Nommo

The pool sits at the foot of a sandstone cliff two hundred kilometres long, and on a hot afternoon it is the only cool thing for miles. Nobody goes in. Children who fetch water lean out from the rock and keep their feet dry, and the surface stays flat and brown and unbothered, giving back the heat in a slow shimmer. Somewhere under it, according to everyone who lives above it, is the reason.

The Nommo owns that water. Not the rain, which belongs to Amma up in the sky, but the standing water, the pond and the pool and the sudden lightning that cracks over them in the wet season. Each body of surface water has its own, and often it is a pair, male and female. They keep company with crocodiles, turtles, water serpents and the big whiskered catfish that come up through the silt to breathe. Of every spirit the Dogon name, and they name a great many, the Nommo is the one they are actually frightened of. For a people living on dry rock in the Sahel, with hardly enough open water to drown in, the fear of drowning runs deep. The stories they tell each other are not about creation. They are about the Nommo who grabs people.

That is the Nommo you would meet if you walked the escarpment. It is not the Nommo the world knows.

In 1931 the French ethnologist Marcel Griaule came to Mali, heard of a blind diviner and hogon named Ogotemmêli who had lost his sight to a hunting gun that exploded in his face, and asked for an audience. For thirty-three days the old man talked. What came out of those conversations, and out of the decades of work by Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen that followed, was one of the most elaborate cosmologies ever attributed to any people anywhere, and the Nommo stands at the centre of it.

In that account Amma existed before everything and drew the plan of the universe in two hundred and sixty-six signs, the same number as the days a human child takes to be born. A first attempt failed and left him only water, earth, fire and air. He put two pairs of androgynous twins into the egg of the world in the shape of fish, the catfish being the image a Sudanese eye already reads as a foetus. Then one of them would not wait. A single male twin tore out of the placenta before his gestation was finished, taking a piece of it with him, and that stolen scrap fell and became the earth. He went looking for his lost female half through space and then down into the ground itself, which was incest, and the torn placenta rotted, and that is where death came from. Amma cut out his tongue and shrank him into a fox, the small pale desert fox that hunts at night and will not drink from a village pond. He kept the power of prophecy. He still has it: diviners scratch grids in the sand outside the village, leave food on them, and read the paw prints in the morning.

Then Amma did the thing the whole system turns on. He took the other male twin, the Nommo who had stayed, and killed him. In the fullest version the Nommo is bound upright to a tree with iron, arms stretched out along the branches, and while he is dying he grows thirsty and is offered water and spits it out. His body was cut apart and the pieces cast to the four corners of the world, and where they landed the Dogon raised the binu sanctuaries, whose façades are still repainted with thin millet paste before the rains. His blood ran out into stars, into edible plants, into animals. Amma put him back together, brought him back to life, and lowered him to earth in an ark of clean placental clay on a copper chain, along with eight ancestors and the seeds of everything worth eating. The ark hit the ground in the first rainfall and made the first pool. The sun came up. The Nommo went down into the water and stayed there, and afterwards taught the ancestors to speak, to weave, to farm, to work iron, to dance.

It is a magnificent story. In 1991 the anthropologist Walter van Beek published a field restudy of the Dogon and reported that he could not find it. Working around the same villages, he found no creation myth of that kind at all. The binu are collective spirits nobody claims descent from, not the scattered limbs of a god. The Nommo he found was formidable and dangerous and entirely local, a thing in a pond, and the two great Griaulean roles, creator and redeemer, were nowhere. Van Beek also noticed something Griaule’s admirers had somehow never said out loud: creation from nothing, the creative word, a rebellion, an atonement, a figure killed upright with his arms out who thirsts and is offered a drink and is resurrected, eight people saved in an ark. The Pale Fox reads, in places, like the Bible in Dogon dress.

The most famous claim of all fared worst. Griaule and Dieterlen reported that the Dogon knew Sirius had a tiny, impossibly heavy companion on a fifty-year orbit, which the Sigui ceremony tracked. Robert Temple built The Sirius Mystery on it in 1976 and the ancient astronaut industry has been feeding on it ever since. Van Beek found that the Dogon call Sirius the hunter’s star, that stars matter very little to them either daily or ritually, that nobody outside Griaule’s own small circle of informants had ever heard the star names in the books, and that nobody at all, inside that circle or out, had ever heard that Sirius was double.

What the Nommo can do, then, depends on which record you are standing in. In the field it commands open water and weather over water, moves with an escort of the animals that live at the edge of both elements, and takes people. In Griaule’s Dogon it is the source of language itself, which is why water and speech are the same substance in that system, why the mouth is said to weave sound, and why a marriage without good words between husband and wife is held to be barren.

Its limits are just as double. The pond-Nommo cannot leave its water; the pool is its whole kingdom and also its cage, and it is one of a crowd rather than a lord of anything. The cosmic Nommo has a sharper limitation, which is that Amma can kill him whenever the design requires it, and did. He is the instrument of the repair, not the one who decides on it, and the disorder he dies to fix is never fully fixed. The pale fox keeps his tongueless freedom and his knowledge of the future, and the world stays imperfect, which is the point.

Nobody has gone back to settle it. Griaule’s defenders, his daughter Geneviève Calame-Griaule among them, argued that van Beek simply had not been let into the deep knowledge; van Beek argued there was no deep knowledge to be let into, only a brilliant elder and an eager listener building something together over thirty-three days. Both men are dead and so is Ogotemmêli. What is certainly still there is the pool under the cliff, and the people who will not swim in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is the Nommo?

Nommo are the water spirits of the Dogon people of the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali. Every pond or pool has its own Nommo, frequently a male and female pair, and they command open water and the lightning that comes with it. Among the Dogon they are the most feared of all spirit beings.

What does the Nommo look like?

There is no fixed description. The Nommo is paired or doubled with a catfish and is associated with the reptiles and amphibians of the waterline, and although the Dogon draw these creatures readily they never represent the Nommo in a mask. Wooden figures with the arms raised high above the head are catalogued in museum collections as Nommo figures, though the raised-arm gesture is most often explained as a prayer for rain.

What is the story of the Nommo’s sacrifice?

In the cosmology Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen recorded, the creator Amma sacrificed one of the Nommo to purify an earth defiled by his rebellious twin, who had broken out of the world egg early and been turned into the pale fox. The Nommo was dismembered and his blood became stars, plants and animals, and the places his body parts fell became the binu shrines. Amma then resurrected him and lowered him to earth in an ark, after which he taught the first people speech, weaving, farming and metalwork.

Did the Dogon really know about the star Sirius B?

The claim comes from Griaule and Dieterlen and was popularised by Robert Temple’s 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, which used it as evidence of ancient alien contact. Walter van Beek’s 1991 field restudy found no support for it: the Dogon call Sirius the hunter’s star, pay little ritual attention to the stars at all, and no informant he spoke to had ever heard that Sirius had a companion. The Sirius material is best treated as an artefact of Griaule’s fieldwork rather than inherited Dogon tradition.

Why is Griaule’s account of the Nommo disputed?

Walter van Beek worked in the same Dogon area decades later and could not reproduce Griaule’s cosmology in the field, finding no creation myth of that type and no trace of the Nommo as creator or redeemer. He also pointed out that the Pale Fox account closely echoes biblical material, including creation by word, a rebellion, an atoning death with the arms outstretched, and eight people saved in an ark. Griaule’s supporters, including his daughter Geneviève Calame-Griaule, replied that van Beek had not been admitted to the Dogon’s esoteric knowledge.

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