The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple

The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple What is the Mystery? The question which this book poses is: Has Earth in the past been visited by intelligent beings from the region of the star Sirius ? When I began writing this book in earnest in 1967, the entire question was framed in terms of an African tribe named the Dogon, who live in Mali in the former French Sudan. The Dogon were in possession of information concerning the system of the star Sirius which was so incredible that I felt impelled to research the material. The results, in 1974, seven years later, are that I have been able to show that the information which the Dogon possess is really more than five thousand years old and was possessed by the ancient Egyptians in the pre-dynastic times before 3200 B.C., from which people I show that the Dogon are partially descended culturally, and probably physically as well. What I have done, therefore, is to push back by over five thousand years the terms of reference of the original question, so that it now becomes more tantalizing than ever. But now that I have done that, it becomes less easy to answer. The Dogon preserve a tradition of what seems to have been an extra- terrestrial contact. It is more satisfactory not to have to presume the preposterous notion that intelligent beings from outer space landed in Africa, imparted specific information to a West African tribe, then returned to space and left the rest of the world alone. Such a theory never really struck me as possible. But in the beginning it did have to serve as a working hypothesis. After all, I had no idea that the Dogon could have preserved ancient Egyptian religious mysteries in their culture. I also had no idea that the ancient Egyptians knew anything about Sirius. I was in that state of ignorance so common among people who know nothing more about ancient Egypt than that the Egyptians built pyramids, left mummies, had a Pharaoh named Tutankhamen, and wrote in hieroglyphs. My own academic background concerned oriental studies, but I never touched on Egypt except regarding the Islamic period after a.d. 600. I knew almost nothing whatsoever about ancient Egypt. If I had, perhaps I might have saved myself a lot of time. It took many, many months for two or three small clues to work themselves around in my head long enough to force me to study ancient Egypt and a whole range of subjects which I had never previously tackled. I doubt if, even then, I could have been persuaded to spend considerable sums of money such as the necessary fifty pounds for the essential and out-of-print Wallis Budge Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, which consists of 1,356 pages and cannot even be lifted off the table by a ten-year-old child. But as fate would have it, I was actually given one of these huge dictionaries, along with many other essential books on the subjects with which I needed to become concerned. This helped overcome my natural disinclination to erect a camp bed in some scholarly library and move in for a couple of years. I must therefore note my debt to my dear friend the late Miss Mary Brenda Hotham-Francklyn for giving me in the ninety-fourth year of her life what amounted to a sizeable library of books, which were so interesting that I found it impossible to neglect them, and the result is now before us. CONTENTS page xi TO THE READER I PART ONE The Sirius Question is posed 1 The Knowledge of the Dogon ii A Sudanese Sirius System by M. Griaule and G. Dieterlen 35 PART TWO The Sirius Question is rephrased 2 A Fairytale 55 3 The Sacred Fifty 82 4 The Hounds of Hell 101 5 The Oracle Centres 121 6 Origins of the Dogon 153 7 The Rising of 'Serpent's Tooth' 175 8 A Fable PART THREE Beyond the Mystery APPENDICES I The Moons of the Planets, the Planets around Stars, and Revolutions and Rotations of Bodies in Space - Described by the Neoplatonic Philosopher Proclus 223 II The Surviving Fragments of Berossus, in English Translation 24.8 III Why Sixty Years? 258 IV The Meaning of the E at Delphi 265 V Why the Hittites were at Hebron in Palestine 268 VI The Dogon Stages of Initiation 273 Bibliography Index 283 tags: Sirius, Lucifer, aliens, UFO, civilization, history, humanity, evolution, spirit