Nommo

The Nommo are the primordial ancestral beings of the Dogon people of Mali, brought into being by the supreme creator Amma near the beginning of the world. As the tradition is commonly reported, they are twin, amphibious, water-dwelling beings, often described as part human and part fish or serpent, and as paired or hermaphroditic, embodying the completeness of twinned opposites, who descended or were sent to the earth and brought to it the ordered world of human life: they are credited with the gift of speech and of moisture, with the founding of the social order, and with the arts and crafts (weaving, smithing, cultivation) on which settled life depends.

Water is their element and their essence; they are bound up with rain, with the fertility of the land, and with the life-giving moisture without which the world would be barren. As the first ancestors and the bringers of order and the word, the Nommo occupy a central place in the account of creation, standing between the remote creator Amma and the human world he set in motion.

Almost everything widely known about Dogon cosmology, the Nommo included, comes from the fieldwork of the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, whose books, above all Griaule's Dieu d'eau (Conversations with Ogotemmeli, 1948), presented an extraordinarily elaborate and systematic Dogon cosmology to the world and made the Dogon among the most famous peoples in the anthropological literature. That account is also, today, seriously contested.

The anthropologist Walter van Beek, who carried out later fieldwork among the Dogon, reported that he could not find the elaborate esoteric cosmology Griaule described, and argued that it may have been shaped, perhaps unintentionally, by the questions Griaule pressed and by the answers of a small number of informants, so that the famous system may reflect the encounter between ethnographer and informant as much as a settled body of Dogon doctrine. (A separate and far more extravagant claim sometimes attached to this material, that the Dogon possessed secret ancient knowledge of the invisible companion star of Sirius, is regarded by scholars as fringe speculation, not sober ethnography, and is best set aside entirely.)

None of this means the Nommo are an invention; that the Dogon honour primordial water-beings associated with Amma, creation and the fertilising rains is not in doubt. It means that the precise, encyclopaedic detail of the classic accounts should be treated as a contested reconstruction rather than as simple fact. The Dogon are a living people with a rich religious life of their own, and the honest report is this: the Nommo are their ancestral water-spirits, bringers of order and of the word, at the heart of a cosmology whose famous elaboration rests on a body of fieldwork that later scholars have called into question.