Nommo, the first Dogon ancestor. After the creation of the cosmos, the supreme god Amma created the first earthly being, that being was Nommo. Nommo was the culmination of Amma’s creation, holding both sexes, they were the purist form of life. Nommo held complete dominion over water, being intrinsically tied to the life bringing substance. After his creation, Nommo multiplied into four pairs of twins, all also named Nommo. One of each pair of the twins was male, while the other was female, continuing Amma’s divine order of dual sex. However, another child of Amma, the jackal god Ogo, sewed chaos across the world, even turning some of the Nommo to his side, his power threatened to destroy the world. One of the Nommo stepped forward, offering themselves as sacrifice to correct the world’s balance. Amma used this Nommo’s body, flinging their parts across the earth, purifying it from Ogo’s darkness. Where each part landed a shrine was built. However, These events caused the Nommo’s descendants, humanity, to now be imperfect, resulting in less twin births to uphold the dual sex order. The Nommo were described by their descendants, the Dogon, to be amphibious spirits. They were depicted with a human body and legs with a fish tail, other descriptions said they had a human upper body and a snake lower body.
The word Nommo is believed to be derived from a Dogon word that means “to make one drink”, some Dogon have posited that it actually means “master of water” instead, they have also been called “the teachers” and “the monitors” instead. As a term Nommo is used to refer to both the first ancestor deity and their progeny, both groups are referred under androgynous and genderfluid pronouns. In the 1940s a pair of German anthropologists, Germaine Dieterlen and Marcel Griaule, claimed that they had received secret teachings from their Dogon informants. Allegedly they transcribed a myth which stated that the Nommo were originally from a planet in the Sirius star system, also known by the Dogon as Sigui Tolo, who then came to earth on a ship of fire and lightning, in this myth it’s alleged that it held information about Sirius that would’ve been impossible to ascertain by the naked eye, such as it having a companion star and that it had a 50 year orbital cycle. This has been used by conspiracy theorists to appropriate the Dogon religion, saying that the Nommo were aliens who came to earth. However this has been refuted in modern scholarship as not only did the Dogon have the capability to gain that knowledge through outside forces, but the actual information itself is very dubious. The “knowledge” that was allegedly shared to the anthropologists has never been fully repeated by other Dogon elders, and actually has been rebuked by them on a number of occasions. According to other researchers Sigui Tolo doesn’t refer to Sirius at all, but to the morning star, other traditions state that Sigui Tolo was actually an invisible star that only appeared during festivals. The word Nommo is also used by some African-American philosophers, like Molefi Asante, to connote the power words have to shape our reality.
