4

Parallels to Dogon Cosmology

Our initial entry point to the study of ancient cosmology was a modern-day primitive African tribe from Mali called the Dogon. They are a priestly tribe from a remote desert region of Northwest Africa, situated in southern Mali. The Dogon have long lived in relative isolation from the outside world, and it is clear that the choice to do so was a deliberate one. Living at a distance from outside influences is consistent with a Dogon cultural mind-set that prioritizes the preservation of ancient rituals, civic practices, cultural outlook, and language. Outwardly, the Dogon are farmers, weavers, artists, mask makers, and priests; however, they also preserve a complex symbolic creation tradition. The initial impulse to focus our inquiries about ancient cosmology on the Dogon turns out to have been a fortuitous one, since their culture integrates important elements from a number of different classic ancient traditions.

We have seen that Dogon civic practices bear a consistent resemblance to those known to have existed in ancient Egypt. Like the Egyptians, the Dogon establish their villages and districts in pairs called upper and lower. A Dogon chieftain is referred to by the term faro, comparable to the Egyptian title of pharaoh. The Dogon use the same set of diverse calendars as the ancient Egyptians, including solar and lunar calendars, a 360-day civic calendar, an agricultural calendar, and a calendar related to the planet Venus. However, Dogon society consistently reflects Egyptian practices as they were known to have existed in a very early period of Egyptian culture, seemingly from around the boundary between predynastic and dynastic times in Egypt. Consequently, Dogon society is lacking certain familiar elements of Egyptian culture that are understood to have developed sometime after 2900 BCE. These include the use of five intercalary (leap-year) days to reconcile time frames in their calendars and evidence of a written language.

Although the Dogon have no indigenous written language, the words that define their creation tradition are demonstrably ancient Egyptian words. Much attention has been devoted in prior volumes of this series to correlating Dogon words and meanings to Egyptian hieroglyphic words and meanings. In keeping with Dogon rituals that reflect Jewish practices, many of these same words also have likely correlates in the Hebrew language. The system of concepts and symbols that comprise Dogon cosmology, however, most closely matches the tradition that is associated with an aligned ritual Buddhist shrine called a stupa. In fact, the Dogon system is also defined in relation to an aligned ritual shrine whose form is very much like that of a Buddhist stupa. The close similarities of these two systems allow us to cross-confirm the meanings of cosmological concepts and relationships to specific symbols. Because the Buddhist cosmology is given in Sanskrit words that can take distinctly different forms than Egyptian or Dogon words, it seems unlikely that either the Dogon or the Buddhists simply adopted their tradition wholesale from the other.

As we have suggested, Dogon ritual practices also bear a close resemblance to Judaism in that the Dogon wear skullcaps and prayer shawls, circumcise their young, and celebrate a Jubilee Year. Their tribal culture is organized according to revered family lineages, comparable to what we find in Judaism. For example, the Hogon priests of the Dogon tribe compare to the priestly Cohane clan of Judaism, and the descendants of a mythical Dogon ancestor named Lebe compare to the Levi tribe of Judaism. Conceptually, as we approach the inner definitions of the Dogon cosmological tradition, abiding parallels can be seen to the Kabbalistic tradition of Judaism.

Linguists say that the Dogon language is not easily classifiable because it includes a number of distinct subgroups of words that were drawn from different languages. Thus far in our cosmological studies, we have offered correlations to Dogon words from various languages, including the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, Hebrew, the Dravidian languages of the Tamil (a cultural group that is thought to have originated to the northwest of India), the Turkish language, the Dongba language of the Na-Khi tribe in Tibet, and even ancient Chinese. From the standpoint of cosmology, we have demonstrated broad agreement between Dogon words and Egyptian hieroglyphic words, and so the two languages provide us with valuable cross-confirmation of the likely pronunciations and meanings of many cosmological words.

Notwithstanding the great geographic distance between North Africa and New Zealand, Dogon references become pertinent to our study of Maori cosmology once we realize that many of the characteristic attributes of the Maori religion are also reflected in the religion of the Dogon. As in the Dogon culture, Best tells us that Maori myth and religion are closely intertwined and that precepts of the religion essentially defined the contours of everyday life among the Maori.¹ He describes the Maori religion as being both cosmogonic (pertaining to the origin of the universe) and anthropogenic (pertaining to the development of the human race). Once again, this is just as we observe the situation to be in the Dogon tradition.² Best characterizes the esoteric tradition of the Maori in terms that relate directly to what we know about the Dogon tradition, saying that the education of an initiate to the Maori esoteric tradition could be a lengthy process and that to attain an innermost level of knowledge required the initiate to gain the intimate confidence of a tribal elder.³

Tregear writes in his 1904 book The Maori Race, “When attempting to question an old priest on the subject of the ancient Maori worship of the Supreme Being he was refused information, and politely referred to another priest 100 miles away. Probably that priest would have referred him again to someone else and so on. Each initiate into the sacred mysteries considered his knowledge as a trust to be guarded against the outer world, and it is only under most exceptional circumstances that information could be acquired.”⁴

Consistent with the archaic philosophies that underlie the Dogon religion, the Maori religion was not rooted in traditional Christian concepts of heaven and hell or of an afterlife, although the concepts of both a soul and a spiritual or nonmaterial realm were defined. Again, Tregear writes in The Maori Race, “The great difference between the conception of the Maori Spirit World and our own is that the native idea had nothing therein of the future life being a state where reward or punishment was meted out according to the quality of the mortal life.”⁵

We know that the Dogon often illustrate concepts of creation through the defined actions of characters in myths. However, unlike Egyptian culture (but consistent with earlier traditions), they do not personify these concepts as anthropomorphized deities. Best writes, “The Maori have viewed the powers of nature as concrete in one meaning of that term, as opposed to abstract, but there is nothing to show that he viewed them as entities. He personified them in obedience to his mythopoetic nature, as he personified the ocean, earth, sky, as also misfortune, sickness, death, etc.”⁶

Best goes on to say that natural phenomena can be treated as entities in Maori cosmology in the sense that the evolution of stages of creation from “empty space down to the appearance of earth and sky” is presented in the form of a genealogy. This perspective aligns well with how the Dogon treat their symbolic concept of ancestors. Another commentator on the Maori, a German professor and parson by the name of Ferdinand von Hochstetter, echoed Best’s characterization of the Maori tradition as one without traditional worshipped deities. He described the Maori religion as “a kind of polytheism” or “worship of elementary spirits and deified ancestors; yet without idols and temples.”⁷ Once again, the notion of ancestors is one that plays an essential role in Dogon cosmology, both in a literal and a symbolic sense. Best adds the statement, “Some consider that all Maori gods were deified ancestors.”⁸

We are also told that the Maori, again like the Dogon, defined two distinct classes of myths. The first were somewhat akin to stories that are told around a campfire. These can be thought of as constituting public myths, which were known to any member of the tribe. In the Dogon culture, myths of this kind work to establish the basic storylines and symbolic elements of the cosmology, concepts that ultimately frame a more secret body of knowledge, open only to trusted initiates. They also serve to orient the average tribe member to the mind-set of the cosmological tradition and to foster interest in learning about it.

Like the Dogon, the Maori understand that creation emerged in stages, and they define a series of discrete steps for the process. Like many of the other cultures we study, the Maori associate these stages with the ordinal numbers (even in Christianity, God is One), and so any recitation of the stages of creation in their proper sequence could be compared to the act of counting. In China’s Cosmological Prehistory, we commented on similar associations between the stages of creation and the ordinal numbers in the early creation traditions of ancient China. These become evident both in the yijing and in Daoism. We see the survival of similar symbolism in Judaism, where creation is said to have happened over the course of seven days and where the first six days are simply assigned numbers, given as Day 1, Day 2, and so on. The sequence ends with the Sabbath, a term that we associate with the number seven.

Maori names for the stages of creation center on the term Kore, or Te Kore, a word that, according to Tregear, refers to “the primal power of the Cosmos, the Void or negation, yet containing the potentiality of all things afterwards to come.”⁹ Best says that the generic term te kore signifies “non-existence,” “non-possession,” or “non-occurrence.”¹⁰ In the view of the ancient cosmology, prior to these creative processes all reality exists as a perfectly ordered unity. The stages of creation are seen as the process by which multiplicity emerges from unity through successive divisions. So it makes sense that an alternate definition of the word Kore is given to mean “broken; a break, a fracture.”¹¹

Dogon words formed from the root ko provide us with some potential insights into possible meanings of the Maori term Kore. The Dogon word koro refers to a source of water and means “to surround.”¹² From a cosmological perspective, these meanings describe matter in its base state as primordial waves that are drawn up by an act of perception and then twist and loop in such a way as to surround and define empty space. These looping dimensions are said to create a primary unit of matter that the Dogon call the egg-in-a-ball, or the po pilu. Other Dogon definitions describe the term koro as referring to an “empty container” or a “bucket to transport earth.” Within the framework of the cosmology, the term earth is symbolic of the concept of mass or matter.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, based on his famous formula E = mc², implies that the speed of light remains a constant as mass or acceleration increases. The only way this could be possible would be if the time frame slows down as acceleration or mass increases. In other words, time would pass more slowly for someone who was moving at speeds very close to the speed of light than it would for us in our everyday lives. This perspective implies that matter in its primordial wavelike state, in which it is virtually massless, must exist within the context of an ultrafast time frame by comparison to ours. Essentially, within the void of primordial waves where mass effectively does not exist, all events must effectively occur at once. In keeping with that outlook, the Dogon phoneme ko means “immediate” and so suggests that, on one level, the cosmic void of Te Kore might refer to a “place of immediacy.” Supportive of this interpretation is the Maori view that any recitation of the stages of creation can also be looked on as an enumeration of the “aeons of time.”¹³

In Dogon cosmology, instructed civilizing concepts are symbolically defined as words, and the words are presented in relation to a sequence of ordinal numbers. So when Griaule wrote about the steps of his instruction as a Dogon initiate, he organized the chapters of his book Dieu d’Eau (God of Water, or in the English-language edition, Conversations with Ogotemmeli) in relation to numbered words. Griaule explained that in the Dogon tradition, instructed civilizing skills were tagged in parallel to successive stages of creation. The First Word related to the concept of clothing, the Second Word to concepts of weaving, and so on. So it may be significant that the Maori word Kore bears both a conceptual and a phonetic relationship to the Egyptian word kher, meaning “word.”¹⁴ As in the ancient Hebrew language, when Egyptian hieroglyphic words were written, vowel sounds were omitted. Consequently, the precise pronunciation of any Egyptian hieroglyphic word can only be approximated. A vowel-less Egyptian word given essentially as k-h-r might have been pronounced kher, as Budge interpreted it, or might conceivably have been pronounced khore.

Meanwhile, the Dogon egg-of-the-world, the structure that is the product of the progressive stages of matter, is also characterized as the Word. The implication is that this is the fundamental unit on which a metaphorically “spoken” creation is formed. The Maori word te means “the.”¹⁵ From that perspective, the compound term Te Kore would imply a meaning of “the Word.” From Best’s perspective, the generic term te kore signifies the concept of “nonexistence.”¹⁶

Best provides a list of the stages of Te Kore on page 34 of his Maori Religion and Mythology, which we re-create below. The name of each stage is prefixed by “Te Kore,” perhaps implying “the Word.”

Te Kore tuatahi—the first Kore

Te Kore tuarua—the second Kore

Te Kore tuatoru—the third Kore

Te Kore tuawha—the fourth Kore

Te Kore tuarima—the fifth Kore

Te Kore tuaono—the sixth Kore

Te Kore tuawhitu—the seventh Kore

Te Kore tuawaru—the eighth Kore

Te Kore tuaiwa—the ninth Kore

Te Kore tuangahuru—the tenth Kore

According to Best, the first stage of Te Kore was called tuatahi. The Maori word tuatahi means “first.”¹⁷ In keeping with the symbolism that relates to numbers and counting previously discussed, Tregear explains that tua is an ordinal prefix that can be attached to adjectives to express numeric concepts of sequence like “first” or “second.”¹⁸ (If we attach the prefix tua to the Maori word for “one,” which is tahi, the combined term is tuatahi, which means “first.”) Tregear also tells us that the Maori word tua is a religious word that implies “indefinite power and infinity.”¹⁹ The word tua also represents the root phoneme from which the Maori word atua, meaning “god,” is formed. Tregear associates the words tua and atua with the Hawaiian phoneme kua and word akua, meaning “god.” From our previous studies, we know that the Egyptian term ak or aakhu (Dogon ogo) refers to the concept of light and that matter in its wavelike state is said to be of the same nature as light. Tregear defines Tu as the name of “one of the greatest and most widely worshipped of Polynesian deities.”²⁰

According to the Dogon, matter exists in three conceptual Worlds. It begins in the perfectly ordered state of waves in the First World. An act of perception causes the waves to be disrupted and then to be fundamentally reordered in the Second World. This reorganizational process culminates in the egg-of-the-world, or po pilu, which is considered to be the first finished structure of matter. That egg then becomes the source of transformations that produce the Third World, which is defined as the familiar realm of our material universe. We consider the Dogon Second World of matter to be a conceptual correlate to the Egyptian Other World or Underworld, which is also known as the Tuat.

The Maori word tua also refers to “religious ceremonies taking place at the naming of a child,”²¹ comparable to the modern-day Jewish tradition of a child-naming ceremony. Tregear roughly equates these ceremonies to a baptism, and so the suggestion is that there may be an underlying symbolic relationship to water. Appropriate to the intermediate nature of the creative processes of the Second World of matter, the Maori word tuao means “transient” or “not permanent.”²²

The suffix tahi of the word tuatahi also carries meanings that are understandable within the context of our cosmology. In the philosophies of various cultures, the processes that generate matter are dependent on the feminine energy associated with the nonmaterial universe that comes together with the masculine energy of the material universe. Appropriate to that outlook, the Maori word tahi implies the notion of “joining or meeting together.”²³ The same word can also mean “to beckon to” or “to wave to,” symbolism that is associated in other cultures with the concept of the Mother Goddess who creates matter.

An important aspect of Dogon village life centers on a structure called the togu na or toguna, defined as a “discussion house.” Much of the day-to-day tranquility of Dogon life can be credited to concepts that are associated with this structure. It is a rule of a Dogon village that whenever a dispute arises between two or more tribe members, all interested parties are required to retire to the discussion house and are not allowed to leave until the dispute has been resolved. The toguna structure is built only to half-height, so that anyone who participates in discussions there will be obliged to sit, rather than stand. A likely Maori counterpart for the term toguna is formed from the words tohu, meaning “to think,”²⁴ and nga, meaning “to breathe.”²⁵ The combined term can also be seen as a likely origin for the title of a wise, skilled, or priestly person, referred to as a tohunga.

Best assigns the word tuarua to the second stage of Te Kore. The Maori word rua means “two,” and combined with the ordinal prefix tua, it means “second.”²⁶ The Maori prefix ru means “to shake” and can imply a “rumbling sound,” comparable to the Hebrew concept of ruach.²⁷ From a cosmological perspective, the symbolism indicated is the concept of vibration, an effect that is assigned to a primordial wave once it has been perceived. Consistent with these meanings, Tregear tells us that the Maori deity Ru was the god of earthquakes.²⁸

An alternate meaning for the word rua is “by two and two,” a meaning that seems to convey the notion of duality, which represents an underlying principle of the cosmology.²⁹ The phonetically similar Egyptian word ruu-t means “separation,” a second cosmological concept that, along with vibration, pertains to a perceived wave.³⁰

The third Maori stage of Te Kore carries the name tuatoru. As we might now anticipate based on the pattern set by the prior Te Kore stages, the word toru means “three” and tuatoru means “third.”³¹ The word toru combines the cosmological phoneme to, which implies “the concept of growth,” with the phoneme ru, which we have interpreted to refer to “the concept of vibration.” Concepts relating to the growth of matter are expressed through a series of symbolic metaphors that are defined within the cosmology. One Dogon cosmological metaphor relates the stages of matter to the growth of a plant, and so the Maori term to means “to throw up a stalk.”³² Another metaphor relates to the creational theme of biological reproduction and is expressed in relation to the growth of a womb. Appropriate to that image, the associated Maori word to means “pregnant.”³³

According to Dogon definitions, after a primordial wave is perceived, it is drawn upward and then encircles to create an enclosed space that is compared to a bubble. The Dogon phoneme to provides us with meanings that relate sensibly to that process. One definition means “to arc,” and another means “to be in the interior of,” referring to the now-encircled and enclosed space.³⁴ Looked at from the Dogon perspective, the concept of a pregnant woman’s expanding womb seems like a very good symbolic choice to represent these concepts.

As a brief aside from our discussion of Maori definitions, it seems appropriate to comment on a kind of parallelism that can be seen between those terms and the stages of the history of the civilizing of humanity. The Maori word for “one,” tahi, combines the root ta, meaning “earth,” with the term hi, meaning “to draw up.” Lifting the civilized state of humanity upward was one stated purpose of the Dogon instructional tradition that we associate with the Gobekli Tepe site. The word rua is formed from the root ru, an Egyptian term that means “lion.” Use of this term in association with the second creational stage supports the notion that the Sphinx might possibly be a remnant of an early attempt to establish agriculture in Egypt during the era that immediately followed Gobekli Tepe. The term toru is a close match for an ancient name Taru, which we associated with the early dynastic-era agricultural kingship in Egypt in The Mystery of Skara Brae.

The fourth Te Kore stage of the Maori is defined by the term tuawha, meaning “fourth.” The Maori word wha means “four-sided” or “square.”³⁵ In the symbolic language of the cosmology, a square represents the concept of a “space.” Likewise, because our material universe is defined as the fourth of seven material universes, the geometric figure of a four-sided square understandably comes to represent it. Moreover, when we consider that our material universe is associated conceptually with a masculine energy, the number four also comes to be symbolic of the male gender in the reversed symbolism of later eras. That numeric designation aligns with Dogon symbolism, which assigns the number four to a male, the number three to a female, and the number seven to an individual. Taking that symbolism an additional step upward, if four is the number that associates with our material universe (defined in relation to masculine energy), then the number three might also be considered to be symbolic of the nonmaterial universe with its feminine energy. From that perspective, the two paired universes, taken together and associated with the number seven, would represent a conceptual correlate to an individual.

Another Maori word wha means “to be revealed,” “to be disclosed,” or “to be made known.”³⁶ The implication here is that, based on our reality, which consists of four dimensions (height, width, length, and time), at the fourth stage of creation, the concept of space is developed and so causes the notion of existence to become perceptible. A similar meaning is conveyed by the Egyptian word hau, which refers to the enclosed space of a hall, temple, or palace.³⁷

The fifth Te Kore stage is represented by the word tuarima, meaning “fifth.” The word rima can also mean “hand,” a definition that could sensibly relate to the five fingers on a typical hand.³⁸ From the perspective of Dogon cosmology, the egg-of-the-world, or po pilu, is conceptualized as seven progressive rays of a star that extend outward from a central point. At the fifth stage, the five emergent rays take on the appearance of a hand. In the symbolic language of the cosmology, a hand or arm represents the concept of a force, and so the suggestion is that at this stage, the first force (gravity) exists. The Maori phoneme ri is a likely correlate to the Egyptian phoneme re or ra, which on one level we take to represent the concept of gravity, as exemplified by the sun, which exerts the primary gravitational influence in our planetary system.

The sixth Te Kore stage is expressed by the word tuaono, meaning “sixth.” The Maori word ono means “to jerk a body forward,” while the word onoi means “to move.”³⁹ The implication here is that of the observed effect of the force of gravity, which tugs on mass. Supportive of this outlook, the Dogon word ono means “to suck.”⁴⁰

The seventh stage of Te Kore is referred to as tuawhitu, or “seventh.”⁴¹ In Dogon cosmology, the starlike rays of the po pilu are considered to be complete after the appearance of the seventh ray. From that perspective, it makes sense that the Maori word whetu means “star.”⁴² In keeping with this, a familiar symbol for the Tuat, which is the likely Egyptian correlate to this Second World of matter, consists of a star inscribed within a circle.

The eighth stage of Te Kore carries the name tuawaru, meaning “eighth.”⁴³ Again in Dogon cosmology, at the eighth stage of the creation of the po pilu, the seventh ray grows long enough to pierce the “egg,” an event that is considered to be the “death” of the current “egg” but also initiates the growth of a new “egg.” Appropriate to this outlook, the Maori word waro means “death.”⁴⁴

The name of the ninth stage of Te Kore is given as tuaiwa, meaning “ninth.”⁴⁵ The Dogon consider the egg-of-the-world to be complete after eight conceptual stages; however, the full progression to a completed atom (po) involves additional stages. From the Dogon perspective, a series of completed “eggs” are said to link together like “pearls on a string” (Buddhism makes use of the same symbolic image) to form membranes. The Maori word ewe refers to the “afterbirth” and, according to Tregear, relates to “the membrane of the foetus.”⁴⁶

The tenth and final stage of Te Kore is given the name tuangahuru, or “tenth” (based on the Maori word tingahuru, meaning “ten”).⁴⁷ The structure of the po pilu is alternately characterized by the spiral that can be drawn to inscribe the endpoints of the seven rays of increasing length. The suggestion in the cosmologies of the Dogon and a closely related African tribe called the Bambara is that the spiral of the po pilu enfolds light between the coils of its spiral, which are comprised of mass. From this perspective, the structure of the po pilu effectively facilitates an “embrace” between the nonmaterial and material universes. Like an air bubble submerged in water, when the egg is “pierced” by vibrations, it emits light. (It seems possible that this staged process is what causes light to be emitted in discrete packets called photons.) The Maori word huru refers to the emission of light, characterized as the glow of the sun just before it rises or the glow of a burning fire.

In the metaphoric language of Dogon cosmology, fundamental particles that compose matter are referred to as “seeds.” The egg-of-the-world, or po pilu, which takes the form of a tiny spiraling vortex, can be thought of as the first of these “seeds.” One Maori word for “seed” is given as huri,⁴⁸ which also means “to turn round,” “to twist,” or “to overturn.”⁴⁹ This same concept of “overturning” is one of the symbolic references related to the po pilu.

In Dogon cosmology, the processes that create the po pilu in the Second World of matter culminate with the formation of the primary component of matter, called the po, in the Third World (our material world). The Dogon word po refers to a primary component of matter that would be comparable to an atom in astrophysics. The word also refers to the concept of primordial time. Genevieve Calame-Griaule, the anthropologist who compiled the Dogon dictionary, refers to the po as “the smallest grain.” She writes that the po “plays a very important role in Dogon cosmology [as the] picture of the atom, from which the universe emerged.”⁵⁰

Best tells us that the Maori word po refers to an unseen, intangible, unknowable concept that underlies the heavenly bodies of the universe. He also says that, for the Maori, the word po connotes:

The period of time prior to the existence of the universe.

The period of labour of the Earth Mother.

The period of time after death.

The spirit-world or the underworld.⁵¹

Tregear defines the Maori word po to mean “the Cosmic Darkness out of which all forms of life and light were afterwards evolved or procreated.”⁵² More generally, the Maori word po can be used to convey “the concept of night.”

The cosmological concept of the po can also be seen reflected in the similar Egyptian phonetic root pa, which means “to exist,” the word pau, meaning “primeval time,” and the word pau-t, which refers to “stuff, matter, substance, the matter or material of which anything is made.”⁵³