluation of the work of Griaule was a necessity,” he wrote in 1991 (“Dogon Restudied”, Current Anthropology 32:2), several years before Temple’s second edition. “As it developed, it increasingly became an integrated restudy of the Dogon.” Far from being central to all aspects of Dogon life, van Beek found that “Dogon religion emerged as elusive and complicated but within the range of known African religions. It has limited relevance for everyday life: for example, much of agriculture is conducted without any reference to it.” More surprising, van Beek – after carefully and discreetly preparing his ground – found no one who recognised any aspect of Griaule’s ‘secret’ lore, although many other features of Dogon culture remained intact decades after first being recorded. Contrary to Griaule/Temple’s account, the Nommo are not ancestors of the Dogon, and Nommo – singular – is “often represented as one but then as an example of his kind: many Nommo people the waters. Nommo is feared as none other….” Van Beek notes that “The Dogon know no proper creation myth; neither the version of Ogotemmeli nor that of the Renard pâle is recognisable to informants... That Sirius is a double star is unknown; astronomy is of very little importance in religion. Dogon society has no initiatory secrets beyond the complete mastery of publicly known texts.” He goes on: “Is Sirius a double star [to the Dogon]? The ethnographic facts are quite straightforward. The Dogon, of course, know Sirius as a star (it is after all the brightest in the sky)… Knowledge of the stars is not important either in daily life or in ritual. The position of the sun and the phases of the moon are more pertinent for Dogon reckoning. No Dogon outside the circle of Griaule’s informants had ever heard of sigu tolo or po tolo, nor had any Dogon even heard of erne ya tolo (according to Griaule… Dogon names for Sirius and its star companions). Most important, no one, even within the circle of Griaule informants, had ever heard or understood that Sirius was a double star (or… even a triple one, with B and C orbiting A). Consequently, the purported knowledge of the mass of Sirius B or the orbiting time was absent.”

In other words, not a trace of the ‘secret lore’ on which Temple builds his exhausting argument. How come, we may ask? Van Beek provides ample evidence that Griaule created narratives out of confused notes, specialised in combining leading questions with a bullying mode, and besides was well-versed in astronomy. Possibly without realising it, but perhaps not, he gave his Dogon informants all the information they needed about Sirius. The Dogon are obsessively polite and non-confrontational, and happily fed him whatever they thought he wanted to hear. It’s worth mentioning too that, being human, they don’t lack humour. Van Beek, for instance, recounts how he showed a 400-panel colour chart to some informants, who obligingly (and to his surprise) gave a name for all of them. They then confessed they’d made most of them up, but had fun doing it.

Which naturally does make one wonder if Robert Temple’s barely readable opus isn’t a whopping spoof as well.

Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5000 years ago, Century Random House, 1998.

“reaDinG MaDe Don QUiXote a GentleMan. belieVinG WHat He reaD MaDe HiM MaD.” Bernard Shaw