Humanity has long been fascinated by Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Its cycles marked seasons and harvest time, it was used for navigation, it was personified as many great goddesses and a star of spiritual initiation. Temples in Malta and Egypt were aligned towards it.
We may not give much thought to Sirius called “Dog Star”, it being the brightest star of a constellation called the Big Dog. But the canine symbolism is remarkably consistent across cultures. In Chinese and Japanese astronomy, Sirius is known as the “star of the celestial wolf”.
Several first nation tribes of North America referred to the star in canine terms: the Seri and Tohono O’odham tribes of the Southwest describe the Sirius as a “dog that follows mountain sheep”.
The Cherokee paired Sirius with Antares as a dog-star guardian of the Path of Souls. In Cherokee beliefs, the “Path of Souls” refers to the afterworld. After death, the spirit travels home, traversing the Milky Way. At the Great Rift of the Milky Way, in Cygnus constellation, the soul meets its Adversary. The path ultimately leads to a final destination, sometimes described as a “Darkening Land” or “Nightland”.
Further north, the Alaskan Inuit of the Bering Strait called it “Moon Dog”.
Remember Cerberus who guarded the gates of the underworld? The Dog Star of the night sky is more of a guide than a vicious creature guarding the gates of Hades, but its presence is nearly ubiquitous in our collective memory.
Fast forward to the esoteric movements of the 19th century, Helena Blavatsky and Alice Bailey, the two main figures associated with the Theosophic Society, both believed Sirius to be a source esoteric power.
Blavatsky stated that the star Sirius exerts a mystic and direct influence over the entire living heaven and is linked with every great religion of antiquity.
Alice Bailey saw the Dog Star as the true “Great White Lodge” and believed it to be the home of the “Spiritual Hierarchy”and the “star of initiation”.
The Dogon and Sirius
The most famous story of an ancestral connection to Sirius is told by the Dogon tribe. Dogon people are a tribe who occupy a region in Mali, in the Homburi Mountains near Timbuktu, south of the Sahara Desert. There are about 100,000 members in the tribe.
Being isolated from the outside world for centuries, the Dogon have kept most of their traditional ways.
The first Western scientists to visit and study the Dogon people were French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who initially made contact with them in 1931, and continued to research them for the next three decades, culminating in a detailed study conducted between 1946 and 1950.
Griaule and Dieterlen documented the traditional mythology and sacred beliefs of the Dogon, which included an extraordinary body of ancient lore regarding Sirius, a star in the Canis Major constellation. Their priests told them of a secret Dogon myth, saying that Sirius had a companion star that was invisible to the human eye.
They also stated that the star moved in a 50-year elliptical orbit around Sirius, that it was small and incredibly heavy, and that it rotated on its axis. That star — which we now call Sirius B — was not seen through a telescope until 1862 and was not photographed until 1970.
The Dogon name for Sirius B (Po Tolo) consists of the word for star (tolo) and po, the name of the smallest seed known to them. By this name they describe the star’s smallness, "the smallest thing there is." The tribe claims that Po Tolo is composed of a mysterious, super-dense metal called sagala which, they declare, is heavier than all the iron on Earth.
It’s not just about weight and size. Sirius B, the Dogon say, is the starting-point of creation. It is the smallest and heaviest of all the stars. It contains the seed of all things. Its movement on its own axis and around Sirius upholds all creation in space.
Not until 1926 did Western science discover that this tiny star is a white dwarf. In the case of Sirius B, astronomers have estimated that a single cubic meter of its matter weighs about 20,000 tons.
While the Dogon were speaking more of the quantum reality, and not just the physical matter, it’s pretty impressive how science had finally caught up with their ancestral wisdom!
The Dogon also describe a third star in the Sirius system, called Emme Ya. In orbit around this star, they say, is a single satellite. To date, Emme Ya has not been identified by astronomers.
The Dogon also tell the legend of the Nommos, beings who arrived in a vessel, with fire and thunder. The Nommos came from a planet that revolved around Emme Ya. There are references in the oral tradition, drawings and cuneiform tablets of the Dogon, to human looking beings who have feet but who are portrayed as having a large fish skin running down their bodies.
The Nommos were more fishlike than human, and had to live in water. The Dogon say: “The Nommo divided his body among men to feed them; that is why it is also said that as the universe "had drunk of his body," the Nommo also made men drink. He gave all his life force to human beings.”
The Dogon are not the only ones who speak about the three stars of Sirius and claim a Sirian ancestry. There is at least one other tribe, this one in Indonesia, who speak of having arrived from Sirius. In this podcast episode, I also discuss my own Baltic ancestry and the esoteric “three suns”. One of the symbols for God that my ancestors used looks like this:
To me, it always evoked the vision of three stars, besides its more down-to-earth meaning of representing the upper world, the middle world and the lower world.
The Akashic Records Perspective
In my own work with the esoteric, I prefer to draw a clear distinction between personal and collective revelation. I receive personal teaching and guidance that is relevant for a specific person at a specific time. I do not work with sweeping conclusions “for the whole of humanity” or revelations of how things “really are” for everyone everywhere.
Truth cannot be given or imposed. It can only be received in the depth of one’s own heart. Of course, if it is important for someone to connect to their star ancestry, this will come through for that person in their Akashic readings.
In relation to working with the Akashic Field, I primarily approach Sirius as a particular star frequency that a soul is connected to at the point of origin. You can think of this as something similar to an astrological chart for the soul. If your soul was born through the gateway of Sirius, this will leave a certain mark, give you certain qualities.
At a deeper level, being connected to Sirius also brings with it a specific set of gifts, and a mission. A mission is not something pompous, given “from above” that you have to “do”. A mission, from my perspective, is the desire of your soul, an irresistible call, something that you are, something that you cannot help but do anyway.
It helps to be aware of it consciously, though!
In this podcast, I talk about the types of mission specific to the Sirian souls and the ways these energies often express — as well as most common blocks to living that mission fully. Tune in if that is of interest!
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