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We're going to introduce you now to our guest.
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We're going to introduce you now to our keynote speaker of the day, who's Professor Robert Temple.
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Now he's the author of a large amount of books on ancient history, ancient mysteries,
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and essentially the mysteries of time and space.
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I mean I could quote various titles, Egyptian Dawn, the Sphinx Mystery, Crystal Sun,
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but he is most well known for a book called The Serious Mystery,
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the book obviously that you can see up here.
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And the important thing about this book, which obviously Robert is about to tell you about,
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is that this seriously influenced a lot of people.
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I mean it seriously influenced me in my younger years when I was a UFO investigator.
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It taught me for the first time about the idea of cosmology and the importance of the universe
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and the cosmos into ancient civilizations and what we do down here on earth.
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But it also introduced us to the Dogon people of Mali and their incredible cosmology that they have.
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And how this may well be something that's inherent from ancient Egypt and from Samaria,
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and that all of these things perhaps, just perhaps,
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suggest that there may have been some kind of extraterrestrial connection with our ancestors.
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It influenced me, it influenced people like Robert Bival and Graham Hancock,
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and many other of my contemporaries in this field to get out and do things yourself and to write books.
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So, without further ado, I'm now going to introduce you to the author of that work, Professor Robert Temple.
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Hello. Welcome fellow conspirators.
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Shall we be naughty and talk about forbidden things?
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I thought that I'd start by telling you how I got into all of this.
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It seems incredible looking back that I was actually, what I thought was then very old,
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twenty when I stumbled across this information.
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And I was busy at the time, so it was a couple of years before I actually began having the opportunity to look into it.
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I'll just tell you how I stumbled across it.
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I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
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and I had an older friend called Arthur Young, who was a philosopher and inventor,
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and a very wealthy man with several houses, and his hobby was collecting Rolls Royces.
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True. I named one of them, actually.
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And I went round to him one day when I was twenty, and he was sitting reading a book.
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I said, what's that book you're reading, Arthur?
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He said, oh, it's very interesting. It's a book called African Worlds,
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and I can learn about a whole lot of African tribes in one book because each chapter is about a different tribe.
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So I said, well, are any of the tribes particularly interesting?
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And he said, well, yes, three or four of them are very interesting, but there's one in particular that's more than interesting.
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It's very strange.
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And he showed me the chapter, which he had just finished, and he said, look, they seem to be called the Dogon tribe,
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and they were in a country which neither he nor I had ever heard of called Mali,
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and it also said they were in the French Sudan, and of course I didn't know where the French Sudan was,
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and I don't think any of you would either because it hasn't existed for a very long time.
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I'd heard of the Sudan, but the French Sudan, which is an old name from the old colonial days, was 2,000 miles away,
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and what it referred to, of course, was really French West Africa.
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And so he said, look at this page here.
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It says here, and I looked at it, that this tribe's culture and religion are entirely based upon the star Sirius.
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I said, the star Sirius? You mean not the sun or the moon or even Venus?
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Because I knew that Venus had been important to the Maya, for instance, because I'd already studied the Maya.
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And he said, no, no, nothing normal like that, but it gets worse because it's not just the star Sirius that they're really talking about.
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They say there's a star that goes around Sirius.
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I said, well, and I had done my introductory astronomy when I was earlier at the university,
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so I said, Arthur, there is a star that goes around Sirius.
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I seem to recall that. It's what they call a binary star system.
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And I know in the book I said that Arthur knew this, but I don't think he really did.
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So I said, I'm going to check this out and look in my old astronomy book, which I later did, and I contacted him and I said,
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it's true, there is a little star that goes around Sirius.
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And they knew its orbital period.
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Well, this just all sounded too bizarre to me, but as I say, I was 22 before I got around to doing anything about it.
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And by that time I was living here in England, in fact, in London, and had already met Olivia.
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And I had befriended a man called Arthur C. Clarke, who was a well-known science fiction writer.
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And I had spent a couple of years, well, I was still spending time watching a man called Stanley Kubrick,
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whom you've all heard of, of course, make a film called 2001, A Space Odyssey.
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I took Olivia out to the set. She was the first woman on the moon.
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Now, you remember that. I want that in the history books.
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Because it was all a plaster moon, you see.
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And so I had been reading Arthur's essays, which are even more amazing than his fiction, and got all spaced up, not spaced out.
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And so I remembered this tribe, and I wrote a letter to Arthur in America, and I said,
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Arthur, can you remember the name of that tribe you told me about a couple of years ago,
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that they had the culture based on the star Sirius and a star that went around it?
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And he still had the book, because he had a huge library.
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He got it out, and he full copied the chapter for me and sent it to me.
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And so then I knew that they were called, what I still thought was the Dogon.
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And I had some names of the authors of the article.
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So I went along to the Royal Anthropological Society, which had a huge library at that time.
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And only a few years later, it closed down. Everything was dispersed.
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So that wonderful facility disappeared. But I was in time.
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And I went to those wooden cabinets with the drawers you pull out with all the very heavily thumbed cardboard library cards
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that younger people here won't remember, but older people will.
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And there were all these articles by these two French people who had written about the Dogon,
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who I still thought were the Dogon.
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And I was set right by the librarian that you should say Dogon.
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And I was just baffled because there was just too much material, and it was all in French, and I couldn't read French.
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So this is a bit of a problem.
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And I came across one article that had the name of Sirius in the title.
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So I thought, well, maybe I can learn something from that.
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So I got it out and photocopied it and took it away. Couldn't read it, but managed to get a little bit out of it.
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Olivia had studied French, so she helped.
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But the thing is that what I really needed was a good translation of it.
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And Olivia knew somebody who knew somebody.
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And for what was then the enormous sum of five pounds, and I thought maybe I'm crazy to be doing this,
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I got this guy who said he knew French to translate it in his most terrible translation.
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Absolutely appalling and full of errors of every kind, as I later discovered.
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But it was enough to get me going with a lot of leads to start getting to grips with material.
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And that's how it all started.
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Just one of those things, I went to see this friend at a particular time of day, on a particular day,
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and he just happened to be reading that book sitting in his armchair, and I walked in.
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And that's why I'm here now.
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And that was a very long time ago.
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Although I'm not that much over 22, am I?
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So that's what started it.
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And I thought, because I'd written some articles, I thought I have to write an article about this really strange subject.
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And I wrote an article, and I took it around, and nobody would believe it.
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They said, must be joking.
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They just wouldn't believe it.
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You need more evidence.
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So I wrote a longer article.
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And they wouldn't believe that one either.
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And so then I did an even longer one with much more information.
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Nope.
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Still didn't believe it.
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So I decided that the only way to get this increasingly interesting story across to the public was I was just going to have to write a book about it,
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which had by no means been my intention.
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But that's how it ended up.
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And it took me a few years to do that, and it turned into the first edition of The Serious Mystery.
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I managed to get an agent who lived nearby, and he offered it to a publisher.
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And the publisher took it, and they gave me an advance of 250 pounds for this book.
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And they sat on it for three years, because they didn't think it was anything very important.
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And so great frustrations.
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It finally came out.
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And then nobody was more surprised than the publisher when, on the day of publication,
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the Times and the Telegraph both ran rave lead reviews of this book,
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which had never happened before for such a weird book as that.
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And then it continued to get all these favorable reviews.
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In fact, the only newspaper in the country or in America or indeed anywhere for the first year
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who said anything even remotely critical about the book was The Daily Worker.
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I had my suspicions about that.
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Because I was a worker, I'd worked really hard to write that thing.
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So it was getting embarrassing at all the praise, you see, Nature Magazine,
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which is for scientists, they did a lead review done by a professor of astronomy from Canada.
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And all these people were praising it.
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And the man who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society,
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who sponsored me to become a fellow, he was praising it and telling everybody that it was a good book.
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And yet I was writing about spacemen.
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So this was breakthrough time.
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And of course, people would ask me about UFOs, and I would say,
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well, you know, I don't know anything about UFOs any more than you do.
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So that made them feel better because I wasn't going to be pushing that subject.
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And it is a book which is full of footnotes.
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And so everything went well for the first year, and it took off and it was translated
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and was what they call an international bestseller.
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And then in 1977, because the book came out in 1976,
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I started being attacked systematically by a group of people who were all linked with one another.
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And it became obvious later on that the security services, primarily the CIA, were behind all of this.
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I know this because people approached me and told me that the CIA people had been contacting them.
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And Arthur Clarke phoned me up from Ceylon, it's now called Sri Lanka, to warn me that this was going on.
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And a friend of mine who was engaged to the girl next door, who was a policeman,
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said to me that he'd been approached by MI5 and he had to do a big report on me.
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And he said, what's all this? Robert Temple, he's completely harmless.
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What do you want me to do a report on him for?
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He had to interview everybody who knew me, he had to write a long report, everything they could find out about me.
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And he said, Robert, I just want to let you know that I told them what a great guy you are.
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And the whole thing was ridiculous, but they wouldn't listen.
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And they were dissatisfied and they looked unhappy that I gave you a good reference.
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He later became a police commissioner. He was a very bright guy.
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And then I was friends with a chap called Brigadier Bidwell, a retired soldier who was a military historian.
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And we were having tea and he said he'd read my book, The Serious Mystery.
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I said, Brigadier Bidwell, The Serious Mystery, that is very far from your sphere of interest.
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Why on earth would you read that kind of book?
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He said, well, I didn't want to. They asked me to, they told me I had to.
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I said, who are they?
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Well, I was approached, you see, he said, because they knew that I knew you.
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And they said, you've got to read this book and do a report on the book and a report on Temple.
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And this was for MI6.
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And so then the CIA did, went around telling people they shouldn't speak to me, they shouldn't work with me.
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It just went on for years and some of that is still going on.
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Now, it was only later that I realized that to the security people,
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extraterrestrial life is what they call the ultimate security issue.
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You see, if the spacemen or women, I should, spacepersons, if the spacepersons should be hostile,
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and of course this is true, actually, I mean, looking at it from their point of view, this is true,
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this would be the ultimate security issue because we might all die.
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But of course, we're being told every day we're all going to all die.
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It's ebola now, it used to be SARS, it was AIDS, it was bird flu, it's always something.
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We're all going to die, as if we didn't know that.
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So there's been certain problems along the way.
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Now, I'm going to run you through this serious mystery, basic information,
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and I think you'll find some of the pictures pretty.
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And I will say that in the 1980s, a prediction which appeared in the book was verified by astrophysicists.
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They verified the existence of a third star in the Sirius system,
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which the tribe, as I will explain in a moment, insisted existed, and it was the same type of star.
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So armed with this verification of what I had published before this was known,
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I was asked to bring the book out again.
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And I decided, well, I don't want to just do a reprint, I want to expand it.
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So I expanded it by 50%, and that came out in 1988,
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and that's the edition that you should all read if you think you can face it.
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Because it's longer, but it's got a lot of interesting stuff in it.
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And of course, since 1988, a lot more has come along, but I'm afraid I'm not going to do the third version.
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But I'm now going to...
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I was going to.
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We need Andrew's secret password, which I think is something like...
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By the way, it was the publishers who put Akhenaten on the cover.
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He's only mentioned in passing briefly in the book, and he doesn't really figure in the story.
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But after seeing all those deformed skulls, I think it's time to move on.
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Now, the big star is Sirius, and the big star is the third star.
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And the third star is the fourth star.
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Now, the big star is Sirius, and the images that go off to the right and to the left are multiple refraction images.
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This was the very first photo taken of Sirius B in 1970.
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Sirius B is the little dot down to the right.
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There is, in fact, a red thing on this.
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Now, Sirius A, which is the name of the main star,
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is three and a half times the mass of our sun, and 10,000 times brighter.
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And it's a really big star, kind of a cosmic bully.
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And it's got this little tiny star that goes around it, which was detected because of gravitational interference.
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And Sirius B is what they call a white dwarf.
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And it was the very first one of those discovered.
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We've now found many, and they're believed to be very common throughout the universe.
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Sirius B is about the size of our sun.
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And it's so much smaller than the big star
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that it's almost impossible, because of the brightness of the main star due to parallax and their being so near,
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to tease the light away so that you can reveal the tiny star behind it,
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which is what the astronomer who took this photograph managed to do.
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And I knew him. He was at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Irving Lindblad, very nice man.
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And I went and looked through his telescope, and he showed me Sirius B, and I was thrilled.
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This is later on.
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So 1970 was the very first time anybody had succeeded in taking a photograph of Sirius B.
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They knew it was there because of all the gravitational things.
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But why would it interfere gravitationally with a giant star like Sirius A when it's so small?
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And this is the whole nature of white dwarfs, that they're made of a special kind of matter
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that doesn't exist in our solar system called super-dense matter.
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And what that is, is that the electrons are stripped off the atoms,
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and the nuclei are pressed together directly,
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so that if you had a matchbox full of super-dense matter, it would weigh two and a half tons.
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And as we will see later, the fact that this was known on this planet,
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before it was known on this planet, if you see what I mean, is the Sirius mystery.
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Now, it turned out that all of this was known by the Dogon tribe,
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and I thought you'd like to see where they are in Africa.
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That's in the country of Mali. You can see Timbuktu is above, although they don't ever go that far north.
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And I'm going to show you now some pretty pictures of where they live.
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I should say that they have related tribes around them.
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The Bambara, the Bozo, the Minyanka are their cousins and neighbors.
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All of them have the Sirius traditions, and all of them have their religion and culture based on Sirius.
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They are also related to the Akan of Ghana, who went a bit further than they did in the migrations,
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which I'll describe in a moment.
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So this shows where they live, and that cliff is called the Banti Agara Cliff.
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It's a thousand feet high, it's full of caves, lots of burials, and all kinds of strange graffiti,
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sacred graffiti, I hasten to add, not Kilroy was here.
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And you see, they live in this fascinating area.
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They grow onions for a living, and yet they know a lot about astrophysics, so figure that one out.
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Here's a close-up of the cliff. Now you can see at the bottom what looks like rubble.
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That's not rubble, that's their houses, which are made of sort of mud, brick type stuff, but not brick,
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it's an adobe type thing.
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And their houses are along the base of the cliff there, and they live in those.
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That's another view of the rocks leading up to the cliff with the houses beyond.
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And this is a sacred rock nearby, where they stage certain ceremonies.
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And here's another shot of their houses, looking down on them.
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It's a strange and rather surreal landscape, don't you think?
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And they have these beobab trees, and they feature in their mythology.
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Everything that they consider deer is expressed symbolically in terms of the fauna and flora around them.
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It's very like the way the ancient Egyptians based their writing system of hieroglyphics upon the flora and fauna around them.
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Every bird and every animal that you see in the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians lived in Egypt, and was familiar to everyone.
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And this same kind of approach towards embodying and bringing nature into their sacred traditions was something that the Dogon have always done, and their fellows in the neighboring tribes.
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Here's another view, I think we may have seen that one already.
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Now, this one shows a very interesting ceremony taking place called the Sigwi, which is to do with the celebration of Sirius, and it's held every 60 years.
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This was in 1963, and you can see that they're getting dressed and ready for the big procession.
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This is a huge ceremony, it takes place in every village throughout the whole area.
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They go around to all the villages, and hundreds of thousands of people take part in this and dress up for it.
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It's their biggest event.
24:48.360 --> 24:55.360
Now, there's a Dogon putting his feet up, as it were.
24:55.360 --> 24:59.360
You can see these sacred symbols that are painted on the cliffs.
24:59.360 --> 25:11.360
Each one has a very profound meaning, and if you were to have a Dogon priest standing beside you looking at that cliff face, he could take several hours to explain to you the meaning of each one of those symbols.
25:11.360 --> 25:21.360
They are really very profound, and I should tell you that the Dogon have thousands of standardized symbols, which are a kind of writing.
25:22.360 --> 25:33.360
But I've never come across a study as to whether they're actually writing language using them as signs, or whether they are purely symbolic.
25:33.360 --> 25:42.360
That's obscure to me, and I don't think the anthropologists ever figured it out either, because the Dogon didn't tell them everything by any means.
25:46.360 --> 25:49.360
Here's another view of the base of the cliff.
25:51.360 --> 26:01.360
This is a man from the Bozo tribe. They live on the banks of the Niger River, or some people say Niger, and they are fishermen.
26:01.360 --> 26:05.360
So the Dogon are farmers, and the Bozo are fishermen.
26:05.360 --> 26:16.360
They have their religion and culture based on Sirius, as well, as I said, and they have a name for Sirius.
26:16.360 --> 26:23.360
They call it the I Star, and the companion of Sirius they call Sitting Trouser.
26:23.360 --> 26:29.360
This actually has relevance when we get further down the line.
26:29.360 --> 26:36.360
The Bozo are more frequently encountered by outsiders because they're on the river.
26:36.360 --> 26:41.360
Here's another shot of preparing for the ceremony.
26:41.360 --> 26:54.360
Now, those things that they're putting on their bodies are symbolic of fish scales, and the hats are symbolic of fish heads, not unlike bishops' mitres.
26:54.360 --> 27:01.360
And it won't be long before you see why they're so keen on fish.
27:01.360 --> 27:06.360
This is just another pretty picture of a baobab tree growing on the rocks.
27:07.360 --> 27:11.360
There's another view of the cliff.
27:11.360 --> 27:18.360
And what they do, you can't get up it from the bottom. You have to go up to the top and dangle on ropes.
27:18.360 --> 27:21.360
And as I say, it's a thousand foot cliff.
27:21.360 --> 27:33.360
And to get into those caves that you see along there, they're all full of sacred objects and burials, mummified burials, and sacred symbols on the walls.
27:33.360 --> 27:35.360
It's an immense complex.
27:35.360 --> 27:45.360
It's never been fully explored because you see, you have to go down a thousand feet on a rope and sort of swing in.
27:45.360 --> 27:50.360
Not a lot of people really fancy doing that.
27:50.360 --> 27:56.360
Here they are in procession now for the Sigwit ceremony.
27:56.360 --> 28:01.360
And here they are from behind doing the same.
28:01.360 --> 28:07.360
These photos were taken by a very remarkable Greek man called Costa, whom I knew.
28:07.360 --> 28:14.360
He was a very close friend of the anthropologists and had worked with them for a long time, for years.
28:14.360 --> 28:16.360
He couldn't stay away from Mali.
28:16.360 --> 28:19.360
Apparently, Mali gets in your blood and you can't stop going back.
28:19.360 --> 28:23.360
It's a bit like people who, like myself, get hooked on Egypt.
28:23.360 --> 28:26.360
You can't stop going back.
28:26.360 --> 28:32.360
And this is a slightly closer view of the strange houses that they live in.
28:32.360 --> 28:40.360
This is a photograph of a mass gathering after the procession.
28:40.360 --> 28:46.360
They congregate in these large gatherings for the big ceremony.
28:46.360 --> 28:51.360
They have a similar ceremony once a year called the Bado day, B-A-D-O.
28:51.360 --> 28:56.360
It's to celebrate the Bado rite.
28:56.360 --> 29:03.360
It's one day a year because they say that, and I'll come to more about the astronomy in a moment,
29:03.360 --> 29:07.360
that Sirius B sends out a very powerful ray.
29:07.360 --> 29:10.360
They say Sirius B spins on its axis once a year.
29:10.360 --> 29:17.360
And once a year this beam strikes the earth and makes everybody go wild.
29:18.360 --> 29:24.360
And they celebrate this by the Bado day ceremony, which is not quite as grand as this one.
29:24.360 --> 29:28.360
But they're very keen on ceremonies.
29:28.360 --> 29:35.360
But then so is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
29:35.360 --> 29:38.360
I don't hold that against you.
29:38.360 --> 29:43.360
So you see, and this is a wider view of how important this ceremony is.
29:43.360 --> 29:46.360
Everybody takes part in it.
29:46.360 --> 29:50.360
It's their major religious ceremony.
29:50.360 --> 29:55.360
This is a really amazing man who I never met, Marcel Griot.
29:55.360 --> 30:02.360
He died in 1955, and he was one of the two anthropologists who recorded all this information
30:02.360 --> 30:06.360
of the Dogon tribe, along with the woman I'll show you next.
30:06.360 --> 30:09.360
And I did meet her.
30:09.360 --> 30:14.360
Now, Griot was so remarkable that he gained the confidence of these people.
30:14.360 --> 30:19.360
And when he died, his funeral was held in Mali.
30:19.360 --> 30:29.360
250,000 tribesmen journeyed by foot to attend his funeral, to honor him.
30:29.360 --> 30:35.360
How many of us are going to have 250,000 people at our funeral?
30:35.360 --> 30:39.360
I'm afraid Westminster Abbey, not enough.
30:39.360 --> 30:50.360
In fact, what Western potentate or leader, I was in Washington on the day of Kennedy's funeral,
30:50.360 --> 30:54.360
there weren't even 250,000 people in Washington that day.
30:54.360 --> 30:58.360
Just imagine that vast concourse of people coming to honor this man.
30:58.360 --> 31:04.360
That's why he managed to get this information out of them, because you see, the Dogon have different levels of initiation.
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And he talked to the head priests. You'll see them in a moment.
31:07.360 --> 31:12.360
Now, this is his collaborator, Germaine Dijelen.
31:12.360 --> 31:14.360
She was a true grande dame.
31:14.360 --> 31:22.360
And she was very nice, but very haughty, as many French academics are.
31:22.360 --> 31:32.360
I went to see her in her very large flat in Rue de Grinnell in Paris, Sept-Yen.
31:32.360 --> 31:38.360
And she lived in quite a grand style when she wasn't sleeping in a tent in Africa.
31:38.360 --> 31:44.360
And I tried to find more about the serious material from her.
31:44.360 --> 31:50.360
And she said, oh, but there's so much, there's so much, when can I have time?
31:50.360 --> 31:52.360
There's so much, look, you see there?
31:52.360 --> 31:55.360
And I looked at the far end of this big room through a door,
31:55.360 --> 31:58.360
there was light coming through from the window on the far side,
31:58.360 --> 32:01.360
and there was a desk there with a great big pile of books like this, notebooks.
32:01.360 --> 32:05.360
She said, those are my notebooks that I haven't transcribed yet.
32:05.360 --> 32:09.360
I have to transcribe them, then I have to edit them, then I have to publish them.
32:09.360 --> 32:10.360
There's too much material.
32:10.360 --> 32:13.360
There's so much more in there about the serious traditions.
32:13.360 --> 32:19.360
Alas, she told me this when she was pretty old,
32:19.360 --> 32:23.360
and there's a lot more about all this that's never been published.
32:23.360 --> 32:29.360
I can only presume that she left the notebooks to the Musée de l'Homme where she was based.
32:30.360 --> 32:36.360
I'm including this photo of Diterlan, who is in the middle in Africa,
32:36.360 --> 32:41.360
because the woman to the right of her, that's on her left, but you're right,
32:41.360 --> 32:47.360
was a wonderful woman whom I also knew, an anthropologist called Solange de Garnet.
32:49.360 --> 32:55.360
And she found that Diterlan was so much of a prima donna that she had to change tribes,
32:55.360 --> 32:57.360
because it just wasn't working out.
32:58.360 --> 33:05.360
So Solange went and did the bombara, along with her friend Dominique Zahn.
33:05.360 --> 33:11.360
And so those are the personalities who gathered the information.
33:11.360 --> 33:17.360
Now for the priest. This one's called Manda, and he likes jewelry.
33:19.360 --> 33:24.360
He spoke a different language from the other three Dogon ones, called Wazuba,
33:24.360 --> 33:26.360
and it came from a place called Monde.
33:26.360 --> 33:32.360
But he's very sharp and very meticulous about detail, and was a very excellent informant.
33:32.360 --> 33:42.360
Now this is Yebeni, and this was the most important one of all.
33:42.360 --> 33:48.360
She's a woman, not taking a great deal of care about her appearance.
33:48.360 --> 33:55.360
Her name was Inekuzu, and she was the high priestess of Amma.
33:55.360 --> 34:01.360
The chief god of the Dogon, and they are monotheistic, is called Amma, A-M-M-A.
34:01.360 --> 34:07.360
And as I was later to figure out when I found out where the ancestors of this tribe really came from,
34:07.360 --> 34:12.360
it's the same as the god Amun of the Egyptians.
34:13.360 --> 34:21.360
She was the one who knew more than the three male priests, because she was a higher level of initiation.
34:21.360 --> 34:27.360
And this one is called Onyonlu.
34:27.360 --> 34:37.360
He was the most helpful in terms of giving the longest interviews, and he corrected various details and so on.
34:37.360 --> 34:42.360
So these are the people who gave the information to the anthropologists.
34:42.360 --> 34:47.360
And I thought it's important for you to see the priests involved and the anthropologists involved,
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for yourselves, to see their faces, and to hear a few words about them from me,
34:52.360 --> 34:57.360
so that you can see where all this information is coming from, and how it came to be recorded.
34:57.360 --> 35:03.360
And bearing in mind that the anthropologist, who had a quarter of a million people come to his funeral,
35:03.360 --> 35:11.360
was a very special man who was able to get things out of these African priests that nobody else could have done.
35:11.360 --> 35:15.360
So now we come to the Dogon evidence.
35:15.360 --> 35:20.360
You're going to see a number of pictures with this kind of tan background.
35:20.360 --> 35:23.360
That's because these are reproductions of sand drawings.
35:23.360 --> 35:28.360
All the drawings and diagrams which appear in the anthropological reports
35:28.360 --> 35:35.360
are drawings made by Dieterland, copying sand drawings done by the Dogon on the ground in front of her.
35:35.360 --> 35:39.360
In a few cases colored, as in this case.
35:39.360 --> 35:42.360
Now the red disk is the sun, our sun.
35:42.360 --> 35:47.360
And the white thing with the four rays coming out of it is Sirius.
35:47.360 --> 35:49.360
That's the main star of Sirius.
35:49.360 --> 35:54.360
This represents the heliacal rising of Sirius, which happens once a year,
35:54.360 --> 36:00.360
and was New Year's Day for them because they have several calendars, but their main sacred calendar is a Sirius calendar.
36:00.360 --> 36:06.360
And the heliacal rising, Helios was the Greek name for the sun.
36:06.360 --> 36:14.360
So what we say when we talk about a star and the sun rising at the same time, we call it a heliacal rising.
36:14.360 --> 36:17.360
And the next day the star would have moved forward and moved forward.
36:17.360 --> 36:20.360
It's only one day a year when you get them at the same moment.
36:20.360 --> 36:29.360
And this is the Dogon sand drawing depiction of the moment that commences New Year's Day and their sacred year.
36:29.360 --> 36:35.360
Which I should say that the ancient Egyptians had the same thing.
36:35.360 --> 36:42.360
First day of the year was the heliacal rising of Sirius, and the Sirius calendar was how they measured time.
36:42.360 --> 36:46.360
And it's not a coincidence.
36:46.360 --> 36:51.360
Now I'm showing you this picture. It may look very uninteresting, as if it's just grasses.
36:51.360 --> 36:54.360
And in a way it is, I suppose, just grasses.
36:54.360 --> 37:04.360
It's of a plant that makes a very small seed, and it's called Phonio.
37:04.360 --> 37:08.360
It only grows in West Africa. It's a staple food there.
37:08.360 --> 37:13.360
And the Dogon call it by the name of Po.
37:13.360 --> 37:21.360
And its Latin name, which is used by the anthropologists, is Digitaria.
37:21.360 --> 37:25.360
And you have to have an awful lot of seeds to have a bowl full of anything to eat.
37:25.360 --> 37:34.360
But it is used symbolically by the Dogon because it is the smallest seed anybody's ever seen anywhere in the world that you could possibly eat.
37:34.360 --> 37:38.360
It's much smaller than a poppy seed or a sesame seed.
37:38.360 --> 37:44.360
And so they use it to symbolize Sirius B because they're both so small.
37:44.360 --> 37:51.360
And so Sirius B is known to them as the Po Star, named after this cereal grain.
37:51.360 --> 37:57.360
And I went to a great deal of trouble to find a botanical illustration of this, which in my first edition I didn't have.
37:57.360 --> 38:03.360
Because I thought people would like to see this grain.
38:04.360 --> 38:07.360
So now we come to geometry.
38:07.360 --> 38:12.360
I'm sure you all know that this is an ellipse.
38:12.360 --> 38:17.360
This is an ellipse, as Monty Python might say.
38:17.360 --> 38:32.360
And so on the left is a circle with one center, and on the right is an ellipse which has not one center but two centers, and they're called foci, which seems a bit strange, but that's how it works.
38:32.360 --> 38:37.360
And this is known by the Dogon, as you'll see.
38:37.360 --> 39:01.360
In the 16th century, Johannes Kepler discovered his law of planetary motion, which said that the planets go around the sun, not in circles, as everybody had imagined until then, but in ellipses, elliptical orbits, and that the sun is at one focus of the ellipse.
39:01.360 --> 39:04.360
Of course, a lot of people got really upset about that.
39:04.360 --> 39:08.360
But then a lot of people are always getting upset when anybody says anything new.
39:08.360 --> 39:18.360
At least he wasn't killed, like Giordano Bruno in 1600 was burnt at the stake for saying there was life on more than one world, you know.
39:18.360 --> 39:25.360
Those were dangerous times, almost as bad as today.
39:25.360 --> 39:32.360
How did the Dogon know that there were elliptical orbits in space?
39:32.360 --> 39:36.360
Well, here's a sand joint that they drew.
39:36.360 --> 39:42.360
The star Sirius has got the S underneath.
39:42.360 --> 39:46.360
I better use this red light.
39:46.360 --> 39:50.360
It's a very small, feeble red light, but I hope you can make it out.
39:50.360 --> 40:01.360
On the right there, what looks like a bow and arrow, that's the star Sirius, which is meant to be more or less at a focus of this egg-shaped or elliptical orbit.
40:01.360 --> 40:16.360
At the top, you see S2, it is in this diagram, S2 at the top and the bottom.
40:16.360 --> 40:26.360
This is a drawing of the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius, and those are the two furthest points, so it's shown twice.
40:26.360 --> 40:33.360
Then the thing in the middle is Sirius C, as astronomers call it.
40:33.360 --> 40:37.360
That's the third star, which is in fact a red dwarf.
40:37.360 --> 40:40.360
It's small, but it's not a white dwarf.
40:40.360 --> 40:43.360
It doesn't have the super powerful gravitation.
40:43.360 --> 40:55.360
The Dogon maintained that there are living beings on a planet that goes around that third star.
40:55.360 --> 41:05.360
Now I'm comparing a modern astronomical diagram of the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius with the travel diagram, which is on the left.
41:05.360 --> 41:11.360
As you can see, there's a very uncanny similarity.
41:11.360 --> 41:14.360
We're talking about a tribe that grows onions for a living.
41:14.360 --> 41:17.360
They do not have any scientific instruments.
41:17.360 --> 41:26.360
You can only see Sirius B with a 15-inch telescope if you're very lucky and it's at the right part of its orbit.
41:26.360 --> 41:30.360
Of course, the Dogon had no telescopes.
41:30.360 --> 41:38.360
Not only could they not see it, but they admitted that they had never seen it and could not see it.
41:38.360 --> 41:40.360
They said that to the anthropologists.
41:40.360 --> 41:42.360
We can't see it, but we know it's there.
41:42.360 --> 41:45.360
So the next question is, how do you know it's there?
41:45.360 --> 41:48.360
They'll come to that.
41:48.360 --> 41:57.360
Here's a linear extension of the orbit, the two orbits that I've just compared.
41:57.360 --> 42:12.360
Here's a rather early but typical astronomical computation of stable orbits that could exist around a binary star system, A and B being two stars.
42:12.360 --> 42:24.360
These orbits that you see around them have been computed to be stable so that you can have other bodies orbiting around, as indeed the Dogon insists that they are in the Sirius system.
42:24.360 --> 42:32.360
I should say that the Sirius system is 8.7 light years away from us and it's therefore a very nearby star system.
42:32.360 --> 42:37.360
I'll have more to say about that too in a moment, but here's another Dogon diagram.
42:37.360 --> 42:45.360
Now, S for Sirius and the D on both sides stands for Dicotario.
42:45.360 --> 42:52.360
Remember that the anthropologists use the Latin name to stand for the Sirius B star.
42:52.360 --> 43:02.360
So there are the two positions, and at the furthest position on the right they say that its light shines coherently when it's near Sirius,
43:02.360 --> 43:09.360
but when it gets further away it's speckled or scintillating or it looks like it might be several points of light.
43:09.360 --> 43:14.360
It changes its brightness considerably as it goes further away in its orbit.
43:14.360 --> 43:18.360
I don't quite understand that, but that's what they say.
43:18.360 --> 43:20.360
Interesting detail.
43:20.360 --> 43:26.360
Now here's another sand drawing. I hope you can make it out because it's a bit faint, but...
43:26.360 --> 43:29.360
I'll have to stop kicking that microphone.
43:29.360 --> 43:41.360
So we have here the orbit of Sirius B. Sirius A is in the middle there, and you've got this elliptical orbit going around it.
43:41.360 --> 43:53.360
And then up to the top right hand corner is another orbit that is a planet that's going around the third star,
43:53.360 --> 44:01.360
which also travels along with Sirius B. In other words, the planet orbits Sirius C.
44:01.360 --> 44:07.360
The Dogon say that two planets orbit Sirius C, but only one of them is inhabited.
44:07.360 --> 44:13.360
The diagrams can be symbolic rather than diagrammatic.
44:13.360 --> 44:19.360
This one is symbolic. It's not meant to be showing any configurations in space.
44:19.360 --> 44:22.360
So the S is once again clearly for Sirius.
44:22.360 --> 44:29.360
The F is meant to be suggesting the orbit around it of Sirius B, but they don't bother to draw it all the way
44:29.360 --> 44:33.360
because they're not doing a pictorial representation in this case.
44:33.360 --> 44:37.360
And it's also the orbit of the other star.
44:37.360 --> 44:45.360
And down at the bottom is a C, as if there weren't enough stars.
44:45.360 --> 44:55.360
The Dogon in a rather offhand manner almost flippantly say, well, there's another one, fourth star.
44:55.360 --> 45:01.360
And they call it the Goat Herd, and it has a retrograde orbit, which is why it's going off in that direction.
45:01.360 --> 45:09.360
It goes the opposite way around all of the others, and they say that it's as far from Sirius B as Sirius B is from Sirius A.
45:09.360 --> 45:15.360
But it's not very interesting because nobody lives there and doesn't really figure in their mythology much,
45:15.360 --> 45:20.360
or at least not part of their traditions that they chose to reveal.
45:20.360 --> 45:25.360
So we've got a Sirius D as well, according to the Dogon.
45:25.360 --> 45:32.360
So the number of cosmic bodies in the Sirius system, according to the Dogon, are Sirius A, the big star,
45:32.360 --> 45:37.360
Sirius B, the white dwarf, Sirius C, the red dwarf, and the Goat Herd,
45:37.360 --> 45:41.360
which is some kind of ordinary star, but clearly not as big as Sirius A,
45:41.360 --> 45:47.360
and then two planets that go around Sirius C, one of which has creatures on it.
45:47.360 --> 45:52.360
I hesitate to say people, and you'll soon see why.
45:52.360 --> 45:57.360
This is a very strange drawing, S once again for Sirius.
45:57.360 --> 46:01.360
This doesn't refer to outer space at all.
46:01.360 --> 46:14.360
This refers to the very weird connection that the Dogon can see evolve between circumcision and celestial motions.
46:14.360 --> 46:18.360
You see, all Dogon men have to be circumcised
46:18.360 --> 46:25.360
because the knife going around in a circle represents the cosmic orbit of Sirius B.
46:25.360 --> 46:29.360
They claim that Sirius B is the source of all living things,
46:29.360 --> 46:34.360
that without it nothing else in this part of the space would exist,
46:34.360 --> 46:39.360
that it is what emitted and generated everything,
46:39.360 --> 46:44.360
and therefore it's really Sirius B that they're honoring.
46:45.360 --> 46:49.360
Sirius A is a bit of a bother. They say that Sirius A is an unruly star,
46:49.360 --> 46:52.360
and that Sirius B keeps it under control.
46:52.360 --> 47:00.360
In fact, Sirius B gives its instructions to Sirius A by means of Sirius C.
47:00.360 --> 47:07.360
It passes its messages onto Sirius C, and Sirius C communicates with Sirius A and tells it to behave itself.
47:07.360 --> 47:10.360
This is what the Dogon are saying.
47:10.360 --> 47:18.360
So, A and B represent the different parts of certain elements of the anatomy of a delicate nature.
47:18.360 --> 47:26.360
You'd be amazed how much sexual symbolism is fundamental to all their religious traditions.
47:26.360 --> 47:35.360
Now, here we have another one of these diagrams, and here we have Sirius C
47:35.360 --> 47:41.360
with the elliptical orbit around it of its inhabited planet.
47:41.360 --> 47:48.360
Sirius C has a cross in the middle to identify it,
47:48.360 --> 47:53.360
and the dots represent whatever they represent.
47:53.360 --> 48:00.360
It's not entirely clear, but they say that when we die we all go back to Sirius C.
48:00.360 --> 48:03.360
That's where souls go and where they come from.
48:03.360 --> 48:09.360
The souls are all originally emitted by Sirius B, but they're deposited at Sirius C,
48:09.360 --> 48:12.360
and Sirius C takes care of the business.
48:12.360 --> 48:15.360
It's like the business manager for Sirius B.
48:15.360 --> 48:23.360
So, the male souls go around on the outside, and the female souls go around on the inside.
48:23.360 --> 48:33.360
This is segregation of gender when you die, at least on your final destination.
48:33.360 --> 48:40.360
This star, Sirius C, is known as the female sorghum.
48:40.360 --> 48:46.360
Sorghum is another grain, you may have heard of it, which they eat all the time.
48:46.360 --> 48:51.360
They use cereals and vegetables and all these kinds of things to represent things.
48:51.360 --> 48:56.360
Sirius C is represented by the grain sorghum, and it's called female sorghum.
48:56.360 --> 49:02.360
It's a female star, and its planet is called the planet of women.
49:02.360 --> 49:12.360
Absolutely adamant that females dominate everything at this system.
49:12.360 --> 49:17.360
Men are sort of tolerated.
49:17.360 --> 49:22.360
Well, we all know about that.
49:22.360 --> 49:28.360
And we did see that the chief priest was a priestess.
49:28.360 --> 49:33.360
This is another one of these sexual drawings.
49:33.360 --> 49:41.360
S for Sirius, D for Sirius B, Degutaria.
49:41.360 --> 49:45.360
B is meant to be a penis.
49:45.360 --> 49:58.360
And B and B' are both representing the foreskin, and A represents a knife.
49:58.360 --> 50:07.360
And T represents another point along the orbit of the Sirius B star.
50:07.360 --> 50:09.360
That's increasingly weird, really.
50:09.360 --> 50:14.360
When you get into all the Dogon stuff, you feel you're just drowning.
50:14.360 --> 50:17.360
It's so detailed and complicated.
50:17.360 --> 50:24.360
This is a picture of Sirius B close up, showing all the seeds inside,
50:24.360 --> 50:30.360
from which everything has come, and seeds being ejected in different ways.
50:30.360 --> 50:35.360
Different types of seeds in different ways, different seeds that do different things.
50:35.360 --> 50:40.360
Everything that is in this part of space comes from this white dwarf.
50:40.360 --> 50:45.360
That's what they say, and continues to do so.
50:45.360 --> 50:49.360
They also know other strange things about things that you can't see.
50:49.360 --> 50:53.360
This is a picture of Saturn with a ring around it.
50:53.360 --> 50:58.360
In other words, they knew about the rings of Saturn, which you can only see with a telescope.
50:58.360 --> 51:04.360
And this is a picture of Jupiter with its four main moons, which you can only see with a telescope.
51:04.360 --> 51:09.360
Now, the Dogon have known these things for many hundreds of years,
51:09.360 --> 51:13.360
because the anthropologists, who by the way were not astronomers,
51:13.360 --> 51:17.360
and when I met Germaine Dittler, and she barely knew the difference between a star and a planet.
51:17.360 --> 51:20.360
I mean, she just knew nothing about astronomy.
51:20.360 --> 51:25.360
They were just writing down what they were told, and they could sense that there was something pretty strange about this.
51:25.360 --> 51:28.360
But they didn't really want to call attention to it,
51:28.360 --> 51:31.360
because they were worried about being criticized by fellow anthropologists,
51:31.360 --> 51:34.360
and what academics are like.
51:34.360 --> 51:39.360
If they stray from the beaten path and talk about anything slightly strange,
51:39.360 --> 51:43.360
they can easily be ostracized, lose their posts, their careers could end,
51:43.360 --> 51:47.360
nobody will speak to them. I hardly need to remind you.
51:47.360 --> 51:51.360
And so, Griel and Dittler were well aware of the dangers to their careers,
51:51.360 --> 51:54.360
if they called attention to all this weird astronomical stuff.
51:54.360 --> 52:00.360
So they buried it in this anthropological journal in about 1950.
52:00.360 --> 52:05.360
And never spoke of it again until I turned up.
52:05.360 --> 52:10.360
Germaine Dittler was very, very, very, very loathe to talk to me about it.
52:10.360 --> 52:16.360
But then she got so old, she was officially retired, so she wasn't in any actual danger anymore,
52:16.360 --> 52:20.360
to admit that she recorded all this weird stuff from an African tribe
52:20.360 --> 52:24.360
that happened to be advanced astrophysical knowledge,
52:24.360 --> 52:28.360
that it was impossible for them to possess.
52:28.360 --> 52:33.360
Or at least it appears that it was impossible for them to possess, but they did possess it.
52:33.360 --> 52:39.360
But Griel and Dittler went to a lot of trouble to find evidence of how far back did all this go.
52:39.360 --> 52:44.360
And they found evidence, going back as physical evidence,
52:44.360 --> 52:49.360
for sigui ceremonies and all this kind of thing, going back to the 12th century.
52:49.360 --> 52:56.360
And from the anthropological studies, the migration routes and all that sort of thing,
52:56.360 --> 53:01.360
it's known that they came down from the northeast through the Sahara,
53:01.360 --> 53:10.360
through the Fasan oasis, and finally settled at Mali about 900 to 1,000 years ago.
53:10.360 --> 53:18.360
And before that, they had come, as I managed to work out with Eva Meyerowitz,
53:18.360 --> 53:22.360
a British anthropologist whose main concern was the Akan tribe,
53:22.360 --> 53:31.360
who preserved many, many Egyptian traits, that all these peoples who are related to one another in West Africa,
53:31.360 --> 53:39.360
that I've mentioned, are they're all descended from the ancient Egyptians by way of Libya,
53:39.360 --> 53:45.360
over many, many centuries. I mean, the migrations are recorded even in Herodotus.
53:45.360 --> 53:47.360
It was going on that long ago.
53:47.360 --> 53:52.360
And I made the first map that anybody had ever made of the locations of the different Libyan tribes,
53:52.360 --> 53:57.360
according to Herodotus, and then plotted it all out and studied the names.
53:57.360 --> 54:01.360
And two of them have names named after Amma and so on.
54:01.360 --> 54:08.360
And you can see exactly how they migrated west and west and west and then south, down through the oasis,
54:08.360 --> 54:14.360
and ended up in Africa, intermarried with the local black tribes, which is why they have very black skins.
54:14.360 --> 54:20.360
And they adopted African language, but they kept a lot of loanwords.
54:20.360 --> 54:29.360
Here we have a picture of Sirius B on the left and Sirius C on the right, side by side.
54:29.360 --> 54:35.360
Sirius B is rather anally retentive of its rays.
54:35.360 --> 54:41.360
Sirius C is a very expensive personality, wants to get his rays out there.
54:41.360 --> 54:49.360
And these are not strictly accurate because the Dogon do maintain that Sirius C is oval as well.
54:49.360 --> 54:56.360
It's not purely round. But here, for purposes of contrast, they have shown it is round.
54:56.360 --> 55:05.360
So now we come beyond the stars to how they say they discovered all their information.
55:05.360 --> 55:12.360
Because they realized that Sirius B is made of super dense matter.
55:12.360 --> 55:19.360
They said that it's made of a matter which is a metal called sagala from their word sakatara, which means strength.
55:19.360 --> 55:23.360
So it's a strong metal, and they describe it as best they can.
55:23.360 --> 55:28.360
They said all the people in the world could not lift it. It's so heavy.
55:28.360 --> 55:36.360
And they have all sorts of wonderfully complex numerical calculations.
55:36.360 --> 55:39.360
I mean, you wouldn't believe how complicated it all gets.
55:39.360 --> 55:45.360
And one of their favorite numbers is 480, which sort of symbolically represents the highest number to them
55:45.360 --> 55:49.360
in the same way that 10,000 used to do traditionally for the Chinese.
55:49.360 --> 55:57.360
The Chinese know perfectly well that it's not literally 10,000, and they say, oh, 10,000 things, but what they mean is an infinite number.
55:57.360 --> 56:01.360
And similarly, the Dogon used 480 sometimes.
56:01.360 --> 56:06.360
And they said, it's heavier than 480 assloads.
56:06.360 --> 56:12.360
You see how quaint their pictorial symbolism is.
56:12.360 --> 56:20.360
But what they're saying is, quite specifically, they state that this material does not exist on Earth.
56:20.360 --> 56:23.360
They know the difference between solar systems and empty space.
56:23.360 --> 56:30.360
They say that our sun and our planet and Jupiter and Venus and whatever are in one system.
56:30.360 --> 56:33.360
Then there's a big, long, empty space.
56:33.360 --> 56:39.360
And finally, you come to another bunch of suns and planets, and that is the Sirius system.
56:39.360 --> 56:44.360
And they know this, and they've known it for centuries.
56:44.360 --> 56:50.360
And they know about super dense matter, which we only discovered in 1926 when Sir Arthur Eddington,
56:51.360 --> 56:58.360
one of my scientific heroes, realized that it was the only way to explain the gravitational influence of Sirius B,
56:58.360 --> 57:00.360
this tiny star on Sirius A.
57:00.360 --> 57:02.360
And now we know that's all true.
57:02.360 --> 57:10.360
But the anthropologists began to go to the Dogon in 1931, and they certainly didn't know nuclear physics,
57:10.360 --> 57:15.360
and they didn't know astronomy, and there was no contamination.
57:15.360 --> 57:21.360
People say, well, what about the White Fathers, who were the missionaries of the French in that part of the world?
57:21.360 --> 57:24.360
No, I wrote to the head of the White Fathers, and he wrote back, and he said,
57:24.360 --> 57:31.360
we had no missions to those people until, I think it was 1948, 49, it was the first mission.
57:31.360 --> 57:38.360
And there was just no way that the Western knowledge could make it through there.
57:38.360 --> 57:42.360
And then, of course, they said Sirius C existed and described what type of star it was,
57:42.360 --> 57:45.360
and that was only demonstrated in the 1980s.
57:45.360 --> 57:49.360
So we've got a real mystery on our hands, and that's why I called the book The Sirius Mystery,
57:49.360 --> 57:56.360
and it has not been solved, and I'm not pushing a theory or an answer.
57:56.360 --> 57:58.360
I'm trying to tell everybody about the mystery.
57:58.360 --> 58:04.360
That's why the book is called a mystery, because it's genuinely what it is.
58:04.360 --> 58:08.360
So where did they get the information?
58:08.360 --> 58:17.360
They say that their ancestors, who did not live in Mali, but lived in their original homeland, wherever that was,
58:17.360 --> 58:25.360
were told it by visiting beings who came from that planet around Sirius C.
58:25.360 --> 58:31.360
And when they came down, the first thing that happened, a new star appeared in the sky,
58:31.360 --> 58:35.360
and they call that the star of the tenth moon, whatever that means.
58:35.360 --> 58:41.360
And it got brighter and brighter, and then stopped and stayed stationary.
58:41.360 --> 58:44.360
That's the first thing that happened.
58:44.360 --> 58:47.360
Of course, we would call that a mothership today.
58:47.360 --> 58:53.360
And then a landing ship came down, that's what we would call it,
58:53.360 --> 59:01.360
which had fire coming out of it, out of its bottom, and it came down, and a lot of dust rose up.
59:01.360 --> 59:09.360
And this is a picture of the whirling of the dust, of the descent of this ship, which they call the Ark.
59:09.360 --> 59:15.360
Well, the anthropologists call it Ash in French, which means Ark in English.
59:15.360 --> 59:23.360
Presumably, they are attempting to translate into French the equivalent of what they gathered, the Dogon word, whatever it was, meant.
59:23.360 --> 59:28.360
They call it the Ark, that's what the anthropologists always call it.
59:28.360 --> 59:32.360
So, no connection with Noah, one presumes.
59:32.360 --> 59:40.360
Here's another picture of the same whirling dust, so they're really big on this whirling dust, they just never got over it.
59:40.360 --> 59:45.360
And then they said, and after it stopped, it was like a fire that went out.
59:45.360 --> 59:55.360
So it's a very detailed description of what seems to be the landing of a rocket-powered landing craft for these creatures.
59:55.360 --> 01:00:01.360
And then the creatures got out, and that's where the fun begins.
01:00:01.360 --> 01:00:08.360
But before I show you the creatures, I will tell you what the Dogon say about inhabited worlds.
01:00:08.360 --> 01:00:17.360
They claim that in our region of space, there are six inhabited planets.
01:00:17.360 --> 01:00:22.360
On the sixth planet, there are the men with wings.
01:00:22.360 --> 01:00:27.360
On the fifth planet, there are the men with horns.
01:00:27.360 --> 01:00:32.360
On the fifth planet, there are the men with wings.
01:00:32.360 --> 01:00:37.360
On the sixth planet, there are the men with wings.
01:00:37.360 --> 01:00:40.360
There are the men with wings.
01:00:40.360 --> 01:00:50.360
And this is a 400-year-old iron statue of one of the inhabitants of the sixth inhabited planet in our area of space.
01:00:50.360 --> 01:00:53.360
This shows one of the men with wings.
01:00:53.360 --> 01:01:00.360
And I think that if somebody told you that was by Giacometti, you'd believe it.
01:01:00.360 --> 01:01:04.360
And if that were in the Tate Modern, people would be raving about it.
01:01:04.360 --> 01:01:07.360
But I consider this a great work of art.
01:01:07.360 --> 01:01:14.360
I mean, this is a very expressive iron statue of a man with wings.
01:01:14.360 --> 01:01:27.360
And now I will show you an equally old iron statue of the people from the fifth planet who they claim visited.
01:01:27.360 --> 01:01:33.360
That's the statue.
01:01:33.360 --> 01:01:42.360
They give very detailed anatomical descriptions of these beings who they claim had no...
01:01:42.360 --> 01:01:45.360
What really impressed them was they had no elbows.
01:01:45.360 --> 01:01:47.360
There were no joints in their arms.
01:01:47.360 --> 01:01:53.360
The Dogon just think this is so hilarious that these beings had no elbows.
01:01:54.360 --> 01:01:57.360
And also, they didn't have much in the way of teeth.
01:01:57.360 --> 01:02:01.360
And their teeth were very pointy, not like ours.
01:02:01.360 --> 01:02:07.360
And they go into great detail, and they breathed through their clavicles.
01:02:07.360 --> 01:02:12.360
Dolphins have sort of air holes, you know.
01:02:12.360 --> 01:02:14.360
But these were aquatic beings.
01:02:14.360 --> 01:02:22.360
So what they seem to be describing is something very similar to an amphibious mammal type of creature or an amphibious reptile.
01:02:22.360 --> 01:02:24.360
Amphibious in any case.
01:02:24.360 --> 01:02:27.360
Breathing air, but they lived in the water.
01:02:27.360 --> 01:02:29.360
And we'll come to more of that.
01:02:29.360 --> 01:02:36.360
But as you can see, they're well equipped there with flipper hands to swim in the water.
01:02:36.360 --> 01:02:40.360
And obviously, that's a head on the end there.
01:02:40.360 --> 01:02:46.360
Now, this is a much more serpentine view than later became common.
01:02:46.360 --> 01:02:48.360
I hope you can make out these sand drawings.
01:02:48.360 --> 01:02:53.360
There are other faint on this screen in these circumstances.
01:02:53.360 --> 01:02:59.360
But this is one of the many drawings of the beings, and they call them the nomos.
01:02:59.360 --> 01:03:01.360
N-O-M-M-O.
01:03:01.360 --> 01:03:04.360
And this is one of the nomos.
01:03:04.360 --> 01:03:09.360
And you can see he doesn't have any elbows, and he's got these sort of flatly flappy arms.
01:03:09.360 --> 01:03:16.360
And they have in fact, because they live in an area where there are lots of catfish in the Niger River,
01:03:16.360 --> 01:03:26.360
sort of transformed their stock image of the nomo from the more serpentine one that you saw that was 400 years old to these more modern ones,
01:03:26.360 --> 01:03:33.360
which look increasingly like catfish, if only perhaps to get the message across.
01:03:33.360 --> 01:03:35.360
But they were definitely not fish.
01:03:35.360 --> 01:03:37.360
They breathed air.
01:03:37.360 --> 01:03:40.360
And there's another one.
01:03:40.360 --> 01:03:47.360
These are all different nomos with different names, because there were eight nomos who came to earth.
01:03:47.360 --> 01:03:52.360
And two, the mother and father nomo, remained behind.
01:03:52.360 --> 01:03:59.360
But there was this group of eight nomos who came, an Agduad.
01:04:00.360 --> 01:04:11.360
And there were some problems with the nomos, because they had a rebel nomo, who Madugon called Ogo.
01:04:11.360 --> 01:04:13.360
And he's the troublemaker.
01:04:13.360 --> 01:04:17.360
And he's represented by the fox.
01:04:17.360 --> 01:04:20.360
They have a white fox in that part of Africa.
01:04:20.360 --> 01:04:26.360
And he's always going around making trouble, and he's the cause of all the evil and disorder in the world.
01:04:26.360 --> 01:04:32.360
So we've got basically the fallen angel legend present.
01:04:32.360 --> 01:04:34.360
There's another nomo.
01:04:34.360 --> 01:04:38.360
These are probably almost invisible here.
01:04:38.360 --> 01:04:42.360
And here are two nomos together.
01:04:44.360 --> 01:04:48.360
And so that's the end of the Dogon nomo pictures.
01:04:48.360 --> 01:04:51.360
In fact, that's the end of the Dogon pictures.
01:04:51.360 --> 01:05:01.360
But they claim that when the nomos came, they introduced people to advance things like how to cultivate grain,
01:05:01.360 --> 01:05:06.360
and how to have more productive and useful lives.
01:05:06.360 --> 01:05:13.360
And that they were sort of civilizers who came down to try to sort things out, get things going on the earth.
01:05:13.360 --> 01:05:20.360
And so they revere them, and they look upon them as messengers, messengers from Amma.
01:05:20.360 --> 01:05:26.360
Who sent them, at least that's how they conceive of it.
01:05:26.360 --> 01:05:31.360
And they don't worship them as gods or anything of that kind.
01:05:31.360 --> 01:05:36.360
They only have one god, Amma, who's the great god of the universe.
01:05:36.360 --> 01:05:42.360
And they go into cosmological explanations of how everything was, a big chaos.
01:05:42.360 --> 01:05:45.360
And then Amma generated things from himself.
01:05:45.360 --> 01:05:50.360
It's very like the Egyptian creation cosmologies.
01:05:50.360 --> 01:05:57.360
Now we're getting into Irving Finkel territory, because we have here an Assyrian fishman.
01:05:57.360 --> 01:06:00.360
And he's not just a mermaid either.
01:06:00.360 --> 01:06:07.360
And here is the stone carving of which that 19th century engraving was a drawing.
01:06:07.360 --> 01:06:09.360
You can see he's swimming in the sea.
01:06:10.360 --> 01:06:15.360
According to the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Babylonians who succeeded them,
01:06:15.360 --> 01:06:21.360
and the Assyrians who succeeded them, civilization on earth was brought to us,
01:06:21.360 --> 01:06:29.360
we humans already being here of course, by visitors who came from the sky.
01:06:29.360 --> 01:06:33.360
And they had fishtails.
01:06:33.360 --> 01:06:40.360
And they became the chief god to the Philistines, known as Dagon.
01:06:40.360 --> 01:06:42.360
D-A-G-O-N.
01:06:42.360 --> 01:06:48.360
Whether that's got any connection with Dogon, I couldn't say, but it's kind of an interesting coincidence.
01:06:48.360 --> 01:06:54.360
And you may have read, if you're highly religious in the Bible, about the idol of Dagon.
01:06:54.360 --> 01:06:57.360
And the Jews did not like that, because they did not like idols.
01:06:57.360 --> 01:07:04.360
And the Philistines worshiped Dagon, and the Canaanites worshiped Dagon under the name of Baal.
01:07:04.360 --> 01:07:07.360
And we're talking about fish beings.
01:07:07.360 --> 01:07:11.360
You'll be surprised at how many fish beings you're about to see.
01:07:11.360 --> 01:07:15.360
And they had priests who dressed in fish outfits.
01:07:15.360 --> 01:07:23.360
Now you see they had scales on them, wearing fish scales and fish heads, just like the Dogon.
01:07:23.360 --> 01:07:26.360
But you'll see more graphic versions of that.
01:07:26.360 --> 01:07:31.360
And this is the only original drawing to survive in the British Library,
01:07:31.360 --> 01:07:42.360
from which all the engravings were made, by Layard in his great 19th century reports on his discoveries of the ruins of Nineveh.
01:07:42.360 --> 01:07:44.360
This is from his book.
01:07:44.360 --> 01:07:51.360
You can see this is the broken bottom half of a gigantic statue of a fish man.
01:07:51.360 --> 01:07:58.360
Now these were also described by Greek writers who were writing about Babylonian traditions, and they called them Oannis.
01:07:58.360 --> 01:08:01.360
That's the Greek name.
01:08:01.360 --> 01:08:05.360
So I'm going to run through several examples of these fish men.
01:08:05.360 --> 01:08:09.360
These are from Gems in the British Museum, as it says in the caption.
01:08:09.360 --> 01:08:12.360
These would be Babylonian or Assyrian.
01:08:12.360 --> 01:08:17.360
And as you can see, one of them has a star there.
01:08:17.360 --> 01:08:27.360
Now there are some very strange pottery figures, ceramic figures, of fish men.
01:08:27.360 --> 01:08:36.360
They're called Apkalo in Babylonian, and they tended to be buried as ceremonial secret deposits in the foundations of the temples.
01:08:36.360 --> 01:08:39.360
And at one point some temple was being excavated, I forget which one,
01:08:39.360 --> 01:08:49.360
and they found a whole family of Apkalo sort of standing there under the earth, blessing the temple from below, as it were.
01:08:49.360 --> 01:08:52.360
And this is one of them.
01:08:52.360 --> 01:08:56.360
Here are two standing together.
01:08:56.360 --> 01:09:01.360
None of this was in the first edition of my book. I didn't know about them.
01:09:01.360 --> 01:09:05.360
Here's one who's lying down, a bit lazy, this one.
01:09:05.360 --> 01:09:15.360
He's being much more fish-like than the others because he's actually swimming like those carvings that you saw just a moment ago.
01:09:15.360 --> 01:09:19.360
Here's another standing one looking at us head on.
01:09:19.360 --> 01:09:30.360
It's difficult to know whether these are meant to be accentuating the human face, because they're really priests of onus, or real onus.
01:09:30.360 --> 01:09:39.360
And here, this one would be a priest on the left greeting two real ones on the right.
01:09:39.360 --> 01:09:45.360
And I don't know, I suppose that's the Tree of Life or something. Not quite sure.
01:09:45.360 --> 01:09:52.360
Nobody thoroughly understands the symbology of all these ancient cultures, any more than they do that of the Dogon, really.
01:09:52.360 --> 01:09:57.360
Here's one where the priest is pointing towards a star.
01:09:57.360 --> 01:10:02.360
And as you can see, there's all kinds of things going on.
01:10:02.360 --> 01:10:15.360
There's a crescent moon on the right, and then this god is being carried along in a procession, carried by these people.
01:10:15.360 --> 01:10:24.360
This is obviously sacred procession with a Dogon priest, I mean, an onus priest, holding on behind.
01:10:24.360 --> 01:10:33.360
Here's another one. This is a photograph of a cylinder seal impression showing the priests with the fish gear hanging off them behind.
01:10:33.360 --> 01:10:39.360
So the Babylonians, Sumerians and Babylonians and the Assyrians were just doing this the whole time.
01:10:39.360 --> 01:10:45.360
All their religious ceremonies featured these fish creatures who they very clearly said had founded civilization.
01:10:45.360 --> 01:10:48.360
And this is recorded in various Greek historians.
01:10:48.360 --> 01:10:55.360
But I won't go into all those details, which you'll find in my book. It's too much to go into in this talk.
01:10:55.360 --> 01:11:02.360
And here we have an eye in heaven looking down and shedding its rays.
01:11:03.360 --> 01:11:08.360
Remember that the Bozo called Sirius the Eye Star.
01:11:08.360 --> 01:11:17.360
And I don't know what this is really all about, what that strange gizmo is, but according to the caption,
01:11:17.360 --> 01:11:24.360
this is really a priest dressed as a Dogon or an onus, but it just goes on and on like this.
01:11:24.360 --> 01:11:33.360
Now this is a creature who really exists in the Red Sea, in the Persian Gulf, and in Florida and all sorts of places called the Dogon.
01:11:33.360 --> 01:11:36.360
Once again, a rather similar name to Dagon and Dogon.
01:11:36.360 --> 01:11:42.360
People have written to me many times and said, is there any connection between all these names? And the fact is I don't know.
01:11:42.360 --> 01:11:52.360
But this is an air breathing sea mammal, which is the closest in appearance to the Dogon representations of the visiting nomo.
01:11:52.360 --> 01:11:59.360
So they might have been something like that, assuming it's true.
01:11:59.360 --> 01:12:03.360
But I'm not insisting that it's true, but the Dogon insists that it's true.
01:12:03.360 --> 01:12:08.360
And so as they write about so much, maybe we should listen to them.
01:12:09.360 --> 01:12:12.360
Now we go into other cultures.
01:12:12.360 --> 01:12:27.360
This is the god Serapis or Osiris in late times in Alexandria, or in fact I think this may be from Syria, but this is Hellenistic times.
01:12:27.360 --> 01:12:35.360
By that time, they were putting fish tails and serpent tails onto the Egyptian divinities.
01:12:35.360 --> 01:12:41.360
And here is the goddess Isis, as you've never seen her before.
01:12:41.360 --> 01:12:49.360
And it's very odd, but even odder still is this one.
01:12:49.360 --> 01:12:57.360
Isis and Serapis, which is the later name of Osiris, who were married to each other, with their entwined tails.
01:12:57.360 --> 01:13:03.360
Now, fix that image in your mind, because you're going to see it from quite another culture in a little while.
01:13:03.360 --> 01:13:06.360
Exactly the same motif.
01:13:06.360 --> 01:13:12.360
Really, really strange coincidence, but of course, clearly not a coincidence, as you'll see.
01:13:12.360 --> 01:13:15.360
Now, ancient Greece.
01:13:15.360 --> 01:13:23.360
This is Nereus, who preceded Poseidon, a very ancient Greek god.
01:13:23.360 --> 01:13:28.360
The Greeks maintained this civilization was brought by fishmen also.
01:13:28.360 --> 01:13:38.360
It's the Athenians who maintained this most strongly, because they said that Athens was founded by men with fish or serpent tails.
01:13:38.360 --> 01:13:50.360
And the founder was called Kekropes, K-E-K-R-O-P-S, but in English we Latinize it and say C-E-P-R-O-P-S.
01:13:50.360 --> 01:13:54.360
We can say Sekropes if it makes us feel better.
01:13:54.360 --> 01:13:57.360
We don't have to use the hard K of the Greeks.
01:13:57.360 --> 01:14:03.360
But the thing is, before the Athenians called themselves Athenians, they called themselves Kekropians.
01:14:03.360 --> 01:14:10.360
And then they decided to get really friendly with the goddess Athena, and in honor of her, they started to call themselves Athenians.
01:14:10.360 --> 01:14:12.360
But before that, they were Kekropians.
01:14:12.360 --> 01:14:16.360
And they had one of these guys as their founder and first king.
01:14:16.360 --> 01:14:20.360
And I'm going to show you a picture of him in a moment.
01:14:20.360 --> 01:14:23.360
But before I do that, I'm going to show you this weird one.
01:14:23.360 --> 01:14:28.360
This is Scylla. You may have heard of Scylla in Charybdis from Homer's Odyssey.
01:14:28.360 --> 01:14:36.360
Charybdis was a whirlpool, and Scylla was a sort of siren who lived in a cave, and she used to eat passing sailors.
01:14:36.360 --> 01:14:38.360
And she was very dangerous.
01:14:38.360 --> 01:14:43.360
Now this is a picture of Scylla, or Skoula, as they would say in ancient Greek.
01:14:43.360 --> 01:14:48.360
And there she is, showing off her bust.
01:14:48.360 --> 01:14:53.360
And the top half of her is pretty much okay.
01:14:53.360 --> 01:15:01.360
But when you get down below the waist level, this is often the case, things can change.
01:15:01.360 --> 01:15:06.360
And so here, at her waist, we have a protruding head of a dog.
01:15:06.360 --> 01:15:11.360
That's very important, because the dog symbolism is significant.
01:15:11.360 --> 01:15:15.360
And Sirius is traditionally known as the dog star.
01:15:15.360 --> 01:15:26.360
And I could tell you more about this, but there seem to be zoological possibilities of beings who have multiple heads.
01:15:26.360 --> 01:15:29.360
That's too strange to go into.
01:15:29.360 --> 01:15:38.360
So this is another one of the sea god of the Greeks, but this one is because it's to do with the Tyrrhenian sea.
01:15:38.360 --> 01:15:43.360
He was probably called Tyranos, the god or demigod of the Tyrrhenian sea.
01:15:43.360 --> 01:15:49.360
But there he is with his dolphins playing with him, who are his pets.
01:15:49.360 --> 01:15:52.360
We have dogs and cats.
01:15:52.360 --> 01:15:56.360
These guys had their dolphins as friendly pets.
01:15:56.360 --> 01:15:59.360
And here's another one.
01:15:59.360 --> 01:16:06.360
These pictures are never really discussed by archaeologists and classical scholars,
01:16:06.360 --> 01:16:08.360
because, well, they simply don't know what to say.
01:16:08.360 --> 01:16:12.360
They just say, oh, what's the old man of the sea, or it's a merman.
01:16:12.360 --> 01:16:18.360
They don't quite know what to say about all of this, and it's just never discussed.
01:16:18.360 --> 01:16:25.360
And so most people who think they know a great deal about classical studies and Greek archaeology and whatever
01:16:25.360 --> 01:16:32.360
might never have set eyes on any of this, or if they had in passing, they would have thought it was some kind of artistic fancy.
01:16:32.360 --> 01:16:34.360
But it was far from that.
01:16:34.360 --> 01:16:38.360
And so this is a vase painting.
01:16:38.360 --> 01:16:44.360
On the right is Kekroops, the founder and first king of Athens.
01:16:44.360 --> 01:16:56.360
And what's going on is that in front of him is Athena, who has by this time been adopted by the Athenians.
01:16:56.360 --> 01:17:08.360
And the woman holding up the baby is Gaia, also known in ancient Greek as Gai, G-E, long E.
01:17:08.360 --> 01:17:11.360
She wasn't.
01:17:11.360 --> 01:17:18.360
And she's holding up a baby called Erick Thonius, who's going to become the next king in succession.
01:17:18.360 --> 01:17:26.360
And in many myths, Erick Thonius himself is a fissure of serpent-tailed being.
01:17:26.360 --> 01:17:32.360
Socrates was a stonemason by trade, you may recall if you've read any Plato.
01:17:32.360 --> 01:17:39.360
And he worked on the Acropolis carving something called the Erechtheum.
01:17:39.360 --> 01:17:46.360
As you go up in the Acropolis, and you see the great big temple up there, up ahead at the end, slightly to the right.
01:17:46.360 --> 01:17:57.360
And on the left is a structure, sort of rectangular structure with carved women draped in robes, looking very solemn, known as the Erechtheum.
01:17:57.360 --> 01:18:07.360
And that was built to honor Erick Thonius, this little boy who's being brought to birth from the earth and handed by the earth goddess to Athena,
01:18:07.360 --> 01:18:12.360
so that he can become the next king in succession to Kekroops here on the right.
01:18:12.360 --> 01:18:16.360
Now this became a standard motif in Grieg's Voss painting.
01:18:16.360 --> 01:18:28.360
Here we have Zeus on the left with his thunderbolt waging war on the bad Nomo, the Ogo, known to the Greeks as Typhon.
01:18:28.360 --> 01:18:34.360
And as you can see, he was a nasty guy.
01:18:34.360 --> 01:18:39.360
And there was this heavenly war between the good gods and the bad gods.
01:18:39.360 --> 01:18:48.360
And so Typhon was subdued, and Zeus was able to reign peacefully from Mount Olympus, but there's still quite a lot of trouble.
01:18:48.360 --> 01:18:51.360
And of course, he was pretty naughty himself.
01:18:51.360 --> 01:19:01.360
Here again we have the motif of Kekroops being handed his successor, delivered into the hands of Athena by the earth goddess,
01:19:01.360 --> 01:19:07.360
often symbolized because it's just her head and arms reaching up out of the earth, you see.
01:19:07.360 --> 01:19:14.360
And here's another version of the same, just to show you how popular this was.
01:19:14.360 --> 01:19:19.360
People would have one of these in their house if they had a bit of money and wanted to show off to the neighbors,
01:19:19.360 --> 01:19:24.360
they'd have a scene of the birth of Erick Thonius on a vase, prominently on display.
01:19:25.360 --> 01:19:30.360
And once again, the baby Erick Thonius being handed to Athena.
01:19:30.360 --> 01:19:38.360
And this time on the left we see Kekroops looking on at the birth of his successor.
01:19:38.360 --> 01:19:44.360
And this is a close-up of Kekroops, the first king of Athens.
01:19:44.360 --> 01:19:46.360
Now just think about this for a moment.
01:19:46.360 --> 01:19:54.360
We've got the Babylonians, Sumerians, and Assyrians saying that civilization was started by fishmen or serpent men, whichever.
01:19:54.360 --> 01:19:57.360
You have the Athenians saying that.
01:19:57.360 --> 01:20:02.360
And you have the Dogon of West Africa saying that.
01:20:02.360 --> 01:20:07.360
And now the Chinese also say that.
01:20:07.360 --> 01:20:15.360
Do you remember this motif of the Isis and Osiris with their entwined serpent tails?
01:20:15.360 --> 01:20:19.360
From the Middle East.
01:20:19.360 --> 01:20:21.360
Here we have it in China.
01:20:21.360 --> 01:20:28.360
On the right is Fuxi, holding his carpenter's square because he measured the earth.
01:20:28.360 --> 01:20:37.360
On the left we find his wife, Niu Gua, and they are holding their little baby fish tail, their Erick Thonius.
01:20:37.360 --> 01:20:46.360
Now the Chinese maintain that Chinese civilization was founded by fish-tailed or serpent-tailed beings.
01:20:46.360 --> 01:20:54.360
The Chinese, the Greeks, the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and the Dogon.
01:20:54.360 --> 01:20:56.360
It's getting too much.
01:20:56.360 --> 01:20:58.360
What is going on here?
01:20:58.360 --> 01:21:04.360
Why is it that we aren't all taught at school that ancient mythology all over the world seems to exist,
01:21:04.360 --> 01:21:12.360
agree, that civilization was brought to earth by fish-tailed or serpent-tailed beings from the sky.
01:21:12.360 --> 01:21:15.360
Here's another rubbing.
01:21:15.360 --> 01:21:21.360
Now these carvings of which these are rubbings from China are 2,000 years old from the Han Dynasty.
01:21:21.360 --> 01:21:23.360
Here we have lots of them.
01:21:23.360 --> 01:21:28.360
We've got the big ones with the entwined tails, as we saw with Isis and Osiris.
01:21:28.360 --> 01:21:30.360
We've got other ones leaping about.
01:21:30.360 --> 01:21:33.360
The guy on the right has his carpenter's square again.
01:21:33.360 --> 01:21:35.360
That's Fu Xi.
01:21:35.360 --> 01:21:37.360
There are many of these.
01:21:37.360 --> 01:21:49.360
In fact, here is a little statue which I own showing Fu Xi and Niu Gua entwined as one sort of dragon being, as it were.
01:21:49.360 --> 01:22:05.360
I own this pair of rubbings which are also Han Dynasty, which I collected in China, showing this is Niu Gua with a serpent rather than a fish-tail in this case.
01:22:05.360 --> 01:22:07.360
Sorry, that was Fu Xi.
01:22:07.360 --> 01:22:09.360
This is Niu Gua.
01:22:09.360 --> 01:22:15.360
He's holding plants because he taught agriculture to men.
01:22:15.360 --> 01:22:20.360
She's holding agricultural implements.
01:22:20.360 --> 01:22:30.360
I'm showing you all these fishmen from all over the world to impress upon you that the Dogon are in the mainstream.
01:22:30.360 --> 01:22:37.360
They may be pretty weird, but they've got a lot of company.
01:22:37.360 --> 01:22:43.360
The ancient Greeks, ancient people of the Middle East, the Chinese.
01:22:43.360 --> 01:23:01.360
How many more cultures do you want who are going to verify the antiquity of this fantastic idea that civilization was brought to earth by these fish-tailed or serpent-tailed semi-aquatic or aquatic beings who came from the sky?
01:23:01.360 --> 01:23:06.360
Here's another Greek vase I'm showing.
01:23:06.360 --> 01:23:10.360
This is the Chariot of the Rising Sun.
01:23:10.360 --> 01:23:17.360
I'm going to take you all the way around the vase because this is Dawn arising.
01:23:17.360 --> 01:23:20.360
The sun is holding his horses back.
01:23:20.360 --> 01:23:22.360
He's just about to rise.
01:23:22.360 --> 01:23:25.360
You can see his solar rays around his head.
01:23:25.360 --> 01:23:31.360
Here is the goddess of Dawn on the right, Eos, chasing Orion away.
01:23:31.360 --> 01:23:41.360
This is the typical stance of Orion, always looking back with his arms at the angle of the three main stars, of what we call Orion's belt.
01:23:41.360 --> 01:23:46.360
Under his foot and just ahead of him is the dog for the dog star.
01:23:46.360 --> 01:23:50.360
That's Sirius.
01:23:50.360 --> 01:23:54.360
Here we see them coming around to the other side again.
01:23:54.360 --> 01:24:01.360
I have another one that I haven't included the picture of, which shows the constellation Lepus also in this scene.
01:24:01.360 --> 01:24:05.360
Here's the whole thing rolled out as one big picture.
01:24:05.360 --> 01:24:10.360
Now the Greeks were showing the heliacal rising of Sirius here.
01:24:10.360 --> 01:24:12.360
I showed you the Dogon picture of that.
01:24:12.360 --> 01:24:15.360
Here we have the Sumerian one.
01:24:15.360 --> 01:24:18.360
This is the heliacal rising of Sirius also.
01:24:19.360 --> 01:24:20.360
You see those two mounds.
01:24:20.360 --> 01:24:23.360
Those are the two mountains of Dawn.
01:24:23.360 --> 01:24:32.360
The sun god is rising between the two mountains of Dawn, which are called the Moshe Mountains, which are symbolic because that's the eastern horizon.
01:24:32.360 --> 01:24:35.360
He's coming up between the two Moshe Mountains.
01:24:35.360 --> 01:24:40.360
He has fire coming out of his arms and shoulders because he's the sun.
01:24:40.360 --> 01:24:45.360
He's looking at a star directly next to him.
01:24:45.360 --> 01:24:47.360
That is Sirius.
01:24:47.360 --> 01:24:54.360
At the tip of an arrow, because to the Babylonians, Sirius wasn't the dog star, it was the bow star.
01:24:54.360 --> 01:24:59.360
There's the bow down below launching the arrow, of which Sirius is the tip.
01:24:59.360 --> 01:25:08.360
At the same moment as the sun is rising, on either side of them are the two gates of Dawn, which had been opened with the rampant lions on the top.
01:25:08.360 --> 01:25:16.360
This is the heliacal rising of Sirius, which is once again the first day of the year for the Egyptians and for the Dogon.
01:25:16.360 --> 01:25:28.360
You see the commonality of these concepts across the whole world, really, apart from the Americas, stretching from China to West Africa.
01:25:28.360 --> 01:25:30.360
It's all the same.
01:25:30.360 --> 01:25:37.360
It's as widespread as the arc and flood legends that we heard about from Irving earlier.
01:25:37.360 --> 01:25:40.360
They're all part of a complex.
01:25:40.360 --> 01:25:53.360
We're talking about a spread of traditions that's so wide, and yet the only coherent account we have of it all that survives is when the piece together from the informants by the anthropologists
01:25:53.360 --> 01:26:02.360
and put into a systematic, modern format of explaining it point by point by point by point, which ancient peoples didn't tend to do.
01:26:02.360 --> 01:26:06.360
Aristotle was the first one to even attempt such a thing.
01:26:06.360 --> 01:26:22.360
We have a coherent account from the Dogon, high priests, whereas we only have fragmentary things and hymns and wall texts and the various papyri praising gods and whatever.
01:26:22.360 --> 01:26:25.360
They give you a bit of this and a bit of that.
01:26:25.360 --> 01:26:38.360
Plutarch attempted a systematic account of Isis and Osiris, but he was first century AD and it was already the time when Rome was in control of Egypt, and it was pretty late stuff.
01:26:38.360 --> 01:26:47.360
I mean, Plutarch was the high priest of Delphi, and he was a serious scholar, but he couldn't get to the really ancient material because he couldn't read hieroglyphics.
01:26:47.360 --> 01:26:54.360
He did his best. It's a wonderful treatise on Isis and Osiris by Plutarch. If you haven't read it, you've missed something.
01:26:54.360 --> 01:27:10.360
Here is my solution to interstellar contact. I call it the interplanetary bridge because I've patented this because I thought if we could just build a bridge between the worlds,
01:27:10.360 --> 01:27:14.360
or am I being too multicultural? This is my little joke.
01:27:14.360 --> 01:27:20.360
This is my favorite portrait of myself before I lost all my hair.
01:27:20.360 --> 01:27:24.360
Don't worry, I never smoked a pipe. That's just for effect. It's a prop.
01:27:24.360 --> 01:27:34.360
I wanted to look scholarly and learned, and I thought maybe putting it on a beret would help, but it just made it worse.
01:27:34.360 --> 01:27:45.360
That is the end of the pictures. I'm just going to tell you...I'll have to look at my watch to see where we stand in terms of time.
01:27:45.360 --> 01:27:55.360
Before I open up to questions, I just want to tell you a very strange thing.
01:27:56.360 --> 01:28:07.360
In the 4th to 5th centuries, there lived a man called Macrobius, a Greek author and scientist who wrote some wonderful books that are really fascinating.
01:28:07.360 --> 01:28:20.360
In one of his books, he said that there was something called the sacred fraction. It was 253 over 246. He said it comes from the ancients.
01:28:21.360 --> 01:28:29.360
This was repeated by Chalkidius, Gaudensius, Theon of Smyrna, and Proclus.
01:28:29.360 --> 01:28:38.360
I have an entire lengthy appendix about Proclus in the Serious Mystery, because he knew about invisible bodies in space, and I believe he knew all about the Serious Mystery.
01:28:38.360 --> 01:28:49.360
He also mentions the sacred fraction. I thought, I'm not at all sure about this sacred fraction. What's so special about 253 over 246, because those numbers meant nothing to me.
01:28:49.360 --> 01:29:00.360
I did a little bit of elementary arithmetic and discovered that it was equal to the decimal 1.053.
01:29:00.360 --> 01:29:06.360
I thought, well, that's not familiar to me either, but I did a bit of research. I just had a hunch.
01:29:06.360 --> 01:29:24.360
I looked up in the standard astrophysical reference book called Astrophysical Data, which at that time had just come out, and discovered that the mass of Serious B is 1.053 that of our sun.
01:29:24.360 --> 01:29:36.360
I thought, sacred fraction, Serious B compared to our sun, is this some kind of wild coincidence to three decimal points?
01:29:36.360 --> 01:29:52.360
Clearly, I don't know, but it led me to think that there are, because since the last edition of the Serious Mystery came out, I've realized much more about the structure of space.
01:29:52.360 --> 01:29:59.360
I think that the Serious system, our solar system, may be part of a kind of cell in space.
01:29:59.360 --> 01:30:11.360
I just want you to know that when you get cells of whatever size, absolute size, they can do something called developing long-range order.
01:30:11.360 --> 01:30:18.360
This happens with very simple things called Banar cells on the surface of a fluid in a pan that's heated by thermal convection.
01:30:18.360 --> 01:30:25.360
You have a perfectly featureless surface of the fluid, and suddenly it forms these strange cells.
01:30:25.360 --> 01:30:38.360
Analysis by chemists has shown that long-range order appears within these cells, which is 10 million times the order that existed before the cell formed.
01:30:38.360 --> 01:30:46.360
You seem to be able to get faster-than-light contact within cells, which you can't get outside cells.
01:30:46.360 --> 01:30:59.360
It's not impossible, and this is my speculation only, that the Serious system and the solar system being part of a cell have a much more intimate connection than we imagine.
01:30:59.360 --> 01:31:05.360
Don't forget that the Dogon maintain that stuff is being beamed at us all the time from the Serious system.
01:31:05.360 --> 01:31:13.360
That may sound folksy and just some tribal fantasy, but there may be something to this.
01:31:13.360 --> 01:31:25.360
I'm not at all sure that we don't have telepathic communication going on between the two systems at faster-than-the-speed-of-light, what scientists would call tachionic speeds.
01:31:25.360 --> 01:31:37.360
This may sound way out, but ever since the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thing and the Aspect experiment and all these physics experiments,
01:31:38.360 --> 01:31:49.360
which obviously I can't go into, which have demonstrated the possibilities of long-range order suddenly manifesting itself in what appear to be large systems but turn out to be cells.
01:31:49.360 --> 01:31:52.360
Once you're a cell, you're no longer large because you're just that cell.
01:31:52.360 --> 01:32:01.360
We have to take very seriously the possibility that our solar system and the Serious system may be intimately connected.
01:32:02.360 --> 01:32:12.360
I should add that the Dogon maintain that the Nomos left a long time ago, but that they said they'd be back, and when they come back it will be called the Day of the Fish,
01:32:12.360 --> 01:32:15.360
and they will rule from the waters.
01:32:15.360 --> 01:32:19.360
This brings us back once again to the ultimate security issue.
01:32:24.360 --> 01:32:26.360
Just to help you sleep better at night.
01:32:26.360 --> 01:32:29.360
So, what about some questions?
01:32:32.360 --> 01:32:36.360
Hard to see you, but somebody's going to raise a hand.
01:32:36.360 --> 01:32:39.360
Andy, are you going to take over?
01:32:39.360 --> 01:32:43.360
Yes, I'll just see if I can chair it for the moment.
01:32:43.360 --> 01:32:52.360
But if the house lights could go up at some point, then we can see the audience and see where we're going.
01:32:52.360 --> 01:32:56.360
We've also got a second mic, which will get sorted out.
01:32:56.360 --> 01:32:57.360
There's one there.
01:32:57.360 --> 01:33:03.360
Right, well we've realised that many of you have obviously got trains to catch and things like that,
01:33:03.360 --> 01:33:08.360
but we'll certainly have a few questions for Robert, who would like to start off the proceedings.
01:33:08.360 --> 01:33:10.360
Is that lady there?
01:33:10.360 --> 01:33:12.360
It's not on?
01:33:12.360 --> 01:33:14.360
Okay, we'll look.
01:33:17.360 --> 01:33:18.360
Thank you.
01:33:18.360 --> 01:33:25.360
At the beginning of your talk you mentioned that the Dogon have a very important ceremony every 60 years.
01:33:25.360 --> 01:33:30.360
What's the significance of the 60 years? Do you know what that is?
01:33:32.360 --> 01:33:38.360
You certainly asked a really good question, because the orbital period of Sirius B is 50 years.
01:33:38.360 --> 01:33:42.360
And so, why they have a 60 year period is something that's puzzled a lot of people.
01:33:42.360 --> 01:33:46.360
It's called the Sigwi ceremony, spelled S-I-G-U-I,
01:33:46.360 --> 01:33:53.360
and I proposed in one of my appendices of the book that it might be the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn,
01:33:53.360 --> 01:33:55.360
which happens once every 60 years.
01:33:55.360 --> 01:33:59.360
And I gave many precedents for that. It's explained at some length.
01:33:59.360 --> 01:34:03.360
This is just an idea. We're not serious.
01:34:03.360 --> 01:34:11.360
It's also suggested by the anthropologists that they may have been attempting to disguise the 50 by pretending it's 60,
01:34:11.360 --> 01:34:17.360
because they would often bring it forward slightly without explanation.
01:34:17.360 --> 01:34:20.360
Part of their keeping of their secrecy.
01:34:20.360 --> 01:34:22.360
That's all I can say.
01:34:22.360 --> 01:34:26.360
Right. There was another hand, or this gentleman here.
01:34:29.360 --> 01:34:37.360
There's some discussion that we have a binary star with our sun,
01:34:37.360 --> 01:34:41.360
and some people are suggesting that it's serious.
01:34:41.360 --> 01:34:45.360
Is that anything that the Dogon would back up or completely dismiss?
01:34:47.360 --> 01:34:50.360
I'm glad you mentioned that.
01:34:51.360 --> 01:34:57.360
There have been very serious suggestions, no pun intended by that,
01:34:57.360 --> 01:35:01.360
that we do have another sun in our solar system.
01:35:01.360 --> 01:35:04.360
I mentioned this, I wrote it up in a book of mine called Strange Things.
01:35:04.360 --> 01:35:08.360
It was suggested by a radio astronomer from West Virginia called Harrison,
01:35:08.360 --> 01:35:14.360
and he said we can't see it. He gave various reasons, because it's not a bright sun.
01:35:14.360 --> 01:35:19.360
And so there are also suggestions that there's a dark sun behind the light sun,
01:35:19.360 --> 01:35:24.360
which is because the sun is made of plasma, that there may be another form of plasma behind the plasma,
01:35:24.360 --> 01:35:27.360
so we could have a double sun, but not even know it.
01:35:27.360 --> 01:35:32.360
So that's another possibility that's being seriously discussed by plasma physicists at the moment.
01:35:32.360 --> 01:35:42.360
But the idea that serious would be the other one could be in the sense that if the two systems form a cell,
01:35:42.360 --> 01:35:47.360
that serious and the sun would then become, in a sense, binary.
01:35:47.360 --> 01:35:52.360
So that's actually very perceptive, what you've just said. Thank you for saying it.
01:36:02.360 --> 01:36:06.360
Thank you for a most interesting talk.
01:36:08.360 --> 01:36:15.360
So how benign are these Syrians, these certain snakes?
01:36:15.360 --> 01:36:22.360
I mean, what did you learn about their intention towards us humans, earthlings,
01:36:22.360 --> 01:36:31.360
and do we want them to come back? Or, you know, I'm going to go home and think about this. What did you learn?
01:36:31.360 --> 01:36:34.360
I think that's a central question.
01:36:34.360 --> 01:36:42.360
All the evidence is that the visitors had good intentions, got everybody civilized and so forth,
01:36:42.360 --> 01:36:46.360
but that there are some bad eggs in the basket.
01:36:46.360 --> 01:36:54.360
And that's why all the myths agree that there are the bad nomos.
01:36:54.360 --> 01:37:01.360
And so I think that there's frankly a kind of war between good and evil going on in the universe anyway,
01:37:01.360 --> 01:37:04.360
and that it's reflected at all levels.
01:37:04.360 --> 01:37:09.360
I mean, we have good people and bad people on this planet, and we could name plenty of both.
01:37:09.360 --> 01:37:12.360
Well, maybe more of the bad ones than the good ones come to mind,
01:37:12.360 --> 01:37:20.360
because they tend to be the psychopathic individuals who rise to positions of power due to their obsessive need to control others.
01:37:20.360 --> 01:37:28.360
And so this is a problem which is universal, and I would believe that it would apply to these aliens, assuming they exist,
01:37:28.360 --> 01:37:36.360
and that we might be caught in the middle of a dispute between beings considerably more advanced than ourselves.
01:37:36.360 --> 01:37:44.360
I think that the main ones who are described as culture heroes had good intentions, but I think that they had problems of their own.
01:37:44.360 --> 01:37:50.360
And so I honestly cannot begin to imagine what recontact would entail.
01:37:50.360 --> 01:38:06.360
Six planets in our region of space.
01:38:06.360 --> 01:38:16.360
In other words, in our general area, nearby stars, near enough to talk about our region of space, that would be several solar systems.
01:38:17.360 --> 01:38:24.360
Oh, no, they don't identify them. They only identify this solar system and the Sirius solar system.
01:38:24.360 --> 01:38:31.360
They do talk about other stars, but they don't specifically state that that is where the other planets which they claim are inhabited are.
01:38:31.360 --> 01:38:33.360
They don't say where they are.
01:38:33.360 --> 01:38:41.360
In fact, I got the impression from the information written down by the anthropologists that this tradition handed down from the ancestors
01:38:41.360 --> 01:38:48.360
was passed on to them by the nomos who didn't tell them exactly what stars had those planets.
01:38:48.360 --> 01:38:54.360
They just said that there are six that are inhabited, and we come from the fifth, and you're on the fourth,
01:38:54.360 --> 01:39:01.360
and the men with wings are on the sixth, and the men with horns are on the third.
01:39:01.360 --> 01:39:04.360
That's all I know.
01:39:04.360 --> 01:39:17.360
I was just wondering between the first and the second edition of the Sirius Mystery, is the second edition an expansion,
01:39:17.360 --> 01:39:22.360
or have you changed any of the basic premises?
01:39:22.360 --> 01:39:24.360
I'm very glad you asked that.
01:39:24.360 --> 01:39:32.360
The second edition of 1998 has 50% additional material added, a product of further research,
01:39:32.360 --> 01:39:37.360
including, for instance, all of the Greek material about the fishmen and all of the Chinese material.
01:39:37.360 --> 01:39:41.360
That's all completely new. It wasn't in the first edition at all.
01:39:41.360 --> 01:39:48.360
I was able to restore some things that the publisher cut out of the first edition, and I corrected a few things, but not very much.
01:39:48.360 --> 01:39:52.360
It's mostly a greatly expanded edition.
01:39:52.360 --> 01:40:12.360
Thank you.
01:40:12.360 --> 01:40:24.360
Is there a link between the fish hat that the Dogons wear in their ceremony and the fish hat worn by the Pope?
01:40:24.360 --> 01:40:35.360
Well, I think possibly there is, yes, because I believe that this shaped hat passed down through the various mystery traditions over the millennia.
01:40:35.360 --> 01:40:43.360
We've seen it prominent in the Sumerian Babylonian culture, and of course it survives with the Dogon.
01:40:43.360 --> 01:40:51.360
I believe that the fish business was intrinsic in the origins of Christianity.
01:40:51.360 --> 01:40:55.360
The fish was, after all, the symbol in the catacombs.
01:40:55.360 --> 01:41:04.360
The fish body is made geometrically from a vesica piscus, the piscus referring to the fish, of course,
01:41:04.360 --> 01:41:09.360
which is the intersection of the two circles that geometricians here will know.
01:41:09.360 --> 01:41:18.360
I believe that the Pope's hat, which is the same as the hats worn by Church of England bishops as well, probably does have those origins,
01:41:18.360 --> 01:41:24.360
but none of the Christian bishops or the Pope's know this, of course, they just don't know where it came from.
01:41:24.360 --> 01:41:27.360
It's called a mitre.
01:41:27.360 --> 01:41:35.360
Could I just ask, do you think there's any link between the story they have of the bright light that appeared and got brighter,
01:41:35.360 --> 01:41:40.360
and then came to a standstill, and the light of the Nativity story?
01:41:40.360 --> 01:41:41.360
That's a good question.
01:41:41.360 --> 01:41:42.360
That's a good question.
01:41:42.360 --> 01:41:53.360
I should say that when the Nomo left, that light got fainter and disappeared, which is interesting, the part of the story that I didn't add.
01:41:53.360 --> 01:41:57.360
The Star of Bethlehem, I don't know.
01:41:57.360 --> 01:41:58.360
Take your pick.
01:41:58.360 --> 01:42:00.360
There's so many possibilities.
01:42:00.360 --> 01:42:08.360
I don't think that it's anything to do with the visitation, because I don't think there was a visitation at that time, but who knows?
01:42:08.360 --> 01:42:09.360
I'm not all wise.
01:42:09.360 --> 01:42:12.360
I can only tell you what I've been able to discover.
01:42:12.360 --> 01:42:15.360
I'm afraid I haven't got answers for you, just suggestions.
01:42:23.360 --> 01:42:24.360
Hi.
01:42:24.360 --> 01:42:31.360
I just wondered if the doggone ever explained how and when the Nomo arrived here.
01:42:31.360 --> 01:42:32.360
How long ago?
01:42:32.360 --> 01:42:35.360
And how and when they came here.
01:42:35.360 --> 01:42:44.360
Well, they came down in these ships with fire, that made dust and landed in that, but that's how they say they got here.
01:42:44.360 --> 01:42:48.360
And there are some traditions that they couldn't walk.
01:42:48.360 --> 01:42:50.360
You find this in many cultures.
01:42:50.360 --> 01:42:58.360
The Egyptians and the Greeks maintain, the Greeks maintain in one of their very old legends that Zeus, for instance, couldn't walk because his legs were joined together.
01:42:58.360 --> 01:43:00.360
And the Egyptians have a similar thing.
01:43:00.360 --> 01:43:04.360
And if you look at the god Ptah, he's always wrapped up so that he doesn't have two legs.
01:43:04.360 --> 01:43:06.360
It's he's standing on like one pillar.
01:43:06.360 --> 01:43:12.360
But it's a concealed, sacred mystery, which they're not going to show overtly in their statuary.
01:43:12.360 --> 01:43:19.360
And so they appear to have gone around in sort of chairs of some kind.
01:43:19.360 --> 01:43:29.360
And this would apparently be the origin of the symbolism of the throne and why Sirius A is referred to by the bozo as a seated trouser,
01:43:29.360 --> 01:43:36.360
because they had to sit and be transported in sort of little vehicles like chairs for their transport because they couldn't walk.
01:43:36.360 --> 01:43:38.360
They didn't have legs.
01:43:38.360 --> 01:43:44.360
And the Babylonians specifically state that at night they went back to the sea and slept in the sea.
01:43:44.360 --> 01:43:46.360
They didn't sleep on land.
01:43:46.360 --> 01:43:48.360
Does this help?
01:43:48.360 --> 01:43:53.360
Did they ever explain how, when this happened, how many thousands of years ago this all took place?
01:43:53.360 --> 01:43:59.360
Well, no, they just said it was very, very, very long ago with their ancestors in a different land.
01:43:59.360 --> 01:44:01.360
They don't know how long ago.
01:44:01.360 --> 01:44:08.360
But if you take all the other information from the other cultures, it can't possibly have been more recently than, say, 3000 BC.
01:44:08.360 --> 01:44:12.360
More likely couldn't have been before 3500 BC.
01:44:12.360 --> 01:44:15.360
But anywhere from that point on it could have been.
01:44:15.360 --> 01:44:20.360
And it would fit in with the conventional archaeological chronologies that we know.
01:44:20.360 --> 01:44:26.360
Because if it had happened later than that, there'd be some other kind of record of it.
01:44:26.360 --> 01:44:33.360
It was at the beginning of high civilization on this planet, if it happened at all.
01:44:33.360 --> 01:44:36.360
I'm inclined to think that it did, but that's just my opinion.
01:44:36.360 --> 01:44:39.360
You mustn't accept my opinion. You have to make up your own minds about all of this.
01:44:39.360 --> 01:44:42.360
That's why the book is called The Sirius Mystery.
01:44:42.360 --> 01:44:45.360
What about this girl down here? She seems very eager.
01:44:50.360 --> 01:44:58.360
Well, that's an extremely good question, too.
01:44:58.360 --> 01:45:02.360
Why would they go to the trouble?
01:45:21.360 --> 01:45:30.360
There's no suggestion that they were looking for resources, so I don't know that Sitchin's theories really come into play here at all.
01:45:30.360 --> 01:45:32.360
That's just his theories.
01:45:32.360 --> 01:45:38.360
But the thing is that there's got to have been a motive, or more than one.
01:45:38.360 --> 01:45:46.360
And the Dogon don't suggest them that I know of, but I haven't read all the stuff, because it's just very voluminous.
01:45:46.360 --> 01:45:52.360
And your guess is as good as mine, frankly.
01:46:01.360 --> 01:46:10.360
Thank you for illuminating us, and we all here wish you the best for the future and your future work.
01:46:46.360 --> 01:46:49.360
Thank you for watching!