Figure - ancestor

Dogon art is created primarily for religious purposes. According to their mythology, the creator of the universe is the god Amma, but the inhabitants of the Bandiagara Escarpment pay little attention to him, concentrating instead on the various ancestors who are intermediaries between the living and the ultimate forces of the universe. Most Dogon rituals are associated with them. Among the ancestors, several categories can be distinguished. One is the first ancestors created by Amma - the four pairs of perfect twins from whom all humanity descends. Another group of ancestors are the various binu, namely immortal ancestors from a time when there was no death on earth. The last most numerous category is the deceased members of all families called wagem, which translates literally as those who are far away.Such many venerated ancestors generates the existence of a huge number of places of worship in Dogon country. The villages and the areas outside their borders that lie in the Bandiagara Escarpment region are extremely intensely saturated with altars of various kinds (personal, family, market, bringing rains) and other sacred places (stones, caves, ponds) associated with mythical beings. Altars and sacred places do not exhaust Dogon religiosity. According to French researchers led by Marcel Griaule, all Dogon handicraft products, from the smallest ornaments and the most ordinary everyday objects to the masks used during funeral festivals and figures placed on altars, are material symbols of mythical events, figures and ideas.

Ewa Prądzyńska