Deities

Amma

West African Deities

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Amma." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/deities/amma.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Amma. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/deities/amma

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-amma,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Amma},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/deities/amma},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Amma is the supreme creator-god of the Dogon of Mali, the maker of the cosmos and the source of all order, commonly spoken of as male but understood to hold both male and female principles and so better described as of dual or unfixed gender. In the Dogon accounts recorded by French ethnographers, Amma creates the world in stages, first attempting union with the earth and producing only the disorderly jackal, then bringing forth the primordial Nommo, the amphibious twin beings who complete and order creation and become the pattern of humanity. Amma's creation is elaborated through the symbolism of seeds, the egg of the world and the numbered pairs that structure Dogon cosmology. Much of this detail comes from the reports of Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, whose account later scholars have questioned; the core worship of Amma as creator is nonetheless well attested.

Facts

Attributions

Mythic Association

Amma creates the world in stages, first attempting union with the earth and producing only the disorderly jackal, then bringing forth the primordial Nommo, the twin beings who complete and order creation. 1

Identity

Gender

Male 1

Function

Domain / Function

Creation and cosmogony 1

Attestation

Veneration Today

Actively venerated in a living tradition 1

Historicity

Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 1

Belief

Theology

Henotheistic: a supreme being above served lesser divinities 1

Cult

Attributes and Iconography

Symbolised by seeds, the egg of the world, and numbered pairs 1

Learn More

Griaule, Ogotemmeli, and a Contested Ethnography

Almost everything widely reported about Amma and the elaborate Dogon cosmology comes from the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule and his collaborator Germaine Dieterlen, above all from Griaule's Dieu d'eau (1948), his record of conversations with the blind elder Ogotemmeli, and the later Le renard pale. Griaule described an extraordinarily intricate esoteric system, creation in stages, the primordial Nommo, the egg of the world, numbered pairs, a symbolism binding cosmology to granary, loom and field. That account made the Dogon internationally famous. It has also been seriously challenged.

The anthropologist Walter van Beek, after extended fieldwork among the Dogon (published in 1991), reported that he could not find the deep esoteric cosmology Griaule described, and argued that much of it may reflect the interpreter's leading questions, Ogotemmeli's own creativity, and the collaborative dynamic of the interviews. The scholarly consensus now treats the detailed Griaule system as contested rather than as a straightforward record of Dogon belief.

The Sirius Claim, Framed Honestly

One element of the Griaule material became famous far beyond anthropology: the report, published by Griaule and Dieterlen in 1950, that the Dogon possessed traditional knowledge of Sirius B, the faint white-dwarf companion of Sirius that is invisible to the naked eye, its existence, its density, and its roughly fifty-year orbit. Robert Temple's popular book The Sirius Mystery (1976) built on this to suggest ancient contact, whether with distant travellers or with extraterrestrials. The claim does not withstand examination and should not be presented as fact.

Van Beek's later fieldwork did not find the Sirius doctrine among the Dogon at all; critics note that European visitors, missionaries and popular astronomy had reached the region well before 1950, that Sirius B had been known to Western science since the 1860s, and that the "knowledge" may have entered through contact and then been read back as ancient. The episode is best understood as a case study in how a contested ethnographic report can harden, in popular retelling, into a myth of its own, and the living Dogon veneration of Amma as creator stands quite apart from it.

Correspondences & Relations