My research into the Dogon continues with a look at ibogaine use among the Dogon. Ibogaine, or iboga,  is a psychedelic from Africa that has received some attention due to its reputation as a treatment for addiction and alcoholism. It is legal in Canada and Mexico, where several detoxification clinics have sprung up. There is also an ibogaine treatment center on the island of St. Kitts, off the coast of Florida. Addiction treatment centers using ibogaine can also be found scattered throughout Europe and Central and South America. Israel has a clinic offering offering ibogaine. Even Pakistan has one.

Don’t Even Plan to Purchase Ibogaine in the United States – Unless You’re a Rodent or a Scientist

Ibogaine is, of course, illegal in the United States, where it’s classfied as a drug with potential for abuse and no medical value. In other words, you’ll bring the Drug Inquisition down on your head if you take it – or even plan to take it – on U.S. soil. In December of 2005, a Casper, Wyoming couple were arrested by the feds for the crime of planning to purchase ibogaine. They could get up to twenty years. Their motive was that they were trying to cure their addiction to crystal meth (and a painkiller called hydrocodone).

Even while the Casper, Wyoming couple faces a prison sentence for trying to obtain their hoped-for miracle drug, rodents in America have been successfully treated for laboratory-induced alcoholism. At UCSF’s Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, scientists have proven conclusively in their experiments that ibogaine really does reduce alcohol consumption in their tiny charges. Furthermore, they have discovered how it works. It increases the level of a brain protein called glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). They have even conducted a study in which they pump GDNF directly into the rodent brains and decrease the little mammals’ cravings for alcohol. Rats that received ibogaine or GDNF treatment proved to be less likely to fall off the wagon.

Ibogaine Isn’t Just a Treatment for Addiction – It’s Sacred

To those peoples in Africa who have traditionally used ibogaine in their rituals, it is much more than a clinical treatment. It is sacred to them. The intrepid etheogen researcher and writer Daniel Pinchbeck ventured into Gabon to experience his own ibogaine initiation in a traditional setting. He took off his own clothes and donned the red robe of the initiate, symbolic of dying and being reborn. Then he had a bundle of leaves placed in one of his hands, a bundle of thistles placed in the other, and he was told to shake both in rhythm with the music. He was brought into a temple, where he was seated in front of a mirror that was surrounded by ferns and carved figurines. The King and tribal elders sat in the temple with him to his left, while the rest of the tribe sat on benches to his right. He was told, “If you see a window, you must try to go through it.” The Bwiti repeatedly told him to narrate all of his visions out loud for the entire tribe to hear. When he asked for a pillow, the King mocked him. Finally, after having no visions and retching, he began to experience the oft-reported memory theate, in which the ibogaine taker sees the process of their own self-development. The sought, but not always experienced, effect is a reputed freedom from the past and its emotional baggage. This is the effect that Pinchbeck experienced.

“Through iboga,” he writes, “I recognized my existing self as the product of all the physical and psychological forces that had acted upon me. Yet there seemed to be something beyond all of it, something that was ‘mine,’ an energy projected from outside of my biographical destiny. That energy was the self – and the self’s trememdous capacity for transformation.”

After reading about Daniel Pinchbecks ibogaine initiation ritual in Breaking Open the Head, I became curious as to how widespread ibogaine use is in Africa. I wondered if the Dogon make use of it. A little research online quickly confirmed that the Dogon use both ibogaine and cannabis. It is difficult to find detailed information about this subject, other than that fact that they use it. I can only surmise that their use of ibogaine may be similar to that found in places like Gabon. Research online didn’t turn up much, other than the facts that Fang art has some similarities with Dogon art, and that Tantric elements can be found in both Fang and Dogon religious beliefs.

Valis, the Dogon and Ibogaine

Curiously, my online research in this area has led me to Philip K. Dick’s Valis trilogy. Both Dogon mythology and ibogaine figure in Valis. Valis is one of those books that I have on my shelf, that I’ve always intended to read some day, and that I’ve never read. Now that I’m so obsessive about all things Dogon, I know I will not be able to resist reading it.

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The Dogon people of Africa will play a role in the unfolding story of The Myth of Merula. The Dogon are a people numbering at least 450,000 who live in Mali, farming onions and millet in the Niger river delta. They have not been converted to Islam to the extent of most of the population of Mali. Their own sacred traditions, beliefs and rituals remain strong. Islam is spreading more rapidly among the Dogon of today. Chrisitianity has made only small inroads. The people live in small mudbrick or stone mud-covered dwellings, many of them on cliff walls. Weaving is primarily a craft of men, while women engage in the crafts of pottery and cotton spinning. Frequent locust plagues and droughts often mean that farmers’ crop yields are meager. Boys are circumcised. This is thought necessary to remove the female element from their genitals so that they can become men. As the clitoris is considered a male element, it is also thought necessary to excise it so that girls can become women. (Since my character, Blackbird, was adopted by an American celebrity when she was a little girl, she will not have suffered this fate.)

It’s easier to find data on Mali in general than about the Dogon people in particular. Mali is among the five poorest countries in the world, partially due to a drought that has lasted since the mid-1980s. Adult literacy in Mali is 20% among men and 12% among women. Infant mortality is 118 per 1,000 births. Malnutrition is widespread, in part because vegetables are difficult to grow under drought conditions. Women spend a lot of time grinding millet. They also become very good at carrying heavy loads, including water pots, on top of their heads. They dress in colorful clothes, and every village has a diva who can rival Aretha Franklin.

Tourists online who have visited Mali say not to expect much air conditioning. They tell tales of having to get out and push their vehicles when they travel through the desert in groups. They say that the heat is relentless and when the wind blows the sand across the land, it gets into every orifice. Don’t expect too much variety in the food, they warn, and never drink any local water.

Mali Online

There isn’t much in the way of communications infrastructure, but Geekcorps Mali has installed a VIA Desert PC with R-BGAN satellite modem connection to give the Radio Beeray station, near Timbuktu, email and internet access. Wikipedia lists 30,000 internet users nationwide, along with 13 ISPs and 24 private ISPs. Two French expats operate a cyber cafe in the city of Bamako. You pay by the half hour, and you only pay half price if you’re a student. So goes the surface data from my research on the internet. All this says very little about the inner cultural life of the Dogon people. Dogon culture and religion is what primarily interests me.

What’s Really Fascinating About the Dogon

I have been fascinated by the Dogon, ever since reading The Sirius Mystery several years ago. The Sirius Mystery is, of course, a book in the genre of ancient alien contact. The author, Robert Temple, attempts to convince the reader of the likelihood that alien visitors brought civilization to humanity. This ancient civilization, he tries to show, is behind the civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria. The Dogon, he believes, are cultural descendents of the unknown “mother civilization” jump-started by the aliens. The aliens, as they are depicted by Dogon sculptures and described by stories, are apparently amphibious. To me, some of the carvings slightly resemble the annoying Jar Jar Binks. In terms of credibilty, The Sirius Mystery is somewhere in between Chariots of the Gods (not very credible) and Fingerprints of the Gods (much more credible). It sounds crazy, but don’t knock it ’till ya try it. Even if you do not agree with every conclusion and interpretation, you can still find much of the information fascinating. More recently, I have picked up a copy of The Science of the Dogon, which is what I’m currently reading.

The Science of the Dogon

The Science of the Dogon presents a case that Dogon mythology consists of surface and deep meanings. The author, Laird Scranton, contends that the deep meanings are allegories, metaphors and symbols for an ancient science more advanced than our own. One example he gives is that of water. He has found that the Dogon understanding of water, as expressed by Ogotemmeli, corresponds remarkably well to descriptions of water that appear in encylopedias. An encylopedia entry about water will typically present information about the molecular structure of water first. Second, it will usually describe the three physical states of water – liquid, solid and vapor. Third, the entry will elaborate on the natural water cycle; from evaporation, to clouds, to rainfall, to bodies of water, and back to clouds.

The Nummo Pair is Water or Hydrogen

How does this compare to water in the Dogon creation myth? First, the Dogon say that Nummo pair is found in all water. The Nummo pair is always associated with the numbers 2 and 8, which are extremely important and are all over the place. The numbers 2 and 8 happen to be the numbers of the electron structure of water. The same Dogon symbol that represents water also represents the burning rays of the sun. The sun is said to be surrounded by a spiral of copper that has 8 turns. Its fire is said to be excrement of the Nummo pair. If the Nummo pair symbolizes hydrogen, then this is correct, since the burning of the sun involves the fusion of hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen was the most abundant element in the primordial universe. The sun is also involved in the water cycle in that it causes the water to evaporate and form clouds.

The Dogon also say that there is water in copper. The electron structure of copper contains 2 electrons in the innermost electron ring and 8 in the second ring. As mentioned above, the sun is imagined as being surrounded by a spiral of copper with 8 turns. Modern science defines 8 separate zones or spheres that compose the sun: the core, the radiant zone, the convection zone, the photosphere, sunspots, the magnetic field, the corona and solar wind. Further, the Dogon know that the sun is a star.

The section about the three states of water is somewhat more complex and possibly more of a stretch (I’m not sure yet). I will quote it at length.

From our earlier discussion about the Sumerian gods An, Enlil, and Enki, we may recall the difficulties that scholars have faced when trying to categorize these three deities simply as gods of the heavens, the earth, and the waters, respectively, and the persistent link to water that comes into play in their symbolism. We may also recall differences in the symbolism of equivalent deities from culture to culture, as in the case of Enlil, Bel, and Neith, who are in some instances identified as gods or goddesses of the air (conceived of as a liquid), in others as gods of the atmosphere, and in still others as gods of vapor or humidity. However, if we step back and take a broader look at the complete triad of gods in any one culture, we quickly realize that as a group they might more aptly be represented as the three states of water – liquid, solid and vapor. Our encyclopedias tell us that water is the only substance that naturally occurs in all three of these states at temperatures of normal, daily life. Since ice is not a substance that would be familiar to the experience of a society living in a subtropical area of the world (in fact, Budge includes no entries in his Hieroglyphic Dictionary for the words “ice”, “freeze”, or “frozen”), the images of hardened clay and moisture in rocks might have been substituted for ice as the solid form of water. When we test this supposition by applying the meaning of the word “clay” to Enki, Ea, and Khnum, we find that it draws together the divergent images of a god of dryness, a god of the earth, and a god of the waters of the earth in a way that makes complete sense. In a similar way, the assignment of water vapor as the symbol of our goddesses of the air helps us integrate the symbols of various gods and goddesses who are alternately represented by the atmosphere, moisture, and humidity.

In the Dogon creation myth, the Earth was originally flawed, because it did not contain water. Water was delivered in an act of fertilization. This agrees with the hypothesis that the bulk of water on Earth was delivered by comets. Life as we know it requires water, and we also know that the first single-cell organisms originated in the ocean. There is so much more. Water is only one example. The more resemblances you find between science and myth, and the more you learn how myth is recreated in daily life, the more you see how densely packed the Dogon culture is with layers upon layers of meaning that can be mapped to science as we know it.

Are the Dogon the Symbolic Carriers of a More Advanced Science That Existed in Ancient Times?

These symbologies may even have been mapped to a more advanced science known in ancient times. There is a very strong suggestion, for example, that this ancient science was aware of 266 sub-particles. We currently know there are over 200 but have not identified all of them. While it’s possible that these resemblances are coincidental, it’s also possible that an ancient civilzation embedded its scientific knowledge in mythology to preserve this knowledge through the ages and to keep its more advanced secrets from the common people. Maybe it was known how to split the atom, for example; but this knowledge was forbidden to all but the initiates into the deepest, most esoteric secrets. The Dogon say that it is forbidden to speak of Po, which is a small entity that resembles an atom and is thought to be the seed of which everything is made.

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First, let me say what the theme of this book is not. You may have encountered the idea before that we don’t need to worry about solving environmental problems on Earth because we can always colonize Mars. The author, Marshall T. Savage, explicitly says that this is not the type of argument he is advocating.

“Our future lies in space, but the Earth is the womb of life, and it will be a long time before we can cut the umbilical cord. The new worlds we wish to create can survive their infancy only if the Mother of Life (Gaia) is here to nourish them. If we are to fulfill our Cosmic destiny as the harbingers of Life, we must first insure survival of the home planet.”

Savage then goes on to provide a concise description of the problems and their solutions. He explains that the primary things that support the human population on Earth are food and energy. These things must come from somewhere, but he notes that if we continue to overexploit the Earth to obtain them, then we will destroy our own living habitat. The solution is to find some source outside the biosphere. So far, these are obvious and familiar arguments, but it is necessary to begin with them in order to build the chain of reasoning. The interesting argument comes next. It is necessary in the interim, he says – in the interim before we begin to colonize space, that is – to find the resources we need from somewhere that is on Earth but that is not a part of the existing biosphere. This point could be argued with semantic hair-splitting, so let me clarify. We need a source of food and energy that will not bring about the poisoning or destruction of the Earth’s existing ecosystems into which we have so far been plugged in our known human history. That is still not a perfect way of putting it, but please reserve your arguments until you read on to learn more specific and concrete details of the plan that Savage is proposing.

You have probably figured out by now that he is saying we could and should get what we need from the ocean. You have probably heard this before. But did you know that there is enough latent energy in the oceans to supply the entire world power demand for 25,000 years? Did you know that the oceans contain 36 times more nitrates than the amount of nitrogen that exists in the Earth’s entire biomass? Did you know that it would possible to use sea colonies to act as carbon dioxide sponges and offset global warming, while still getting food and energy from them? Did you know that the open oceans are mostly lifeless, due to a lack of nutrients? Therefore, if human beings were to form marine colonies on the open oceans, we would not disturb or displace any existing ecosystems.

I’ll sketch a brief outline of how this would all work. There would be an ocean thermal energy converter in each sea city. It would work simply by extracting energy from the temperature difference between the warm surface waters of the equator and the cold deep waters. OTECs would produce more energy than they consume, on net balance. Savage says that for every 700 calories of energy they consumed, they would generate 1000 calories. Some of the net power surplus would be consumed by the colonies. The rest would be stored in hydrogen and exported. As the OTECs pumped enormous quantities of cold water from the ocean depths, they would bring nitrogen up to the surface with them. This nitrogen would cause the algae population to explode. Algae would be cultivated in containment ponds surrounding the sea cities.

As the marine colonies grew and seeded more colonies, they would act to cool the equatorial waters. This would help offset global warming somewhat. To offset it still further, the colonies could allow part of their harvest of algae to sink into the oceans. This would act as a carbon sponge, because algae are 20% carbon by weight. If all of the algae were used as food, the carbon would all return to the atmosphere. Some of the protein bounty would be lost, but millions of tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere of Earth each year.

It’s time to go off on a digression now, about the way that life is recycled at sea.

“At sea, nutrients are not recycled the same way as on land. If they were, life on the seas would be far more plentiful than it is. At sea, the nutrient cycle is very indirect. A plant or animal will scavenge nutrients from its environment and bind them up in its body during the course of its life; then, when the organism dies, it sinks into the depths, taking its nutrients with it. These nutrients remain locked away in the depths until brought to the surface again – usually after a lapse of a thousand years or more. Consequently, a millennium’s worth of nutrients are concentrated in the deep waters of the world’s oceans.”

To understand the significance of this stuff about nitrogen, you need to know that plants form the base of the food chain and that plants need nitrogen. You need to know that the Green Revolution in increasing agricultural productivity was enabled by nitrogen that was extracted from oil. You need to know that we are running out of oil and that it is becoming more and more expensive to extract the remaining oil. And you need to realize that Peak Oil doesn’t just imply trouble for the gasoline on which our cars run but also implies massive food shortages and starvation.

Furthermore, you should know that algae use nitrogen a lot more efficiently than the plants that people grow for food and that people can eat algae. In fact, blue-green algae – the oldest kind – is nearly a perfect food for people. If you’re health conscious and open-minded, maybe you have had a Spirulina protein shake before. Or, perhaps not. In any case, eating algae is better than starving. Savage points out, however, that we should not assume that people will eat anything if they are starving. Efforts to feed the hungry have foundered before on the assumption that people who are starving are not choosey about what they eat. In fact, they are. Therefore, he has even thought of a way to to make a nutritious, high-protein bread with this algae and to make sure that the bread will not be green in color.

There’s more. The containment ponds used to grow the algae would suffer from the problem of biofouling. The kind of algae that people would eat would grow on the surface of the ponds and be removed frequently, but another kind of algae – grass algae – would grow on the sides and bottoms of the ponds. This problem would present an opportunity, because shellfish could be used to eat this grass algae, and then the shellfish could be harvested. For instance, the Carribean King Crab feeds on this type of algae. This type of crab grows large and has lots of delicate, tender white meat. The next problem (and opportunity) that would be introduced would be the problem of the shells of all of these shellfish. The shells would become a source of chitin, which can be used to make paper, enabling the sea cities to be self-sufficient in paper products. Limestone and magnesium would also be extracted from the shells. The limestone would be used for finishing plaster. The magnesium would be used for another purpose, about which I’ll write more further on. Pearls could also be harvested from the farming of oysters. The colonies could export pearls and use part of the money obtained from these exports to fund space travel.

Just outside the containment ponds, seaweed would be cultivated. It would not only clean up the deep water effluent, but it would also be used in the production of algin. Algin can be used to make a lot of useful products, but Savage is proposing to use it mainly for textiles. Algin would produce textiles of a silky texture. The sea cities would be self-suffient in not only paper but also textiles. Learning self-sufficiency in the sea cities would be important to preparing humans for life in space colonies. At every opportunity, Savage tries to think of a way that the sea cities can use something harvested in their immediate vicinities to meet all of their needs.

Due to all of the processing of shellfish, there would be a lot of scrap animal protein, and this protein could be used for fish farming. Various species of carnvorous fish could be suspended in cages in the seaweed and fed pellets made from the scrap protein. The colony could export fish.

You may have been wondering what these sea cities would be constructed of and how the materials would be brought out to sea. The answer is that the cities would not be constructed. They would be grown. In fact, they could be viewed as a kind of macro-organism. There are aquatic snails that build bubble floats and use these floats to suspend themselves. Bubbles that are packed together naturally cohere into a hexagonal grid. This kind of structure is naturally buoyant and stable. The bubbles would be made of concrete, and the concrete would be grown like seashells. The accretion of this type of cement would be caused by passing an electric current through a metal grid. Calcium carbonate in the sea water bonds electrochemically to charged metal. The resultant coating is as hard as cement. Most of the waters on the surface of the ocean, especially near the equator, are full of dissolved calcium carbonate ions that are positively charged. This same mineral is found in the things we know as marble, limestone, seashells and Portland cement.

The metal grids that accreted the calcium carbonate would be made of magnesium, which would also be extracted from sea water. Sea water is the main source of magnesium produced in the United States. Magnesium can be extracted from it by mixing it with calcium oxide. Calcium oxide can be produced by heating sea shells in the presence of oxygen. Magnesium is the lightest of all structural metals and is a good conductor of electricity. In its pure form, it is soluble in sea water, but when alloyed with manganese and anodized, it can be made corrosion-proof.

To summarize, then, sea colonies can grow enough food and produce enough power to feed and power the world while being self-suffient, preparing people to live in space and acting as carbon sinks to offset global warming. Their structures can be grown in an organic manner, using materials that are already found in the sea, powered by a source of power that is already ready to be tapped in the sea. People can sustain the population we have now, while preparing to colonize space, in spite of Peak Oil, while offsetting global warming and global climate change, without displacing any existing ecosystem on Earth. Now, tell me what the engineering or scientific flaws are in this plan. Are there any? Or are the barriers to enacting this kind of a plan solely psychological, social and political in nature?

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