The protagonists or auxiliary characters of cosmogonic myths are often animals. In some such accounts, animal or animal-like beings trod the earth before humans did, and it was they who established the first parameters of social life as humans would come to know it. The Dogon people of Mali speak of primordial, proto–human beings called Nommo, who shared attributes with mudfish and snakes—animals often considered “amorphous and virtual” and “everything that has not yet acquired form,” as Mircea Eliade (1959, 148) put it. According to the famous Dogon sage Ogotemmeli (Griaule 1970), Nommo had unarticulated serpentine members, undifferentiated gender, and other traits embodying all that is potential and not yet formalized. One Nommo decided to defy God by stealing a piece of the sun to bring fire to earth as the basis of human culture. The Nommo fitted out a granary (or silo) as an ark for his descent, with all categories of plant, animal, and human ethnicity necessary to the world that humans would come to know. As he began his trip downward along the rainbow, God discovered the Nommo’s betrayal and furiously hurled lightning bolts that so accelerated the ark’s trajectory that it crashed to earth. As it did, the plants, animals, and people it bore were dispersed to their present locations, and the snakelike arms and legs of the Nommo were broken at what would become the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles: body parts and appendages necessary for the Dogon agricultural lifestyle.
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