Mali

Mali is the archive's home for the Dogon cosmogony, recorded in the field by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen: a cosmos created in stages, seeded with the Nommo, the amphibious ancestors, and tied to the star Sirius — whose invisible companion, the Dogon say, is the heaviest thing in the sky and the pivot of the world's rebirth. The end in Dogon thought is a return: the word of the creator, scattered at the beginning, gathers again at the close. (Note: the Griaule field data is contested in parts of the scholarship — handled on the myth page.)