DOGON TWINS

The Nyamwezi example has shown how important a role twins play in relation to the value that duality may represent. Duality is not, however, unity times two but a conjunction of asymmetrical opposites. It may therefore prove useful to round off this discussion by giving a rapid account of a study on ‘complementarity’, where the latter also appears as a value which organises levels.

In a conference held in 1967 on the theme of ‘Norm and laterality’, Germaine Dieterlen used the Dogon origin myth to remind her listeners that ‘complementarity’ is at the basis of the whole ‘Sudanese cosmological system’ (Dieterlen 1968). This is not, however, just a complementarity on the logical plane alone, with right + left, sacred + profane or man + woman, but a symbolic configuration which engenders a system and which must be defined in terms of value. On the one hand, there is ‘the ideal image of the universe’: two twins of opposed sex, a ‘non-antagonistic complementary duality’. On the other hand, there is the element which is encompassed, singularity as failed duality: the birth of the ‘prematurely born, conceived as a twin but having lost his female twin forever’. This ‘antagonism’ or, as I would put it, this hierarchical opposition, affects the meaning of both mythical narrative and ritual organisation.

The narrative is a familiar one. First, there is a double genesis, with the first one failing and the second succeeding. God creates ‘the smallest thing’, in the form of a grain, but decides not to build up the world from it. The grain is single. It is then with two grains, twins of opposed sex, that the world is created.