Dogon cosmology holds Amma as the creator god who shaped the universe from a primordial seed, and the Nommo as amphibious twin ancestral spirits, born of Amma, who descended to earth to bring order, language, weaving and agriculture to humanity, a cosmology documented across the classic Dogon corpus. Much of what is publicly known about this system comes from the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, whose Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmeli records an extended 1946 conversation with a blind Dogon elder, Ogotemmeli, and whose collaborator Germaine Dieterlen extended the work over decades of further fieldwork.
Griaule and Dieterlen also reported that Dogon initiates held precise knowledge of Sirius, the night sky's brightest star, including the existence and orbital behavior of its faint companion Sirius B, a white dwarf too dim to see without a telescope and only photographically confirmed by Western astronomy in 1970. The claim, popularized in Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery, drew wide attention and speculation, including unfounded ancient-astronaut theories Griaule himself never endorsed. Walter van Beek's later field restudy, published as Dogon Restudied, could not find this specific astronomical knowledge among Dogon informants outside Griaule's own small circle, and argued that the interview dynamic between Griaule and a few highly cooperative elders, particularly Ogotemmeli, may have shaped or amplified esoteric content rather than simply recording a pre-existing shared tradition. The disagreement remains a live methodological case study in anthropology about how fieldwork itself can influence what gets recorded as belief, rather than a settled question with a clear winner.