11

The Heliacal Rise of Sirius

The term heliacal means “related to or near the sun,” so the “heliacal rise of Sirius” refers to the annual reappearance of the brilliant star Sirius above the eastern horizon just before sunrise, following a period of time during which the star is not visible. The reason this happens is that, during the annual rotation of the Earth around the sun, the planet’s position in relation to the sun and the stars changes. There is a point in this rotation where the sun is positioned between the Earth and Sirius for approximately seventy days, during which the sun’s glare effectively blocks our view of Sirius. Immediately following this period of invisibility, Sirius can be seen momentarily in a darkened predawn sky as it rises above the horizon of the Earth just ahead of the sun. Sirius soon becomes invisible again due to the bright glare of the rising sun. This annual reappearance of Sirius is referred to as its heliacal rising.

At Egypt’s geographic latitude, the reemergence of Sirius occurs at around the time of the summer solstice. In ancient Egypt, it was this event that signaled an annual inundation of the Nile River, caused by floodwaters that according to the ancient historian Herodotus rose for a hundred days, then receded, depositing fertile soil as they went. Flooding could be expected to occur within about a month after the rising of the star. This natural fertilizing process served to renew the nutrients of the soil and came to be relied on to promote a productive agricultural season. The regular cycle of Nile flooding is thought to have played a role in the establishment of a three-season year in ancient Egypt. Historian H. W. E Saggs writes in his book Civilization before Greece and Rome:

The Nile rises and floods the land in a very uniform and predictable pattern, so that in ancient times it became thought of as dividing the Egyptian agricultural year into three seasons. The first season was the time of inundation, from when the river began to rise until it had fallen sufficiently to permit sowing. The second season was the time from sowing to harvest, and the third was the period of low water between harvest and the beginning of the next inundation. Experience showed that each of these seasons lasted about four lunar months.1

For both the ancient Egyptians and the Dogon (who both used the same calendar systems) it was the heliacal rise of Sirius that determined the start of the new year in relation to their solar calendar. In Egypt, the rise of Sirius is understood to have defined the start of the year at least since early in the third millennium BCE. According to R. T. Rundle Clark in his book Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, the rising of the sun on New Year’s Day symbolized the creation of the world.2

R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, the great Egyptian symbolist, noted, “Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, on the one hand, and the movement of Sirius on the other, the position of the sun with respect to Sirius is displaced in the same direction, almost exactly to the same extent.” Because of this, “Sirius is the only star among the ‘ fixed stars’ which allows this cycle. It can therefore be supposed that Sirius plays the role of a center for the circuit of our entire solar system.”3

In the Dogon tradition, Sirius and our sun are conceptualized as macrocosmic siblings that are said to have been born from “twin placentas.” This symbolism reaffirms the outlook of the Dogon priests that our material universe emerged side by side with a nonmaterial one as a kind of twin birth. This coupling upheld a fundamental principle in the universe of dualism and the pairing of opposites. If we consider that the concept of light is functionally equated to the color white in the Buddhist color wheel, then comparable symbolism can be seen to be reflected in the Turkish language, where, as we have noted, yildiz means “star,” akyildiz (or literally “white star”) refers to the Dog Star, Sirius, and the terms isik and isigi mean “light” (similar to the name of the Dogon Sigi festival of Sirius); in addition, izik means “twin.”

Like other Dogon cosmological concepts, priestly statements that relate to the heliacal rising of Sirius are supported by a cosmological drawing that is described with the phrase “Sirius meets the sun.” The name that is assigned to this event is taba tolo. These are two words that, like many other cosmological terms, can be understood to combine other familiar cosmological prefixes and suffixes. The Dogon word tolo is used to identify stars and is a likely counterpart to the Egyptian word tau, meaning “star.” The phonetic value ta, which we discussed in chapter 8 in relation to the name of the Sakta earth mother Tana Penu, is a cosmological term that means “earth” and that we interpret to symbolize the concept of mass, matter, or substance. In support of that view, Budge lists a dictionary entry for the name Ta, which he defines as the name of an ancient Egyptian earth god.4 According to Genevieve Calame-Griaule, the Dogon word ba refers to “a temporal or spatial limit,”5 while the Egyptian word ba refers to the concepts of “soul” or “spirit.” If we interpret these two phonemes, ta and ba, from the perspective of the twin Dogon and Buddhist universes that these stars seem to represent, the terms “matter” and “spirit” seem to sensibly apply. From this perspective, we could interpret the Dogon term taba tolo, described as “Sirius meets the Sun,” to mean “stars of spirit and matter.”

Mythologically, in ancient times the Egyptian goddesses Isis and Nephthys were referred to as “the two vultures,” and in some cases they seem to have been symbolized in Egyptian words by the vulture glyph, . One such word, ner-ti, refers to Isis and Nephthys as “vulture goddesses.” According to Budge, the concept of “the opening of the year” is given by the related term ner or ner-t. This word is written with the same vulture glyph and the Egyptian sun glyph, and so symbolically conveys the same essential meaning as the Dogon term taba tolo: Sirius meets the sun.6 Likewise, in his book Ancient Egyptian Religion, Stephen Quirke makes mention of an ancient Egyptian ceremony of “joining the sun disk” that was performed at the New Year.7 The Egyptian term ner is a possible counterpart to a Dogon word nay, which refers to the sun, particularly in relation to the solstices.8 These varied references seem to make clear that the Egyptians and the Dogon understood the concept of the heliacal rising of Sirius in mutual and comparable ways.

Figure 11.1. The heliacal rise of Sirius,
in which Sirius meets the sun, also known as taba tolo
(from Griaule and Dieterlen, Pale Fox, 279)

Figure 11.2. Egyptian word ner,
which means “opening of the year”
(see Budge, Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, 379a)

From another point of view, this again given from an Egyptian perspective, some researchers of Egyptian mysteries such as Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval argue that both the lion-like image and the alignment of the Sphinx at Giza were meant to point to the heliacal rising of Sirius during a remote epoch when, because of the slow rotational cycle of precession, the star would have been seen to rise against the backdrop of the constellation Leo. The synchronization of these two astronomical events serves to associate the concept of the heliacal rise of Sirius symbolically with the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx enigmatically reclines. So it is quite interesting that Calame-Griaule defines the Dogon word taba to mean “plateau.”9

We learn from her Dictionnaire Dogon that the Dogon word taba also means “to touch with the fingers of the hand.” This is symbolism that we might well associate with the enigmatic carved images of arms and hands on the megalithic pillars at Gobekli Tepe. This same meaning is alternately conveyed by the Dogon term numo tabala. Readers who are familiar with Dogon symbolism will realize that the word numo is one that is intimately associated with the Dogon concept of beneficent ancestral teachers.

There is evidence that the heliacal rising of Sirius held significance for other ancient cultures besides just the Egyptians. For example, the Aryans in northeastern Iran (a region not far from where Gobekli Tepe is located) are known to have observed a 360-day year in ancient times that was also measured from around the time of the summer solstice. This calendar, which is referred to as the Old Avestan calendar, is thought to have had great similarity to both the oldest known Vedic calendar and, in some respects, to the post-Vedic calendar in India. A reference from the ancient Yasht text reported, “The year comes to an end . . . when the Tishtrya [Sirius] is in the rising.” In Iran, the heliacal rising of Sirius was also seen as a predictor of coming rain, which was likewise seen as a boon to agriculture in that region.10