Dogon, Mali
 

Lower- Ogol, like all Dogon villages, was a group of tiered houses and granaries, earthern terraces alternating with thatched huts.  Walking through the small, narrow streets, alternately shot with sunlight or sunk low in shadow, in between the truncated pyramids, the prism shaped, cubic or cylindrical huts and granaries, the rectangular doorways.....one felt like a dwarf lost in some kind of a maze.  Everywhere one looked, the earth was cracked from the rains and heat." - Marcel Griaule, ethnologist, who had many trips between 1931 & 1946.

The precise origins of the Dogon people, liek those of most other peoples, are lost in the mists of time.  But their history, beginning at the period when they migrated into the region of the Bandiagara cliffs, has been handed down through oral traditions.

Legend has it that a snake led them to the cliff at the southern end of the plateau, were they overwhelmed and unsurped the local Tellem and Niongom populations.  The Dogon livlihood is based on agriculture concentrated in the fields at the edge of the cliff, where water is scarce but enough for occasional irrigation.

The religious beliefs of the Dogon are complex and knowledge of them varies greatly in degree within Dogon society, it is based primarily on the worship of ancestors and the spirits encountered as they migrated to the Bandiagara cliffs.   Knowledge of this type is passe don not only informally, but also within the matrix of the initiation process into adult life. Dogon art symbolizes both through nuance and candor differnet aspect of this body of religious belief. Cults of th eDogon include the Awa, Lebe and Binu. The  Awa are the cult of the deceased whose purpose is to reorder the spiritual forces disturbed by the Nommo, the mytological ancestor of the Dogon. The Lebe (earth god) cult is focused with the agricultrural cycle and its chief priest is called a Hogon. there is a  Lebe shine in every village.

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Bronzes / Bronser