Primal Myths

by Barbara C. Sproul

  The ant at the same time revealed the words it had heard and the man repeated them. Thus there was recreated by human lips the concept of life in motion, of the transposition of forces, of the efficacy of the breath of the Spirit, which the seventh ancestor had created; and thus the interlacing of warp and weft enclosed the same words, the new instruction which became the heritage of mankind and was handed on from generation to generation of weavers to the accompaniment of the clapping of the shuttle and the creaking of the block, which they call the “creaking of the Word.”

  All these operations took place by daylight, for spinning and weaving are work for the daytime. Working at night would mean weaving webs of silence and darkness.

  OGOTEMMELI had no very clear idea of what happened in Heaven after the transformation of the eight ancestors into Nummo. It is true that the eight, after leaving the earth, having completed their labours, came to the celestial region where the eldest Pair, who had transformed them, reigned. It is true also that these elders had precedence of the others, and did not fail to impose on them at once a form of organization and rules of life.

  But it was never quite clear why this celestial world was disturbed to the point of disintegration, or why these disorders led to a reorganization of the terrestrial world, which had nothing to do with the celestial disputes. What is certain is that in the end the eight came down to earth again in a vast apparatus of symbols, in which was included a third and definitive Word necessary for the working of the modern world.

  All that could be gathered from Ogotemmeli, by dint of patient attention to his words, was the evasive answer:

  “Spirits do not fall from Heaven except in anger or because they are expelled.”

  It was obvious that he was conscious of the infinite complexity of the idea of God or the Spirits who took his place, and was reluctant to explain it. However an outline, slight but nevertheless adequate, of this obscure period was eventually obtained.

  The Nummo Pair had received the transformed eight in Heaven. But though they were all of the same essence, the Pair had the rights of the elder generation in relation to the newcomers, on whom they imposed an organization with a network of rules, of which the most onerous was the one which separated them from one another and forbade them to visit one another.

  The fact was that, like human societies in which numbers are a source of trouble, the celestial society would have been heading for disorder, if all its members had gathered together.

  Though this rule was their security, the new generation of Nummo, however, proceeded to break it and thereby overthrew their destiny; and this was how it came about.

  God had given the eight a collection of eight different grains intended for their food, and for these the first ancestor was responsible. Of the eight, the last was the Digitaria, which had been publicly rejected by the first ancestor when it was given to him, on the pretext that it was so small and so difficult to prepare. He even went so far as to swear he would never eat it.

  There came, however, a critical period when all the grains were nearly exhausted except the last. The first and second ancestors, who incidentally had already broken the rule about separation, met together to eat this last food. Their action was the crowning breach of order, confirming as it did their first offence by a breach of faith. The two ancestors thereby became unclean—that is to say, of an essence incompatible with life in the celestial world. They resolved to quit that region, where they felt themselves to be strangers, and the six other ancestors threw in their lot with them and made the same decision. Moreover, they proposed to take with them when they left anything that might be of use to the men they were going to rejoin. It was then that the first ancestor, no doubt with the approval and perhaps with the help of God, began to make preparations for his own departure.

  He took a woven basket with a circular opening and a square base in which to carry the earth and puddled clay required for the construction of a world-system, of which he was to be one of the counsellors. This basket served as a model for a basket-work structure of considerable size which he built upside down, as it were, with the opening, twenty cubits in diameter, on the ground, the square base, with sides eight cubits long, formed a flat roof, and the height was ten cubits. This framework he covered with puddled clay made of the earth from heaven, and in the thickness of the clay, starting from the centre of each side of the square, he made stairways of ten steps each facing towards one of the cardinal points. At the sixth step of the north staircase he put a door giving access to the interior in which were eight chambers arranged on two floors.

  The symbolic significance of this structure was as follows:

  The circular base represented the sun.

  The square roof represented the sky.

  A circle in the centre of the roof represented the moon.

  The tread of each step being female and the rise of each step male, the four stairways of ten steps together prefigured the eight tens of families, offspring of the eight ancestors.

  Each stairway held one kind of creature, and was associated with a constellation, as follows:

  The north stairway, associated with the Pleiades, was for men and fishes;

  The south stairway, associated with Orion’s Belt, was for domestic animals.

  The east stairway, associated with Venus, was for birds.

  The west stairway, associated with the so-called “Long-Tailed Star,” was for wild animals, vegetables, and insects.

  In fact, the picture of the system was not easily or immediately grasped from Ogotemmeli’s account of it.

  “When the ancestor came down from Heaven,” he said at first, “he was standing on a square piece of Heaven, not a very big piece, about the size of a sleeping-mat, or perhaps a bit bigger.”

  “How could he stand on this piece of Heaven?”

  “It was a piece of celestial earth.”

  “A thick piece?”

  “Yes! As thick as a house. It was ten cubits high with stairs on each side facing the four cardinal points.”

  The blind man had raised his head, which was almost always bent towards the ground. How was he to explain these geometrical forms, these steps, these exact measurements? The European had begun by thinking that what was meant was a tall prism flanked by four stairways forming a cross. He kept returning to this conception in order to get it quite clear, while the other, patiently groping in the darkness which enveloped him, sought for fresh details.

  At last his ravaged face broke into a kind of smile: he had found what he wanted. Reaching into the inside of his house and lying almost flat on his back, he searched among a number of objects which grated or sounded hollow as they scraped the earth under his hand. Only his thin knees and his feet were still visible in the embrasure of the doorway; the rest disappeared in the shadows within. The front of the house looked like a great face with the mouth closed on two skinny shin-bones.

  After much tugging, an object emerged from the depths and appeared framed in the doorway. It was a woven basket, black with dust and soot of the interior, with a round opening and a square base, crushed and broken, a wretched spectacle.

  The thing was placed before the door, losing several strands in the process, while the whole of the blind man’s body reappeared, his hand still firmly grasping the basket.

  World-system: plan

  “Its only use now is to put chicken in,” he said.

  He passed his hands slowly over its battered remains, and proceeded to explain the world-system.

  THE BASKET had been put away, with some embarrassment; returned to the place of mystery behind Ogotemmeli’s back, no one ever alluded to it again. The exposure of this ruin to the light of day had been, as it were, a defiance of worldly vanity; but it had served its purpose. All was now clear and the divine geometry was defined. It was possible to make a beginning with the detailed enumeration of the beings posted at the four cardinal points of the structure.

  The west stairway was occupied by wild animals.
From the top stair to the bottom stair it was given up to antelopes, hyenas, cats (two stairs for these), reptiles and saurians, apes, gazelles, marmots, the lion, and the elephant.

  After the sixth step came the trees from the baobab to the Lannea acida, and on each of them were the insects commonly found there today.

  On the south stairway were the domestic animals, beginning with fowls, then sheep, goats, cattle, horses, dogs and cats.

  On the eighth and ninth steps were the chelonians, the giant tortoises, which today in each family take the place of the family heads, while these are absent, and the small tortoises, which are slowly done to death in the regional purification sacrifices.

  On the tenth step were mice and rats (house and field).

  The east stairway was occupied by birds. On the first step were the larger birds of prey and the hornbills; on the second were ostriches and storks; on the third, the small bustards and lapwings; on the fourth, vultures. Then came the smaller birds of prey, and then the herons. On the seventh step were the pigeons; on the eighth, turtle-doves; on the ninth, ducks; and last of all, the great bustards, white and black.

  The north stairway was that of men and fish.

  This clearly presented complications, for Ogotemmeli had to go through it more than once before he could give a satisfactory account of it.

  He certainly thought the men were Bozo, the original inhabitants of the Niger and still regarded by all the peoples of the Niger Bend as the only true fishermen. But their several positions on the different steps embarrassed Ogotemmeli, and it was not until his second reference to the subject at the end of the day that he arrived at a final version, probably after consultation with another elder.

  On each of the first two steps stood a male Bozo with a fish attached to his navel and hanging between his legs. This attachment to the navel had a significance for Ogotemmeli which the European could not grasp. The man’s navel was nipped between the fins of the fish: that is to say, the fish was quite clear of the man’s belly. On the other hand, the name that the Dogon gave to the Bozo was thought by Ogotemmeli to indicate that the fish was in process of passing into the body of the man.

  This name sologonon or sologonon, from which is derived Sorko, another name for the Bozo, does in fact mean “which has not completely passed.” It would apply therefore primarily to the fish, but ultimately to the Bozo himself, the two (i.e., the man and the fish) being twin brothers, as indicated by the umbilical connection.

  On each of the next two steps was a Bozo woman, also attached to a fish. On the fifth step was a Bozo woman standing alone.

  The five last steps were empty.

  A question occurred to the European: “Only some of the animals and vegetables were on the building; where were the rest?”

  “Each of those mentioned was as it were a file-leader. All the others of his kind were behind him. The antelope on the first step of the west stairway is the walbanu, the red antelope. After him come the white, the black and the ka antelopes. So too on the first step of the south stairway, where the poultry stand, the guinea-fowl, the partridge and the rock-fowl behind.”

  “How could all these beasts find room on a step one cubit deep and one cubit high?”

  The European had calculated that, according to the slope of the walls, the tread of each step must be six-tenths of a cubit deep. But he made no mention of the fact out of politeness, so as not to seem to be examining heavenly matters too closely.

  “All this had to be said in words,” said Ogotemmeli, “but everything on the steps is a symbol, symbolic antelopes, symbolic vultures, symbolic hyenas.” He paused for a moment, and added: “Any number of symbols could find room on a one-cubit step.”

  For the word “symbol” he used a composite expression, the literal meaning of which is “word of this (lower) world.”

  Ogotemmeli, having described the structure as a granary, now proceeded to explain its design.

  “The whole thing,” he said, “with its stairways is called the ‘Granary of the Master of Pure Earth.’ It is divided into eight compartments, four below and four above. The door opens to the north on the sixth stair. It is as it were the mouth, and the granary is the belly, that is the interior, of the world.”

  The structure having set the pattern for present-day granaries, the European wished to get a closer view of the arrangement of the system, and whispered to his assistant Koguem that he ought to see one of these constructions.

  In point of fact nearly half the circumference of the courtyard was surrounded by granaries, some half a dozen of them in number. But to poke one’s head into a granary is to invade the privacy of the family, to pry into its secrets. To scrutinize the foodstuffs, the seeds and ears of grain lying steeped in the darkness, is to measure up present resources and intrude into the provision for future needs.

  Koguem put the point to the old man, suggesting a visit to an empty house he had noticed in Dyamini-Kuradondo, a village belonging to another family: but perhaps, he said, they could find a specimen nearer at hand.

  Ogotemmeli reflected. Obviously he was considering, in his blindness, possible ruined granaries in the locality. At the end of his list appeared no doubt his own granaries, for he pointed to two of these in the backyard.

  The farthest of these was a ruin; it was there that Koguem used to throw stones a dozen times a day at the children who came to listen with ears alert to catch the secrets that were being talked about. The other granary was in good condition, empty but closed. A pair of hoes were needed to open it, for the door was fastened as if in the jaws of a vice. Ogotemmeli waited on his threshold, his hands crossed as always above his head. From time to time Koguem reported on the progress of the work. When the door at length gave way, the European took up a position in the embrasure, from which came the smell of old grain.

  The four lower compartments in a Dogon granary are separated by two intersecting partitions, the junction of which forms a cup-like depression in the earth big enough to hold a round jar. This jar, containing grain or valuable objects, is the centre of the whole building. The door opens above these compartments, and is only just wide enough to admit the passage of a man’s body.

  Above the door is the upper storey comprising four other compartments, two of them in a line along the back wall and the other two along the side walls. They form a sort of ledge round the three sides, leaving the space at the entry free so that if a man crouched on the top of the lower compartments his shoulders would be level with the balcony.

  In the celestial granary these compartments had a numbered order. The first was to the right of the entry on the lower floor; the second was the one on the right at the back, and so on round the building. The fifth was on the upper floor on the right, and so on to the eighth, which was to the left on the upper floor.

  Each of these compartments contained one of the eight seeds given by God to the eight ancestors in the following order: little millet, white millet, dark millet, female millet, beans, sorrel, rice and Digitaria. With each of these seeds were all the varieties of the same species.

  But the eight compartments were not merely receptacles for the seeds which were to be introduced to human use. They also represented the eight principal organs of the Spirit of water, which are comparable to the organs of men with the addition of the gizzard, for the Spirit has the speed of birds.

  These organs were disposed in the following order: stomach, gizzard, heart, small liver, spleen, intestines, great liver, gallbladder.

  A round jar in the centre symbolized the womb; a second smaller jar closed the first; it contained oil of Lannea acida, and represented the foetus. On top of it again was a still smaller jar containing perfume, and on the top of this last was a double cup.

  All the eight organs were held in place by the outer walls and the inner partitions which symbolized the skeleton. The four uprights ending in the corners of the square roof were the arms and legs. Thus the granary was like a woman, lying on her back (representing the sun) w
ith her arms and legs raised and supporting the roof (representing the sky). The two legs were on the north side, and the door at the sixth step marked the sexual parts.

  The granary and all it contained was therefore a picture of the world-system of the new order, and the way in which this system worked was represented by the functioning of the internal organs. These organs absorbed symbolic nourishment which passed along the usual channels of the digestion and the circulation of the blood. From compartments 1 and 2 (stomach and gizzard) the symbolical food passed into compartment 6 (the intestines) and from there into all the others in the form of blood and lastly breath, ending in the liver and the gallbladder. The breath is a vapour, a form of water, which maintains and is indeed the principle of life.

  As Ogotemmeli spoke, the deserted granary seemed to come to life, and the setting sun lighting up the west beyond the I gorges heightened the illusion. The walls of the building became tinged with rose colour, and cast gleams of light on the sandstone surfaces and the straw of the dung-heap. On the roof a bunch of purple sorrel stood out like fire. The moment was near when all the western walls of Upper and Lower Ogol would be aflame. All the visible surface of the granary shared in this prodigal display of light, while in the dark interior the wonders of the past came to life again.

  Ogotemmeli, his head bowed and his hands on the nape of his neck, was lost in the past history of the heavens. At last he arrived at the final stratum of symbols which showed the universe compressed within the walls of the primal granary, as a body filled with life and absorbing food.

  “What is eaten,” he said, “is the sunlight. What is excreted is the dark night. The breath of life is the clouds, and the blood is the rain that falls on the world.”

  —Marcel; Griaule. Conversations with Ogotemmeli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 16–40.

  MANDE

  The Creation

  Polar opposition is also stressed in this retold myth from the Mande-speaking peoples of Mali. God’s first attempt to create a single seed ended in failure; thereafter he made everything balanced and twinned. The eight seeds and the two pairs of archetypical twins in the “egg of God” or “egg of the world” eventually contained all the forces that gave rise to people, the world, and nature. Evil resulted from disruptions of this carefully established balance: in prematurely separating himself from his twin, Pemba violated the sacred order and eventually committed incest by planting seeds in the womb of his mother, earth. Only after the other primordial male twin, Faro, atoned for this infraction was fertility restored to the world.