ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 10
Sirius, the Unseen Companion
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On
August 10th, 1844, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel sat down at
the Königsberg Observatory and wrote a letter announcing something he had never
seen, would never see, and had no way of directly proving: that the brightest
star in Earth's night sky was not traveling alone. After more than a decade of
watching Sirius trace an infinitesimal, wavering path across the sky rather
than the perfectly straight line simple physics predicted, Bessel concluded the
only explanation was gravity, an unseen companion massive enough to tug the
great star gently off its course. He would die two years later. It would take
eighteen more years, and a telescope he never lived to look through, before
anyone actually saw the thing he'd found with nothing but mathematics and
patience.
That
companion, Sirius B, would go on to become one of astronomy's strangest
objects, and one of the twentieth century's most persistent occult claims would
insist, quite wrongly, that people already knew about it thousands of years
before Bessel ever picked up his pen…
The Star That Follows…
Bessel
was, by 1844, already one of the most accomplished positional astronomers
alive; six years earlier he'd achieved the first reliable measurement of a
star's distance from Earth, pinning down the parallax of 61 Cygni through
nothing more than exceptionally careful, repeated observation. Turning that
same precision on Sirius and the smaller star Procyon, he noticed both were behaving
strangely, drifting almost imperceptibly back and forth from their expected
straight-line paths in periodic cycles, roughly fifty years for Sirius. A
single star moving through space in a straight line doesn't wobble. Something
has to be tugging on it.
Bessel's conclusion, laid out in his August 1844 paper for Astronomische Nachrichten, was that each star had an invisible companion, “dark stars” as massive as their visible partners but giving off no detectable light of their own. It was an audacious claim to make from arithmetic alone, and it worked. In January of 1862, while testing a new 18.5-inch refracting telescope, the American telescope maker Alvan Graham Clark spotted a faint point of light sitting exactly where Bessel's orbital calculations said it should be. Sirius B was real, confirmed to be roughly the mass of our own Sun crushed into a volume barely larger than Earth, a density so extreme that a thimbleful of it would weigh several tons. Astronomers wouldn't have a name for this bizarre category of object, the white dwarf, for another sixty years.
Here's
where an entirely different, considerably more dramatic story enters the
picture, one repeated constantly across occult and New Age circles: that the Dogon people of Mali possessed detailed
knowledge of Sirius B, its invisible nature, its fifty-year orbit, even its
extreme density, for centuries or millennia before Bessel ever touched a
telescope, proof, so the claim goes, of contact with extraterrestrial visitors
from the Sirius system itself.
The claim traces to French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who reported detailed Dogon Sirius lore after decades of fieldwork beginning in the 1930s, and to Robert Temple's 1976 bestseller The Sirius Mystery, which built an entire ancient-astronaut narrative on top of their reports, complete with amphibious visitors called the Nommos. It's a genuinely compelling story, and it's also the kind of claim the historical record simply doesn't support once anyone checks it directly.
In
1991, anthropologist Walter van Beek led his own extended fieldwork among the
Dogon, initially hoping to confirm Griaule's findings. He couldn't. After years
of research, van Beek reported finding no trace of the detailed Sirius B lore
Griaule had described decades earlier, and concluded that Griaule's own
uniquely forceful, leading interview methods may have inadvertently shaped the
very myths he later reported back as ancient tradition. No other anthropologist
working independently among the Dogon has ever corroborated Griaule's specific
claims. Compounding the timeline problem, astronomers Carl Sagan and Ian
Ridpath both pointed out that information about Sirius's invisible companion
had already been well publicized in European popular science press for years
before Griaule and Dieterlen's key informant sessions in the 1940s, meaning the
“ancient” knowledge could easily have entered Dogon storytelling through
entirely ordinary, recent, human channels, colonial contact, missionaries,
traveling students, rather than requiring alien visitors at all.
None
of this makes the Dogon's actual astronomical and cosmological traditions any
less rich or worth taking seriously on their own terms. It does mean that the
specific, viral claim, ancient African tribe secretly knew what NASA didn't,
doesn't hold up as science history, and repeating it uncritically does a
disservice to the actual, human intellectual tradition being flattened into
evidence for a story it was never really telling.
Strip
away the alien visitors and what's left is, if anything, a better story: a
nineteenth-century astronomer, working entirely from mathematics and decades of
painstaking observation, correctly deduced the existence of an object so
strange that physics wouldn't have a framework to properly explain it for
another ninety years.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the star at the center of the whole affair, we're recommending the standard modern reference for what Sirius has actually meant to Western astrologers for centuries, no unseen companions or ancient astronauts required.
By
Bernadette Brady | Weiser Books
First
published by Samuel Weiser in 1998 and recently reissued in a fresh Weiser
Classics edition, Brady's Book of Fixed Stars has spent over two decades as the
working reference astrologers actually reach for when a fixed star, Sirius
among them, shows up prominently in a chart. Brady holds a genuine academic
pedigree in the field, a PhD examining beliefs in fate in twentieth and
twenty-first century astrology and a master's in cultural astronomy, and she
received the Astrological Association of Great Britain's Charles Harvey Award
specifically for her contributions to fixed star work. This is
scholarship-grounded practice, not vibes dressed up as tradition.
The
book's real achievement is synthesis: Brady melds Egyptian and early Greek
mythological sourcing with a genuinely usable modern technical system, paran
maps, star phases, and delineations covering over sixty stars, giving readers
both the story of a star like Sirius and a concrete method for actually
locating and interpreting it in a natal or mundane chart. The Sirius entries
draw directly on its documented role as Sopdet, guarantor of the Nile flood and
leader of the Egyptian decans, tracing that inheritance forward into the star's
reputation in Western astrology for conferring honor, fame, and, when poorly
aspected, a dangerous excess of ambition.
This
is a working astrologer's reference rather than casual reading, and newcomers
without at least basic chart literacy will want a beginner's astrology primer
close at hand first. But for readers of this magazine who'd rather understand
what serious astrological tradition actually says about Sirius, as opposed to
what a viral infographic claims the Dogon knew, Brady's book remains the
genuine article, updated with 21st-century star positions and ready for
immediate use.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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