Lébé Seru

Also Known As: also written Lebe Serou and Lébé Sérou; the name is glossed “witness of Lébé”, on the same pattern as the three other founding ancestors, Amma Seru, Binu Seru and Dyongu Seru
Region/Culture: West Africa
Mythos: Dogon Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He died and was brought back in the body of a large snake, and through that second body he is bound to the earth itself and to the vegetation that dies down every dry season and comes up again.
Role in Mythos: He is the ancestor of the Lébé cult, the agrarian and territorial cult of the Dogon, whose priest is the hogon and whose emblem is a village altar built from grave soil carried out of the Mandé.
Relation to Humans: His altar guarantees the health of the village, the multiplication of families, the fertility of the fields and of women, and the long life of the elders, and it is the object on which oaths are sworn. It is also the one thing in a Dogon village that Catholics, Muslims, Protestants and traditionalists all stand behind together.

Every night, somewhere along the two hundred kilometres of cliff that runs south of the Niger bend, an old man lies down and waits to be licked. The snake finds him in the dark and passes over his skin, and by morning the man has been scoured clean and filled back up with the force that leaked out of him during the day. He is the hogon, the senior man of the district, the one who used to settle disputes and hold the markets in his hand. The snake is Lébé. Between them they hold the ground the millet grows in.

The man the snake used to be is called Lébé Seru, and the name is a small warning about how carefully the Dogon separate things that outsiders like to run together. Seru means witness. There are four of these witness-ancestors, one for each of the great cults, and each is named for the power he stands beside rather than for himself: Amma Seru beside the creator, Binu Seru beside the collective spirits of the sanctuaries, Dyongu Seru beside sickness and the masks, and Lébé Seru beside the earth. Whether the ancestor became the earth power or merely testifies to it is a question the sources answer both ways in adjacent sentences, and it has never been settled.

What is agreed is the burial and what came out of it. The Dogon trace themselves back to the Mandé, west of where they live now, and the migration to the cliffs is the one piece of Dogon myth that everybody who has worked there has found intact. On the way out, they took earth from the tomb of the ancestor from whom the clans descend, and at the far end of the road that earth was worked into the first altar. Then the road forked. The groups separated across the plateau, the escarpment and the plain, and the altar was broken up and shared out, so that every foundational Lébé afterwards holds a fragment of the first one. A village is legitimate because it has a piece of a grave in it.

The altar itself is not much to look at. It is a squat cone of earth, sited at the edge of the inhabited ground where the fields give way to scree and dune, low enough to disappear into the rocks around it. The clay it is made of is called logo, and it is chosen for hardness and for standing up to weather, and it is spoken of as a living substance. The Dogon call the Lébé and the other shrines like it pegu, a word for the act of fixing something so that it will keep going, and the Lébé is the first pegu any village puts down. It draws a line. On one side is the village of the living. On the other is the escarpment, where the dead are buried. Elders say that in the old days a pegu was founded by putting a person in a hole in the ground and driving a metal hook into the skull, so that the hook would carry the victim’s vital force down into the shrine and leave it there permanently charged.

Before the rains, when the ground is still hot and the air tastes of dust, the hogon and the totemic priest go out together for the bulu, the sowing feast, and hand back to the villagers the millet seed that has been held in store since the last harvest. The seed is not thought of as merely dry grain. It is understood to carry the spiritual essence of the crop, kept safe over the hungry months and now returned to the people who will bury it. The shrine gets its own attention in the same season: its keepers replaster it with earth carried up from the ponds, which is the most fertile substance they have, and then they rub it in the act called dyala, which purifies the object and, through it, the land.

There is a second story about him, and it is not about farming. The Dogon explain the split between the wet season and the dry as the outcome of a fight between Amma, the high god, and Lébé. That myth was recorded in the 1930s, and it is one of the few pieces of Dogon cosmology that later fieldwork has been able to find again.

Which brings up the awkward part, because the reason most readers have heard of any of this is a book that most specialists no longer trust. In 1946 Marcel Griaule sat down at Sanga with a blind elder called Ogotemmêli for thirty-three days of conversation, and published the result as Dieu d’eau. The eighteenth day is given over entirely to the cult of Lébé. The book made the Dogon the most famous people in the ethnography of West Africa and produced, in Griaule’s later work with Germaine Dieterlen, the celebrated claim that they had always known Sirius was a double star. In 1991 Walter van Beek published a field restudy in Current Anthropology and reported that he could not find the system. No informant, including the surviving members of Griaule’s own circle, had ever heard that Sirius had a companion. The great creation myth was unknown. Ogotemmêli, van Beek learned from Griaule’s interpreter, had already been working with Griaule for three seasons before the famous conversations began, and knew perfectly well what the visitor had come for.

Lébé survives that demolition better than almost anything else in the books. Van Beek’s judgement is not that the earth power is a fiction but the reverse: he calls Lébé the chthonic earth spirit, says he matters to the Dogon far more than the water spirit Nommo or the pale fox ever did, and observes that the hogon’s real attachment is to him. He also notes, drily, that this spirit does not appear in either of the two great volumes. The old French monographs on ritual, meanwhile, came through untouched. The account of the hogon’s enthronement published in 1937 was still accurate forty-three years later in a different village, and the descriptions of the bulu festival written down in 1936 still hold. The cosmology was a collaboration. The farming was real.

What the ancestor gives, he gives through the shrine, and the list is entirely practical: general health, more children, fertile fields, fertile women, elders who live a long time, protection against whatever comes in off the bush, and a place solid enough that an oath sworn on it counts. What he cannot do is look after himself. The altar has to be reskinned with pond earth and rubbed clean every year or the power in it fades, and the barrier it forms is admitted on all sides to be porous, since sickness and bush spirits get through it often enough to keep the sacrifices coming. He is also, uniquely among the powers a Dogon village deals with, divisible. He was broken into pieces at the beginning and handed out, and each village holds only its own fragment, which means the ancestor is never wholly present anywhere and can never be gathered back up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Lebe Serou?

Lebe Serou is the founding ancestor of the Lébé cult, the earth and agriculture cult of the Dogon people of Mali. His name is glossed “witness of Lébé”, and after his death he is said to have returned in the form of a large snake. His cult is one of four that organise Dogon religious and social life, alongside those of Amma Seru, Binu Seru and Dyongu Seru.

What is the Lebe altar and why does it matter?

The Lebe is a low cone of packed earth set at the edge of a Dogon village, and it is the first shrine any village establishes. The first one was made from soil taken from the ancestor’s tomb in the Mandé and carried east during the migration to the Bandiagara cliffs, then broken up and shared among the separating groups. Every later Lebe altar contains a fragment of that original, which is what makes a village’s claim to its ground legitimate.

Who is the hogon?

The hogon is the priest of the Lébé cult and the most senior man in his district, and his authority was once political as well as religious, since he administered justice and controlled the markets. Dogon tradition holds that the snake Lébé visits him every night to lick his body and restore his vitality. Before the rains he and the totemic priest jointly conduct the bulu sowing feast and distribute the stored millet seed.

Was Lebe Serou the first person to die?

No. That role belongs to a different ancestor, Dyongu Seru, who died after breaking a prohibition and whose cult is the mask society. Popular accounts frequently transfer the distinction to Lebe Serou, but the standard reference treatment of Dogon religion keeps the two apart.

Is the famous account of Dogon religion reliable?

Not in its cosmological parts. Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d’eau (1948) and his later work with Germaine Dieterlen made the Dogon world-famous, but Walter van Beek’s 1991 field restudy could not find the creation myth or the Sirius knowledge among Dogon informants, including Griaule’s own former collaborators. The ritual descriptions from the same era held up well, however, and van Beek judged Lébé himself to be genuine and far more important to the Dogon than the figures Griaule made famous.