Customer Reviews

The Science of the Dogon: Decoding the African Mystery Tradition

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The Dogon of Mali, West Africa, a civilization that existed from 10th to 13th centuries, gained prominence in recent times, primarily through Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery, which describes their advanced knowledge of the peculiar workings of the Sirius star system. Author Laird Scranton takes Temple's research even further by showing how these people also possess advanced knowledge of everything from quantum physics to string theory.

In order to sustain the illusion of the technological and intellectual superiority of modern man, the crucial elements which make up the Dogon's world view are usually overlooked--or deliberately ignored--by mainstream anthropologists and archaeologists. The implications that are posited in Scranton's book are nothing short of earthshaking, considering that the Dogon appear to have gained these sophisticated insights through some sort of sixth sense.

Along with Jeremy Naylor's work The Cosmic Serpent, which describes indigenous peoples of South America and Australia as having direct knowledge of the workings of DNA through their visionary experiences, The Science of the Dogon should prove to be a revolutionary force, especially with regard to integrating the Dogon cosmological vision into our own lives.
Mysteries Magazine

Very refreshing. This author has really done a great job in researching the FACTS! He asks all the right questions and gives alternate theories on this very unusual tribe and their beliefs and ancestory. Really makes you wonder where mankinds origins really started.

Science of the Dogon may take a central place in the libraries of ancient knowledge buffs. With tremendous clarity and humility, Laird Scranton unveils an elegant notion. It seems too deep to be fully appreciated in our time, and yet it seems crucial.

The implications of this book are very interesting. While no one seems to mention it in the book, the Dogon tribe in Africa is simply the words No god spelled backwards. What's even more interesting is that the mythology of the Dogon is basically a model for modern science. It would seem as if someone had made up this African tribe in order to express science as being the foundation of all modern religions today. But, the Dogon really do exist. You can easily find information online about these people. So, this correspondence is actually more mysterious than people realize. It's as if the original 'teachers' set this tribe up to be discovered at some point in future, when science had advanced to a level of understanding the metaphors of the storylines. It's basically showing that the idea of a personified god figure breaks down to the simple structure of matter and of existence in general. It's suggesting that there is no God other than existence itself, in it's various forms and images. So the term Nogod is fitting for the native people that hold this key to understanding the worlds mythologies. Very interesting.

Scraton's book confirms that he has done some very good work on the Dogon, and his research into comparative "modern" science with that of the Dogon is also very instructive and exciting. His main limitation is in relation to reading and understanding the glyphs. The spiral H is not a determinative but a vocalic sound. There are three letters for an H as there are several letters for others. The determinative usually comes last after sounding the letters, i.e., the entire word is spelled out, then comes the determinative.
Thus many of his assertions are clearly wrong. He may have the right philosophical approach but his linguistics needs much deeper exploration, particularly ancient Egyptian. His chapter on the Hebrews and ancient Egypt is also disappointing. He is long on information for the Egyptians and the Dogon but offers little data on the Hebrews' concepts and practices.
Scranton's read is still highly informative and an eye-opener and I would really suggest he takes some classes in formal egyptology and linguistics.

Dr Amon Saba Saakana

Glad the world religion's come together like a large piece of the puzzle yesterday -;). I already knew that they were all astronomically correlated...I just didn't know xactly where.

This was a tough little book for me to read. If one were a student of linguistics or ancient religions I expect they would love this book. I, being neither, had difficulty getting through the 194 pages. I don't know what I expected when I purchased the book; maybe another "Sirius Mystery" or "Orion Mystery", but whatever it was, I was disappointed.

Mr. Scranton attempts to correlate many of the central words and symbols of the Dogon with those of Judaism and the peoples of ancient Egypt, and to demonstrate that cosmological traditions of the Dogon define an apparent system of mythological symbols and stories whose patterns can be seen repeated again and again in the myths and symbols of ancient cultures from other regions throughout the world. While Mr. Scranton does present some rather convincing correlations, his theory that 3,400 years ago the Dogon knew all about the atom, atomic energy, quarks, string theory, quantum forces and quantum spin, the big bang, cells, genes, chromosomes, and DNA, I think is a case of finding and presenting only the data that supports the hypothesis.

The text that is written Mr. Scranton is straightforward and easy to comprehend, but the author reproduces excerpts of tests from other authors and other publications verbatim, many of which I found tedious and distracting, if not at times unnecessary.

I can't say I'm sorry I took the time to read Mr. Scranton's book, but I think I'll pass on his second work, "Sacred Symbols of the Dogon: The Key to Advanced Science in the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs."