Amma is the Dogon
creator god. The oldest ancestor to which Dogon mythology refers,
Lébé Séru (or
Lebe Seru) It was this Lebe serpent which guided the Dogon people from Mandé towards the
Bandiagara Escarpment where they are found today. In the 1930s, Dogon high priest and elder
Ogotemmeli narrated to French ethnologist
Marcel Griaule the Dogon creation myth (
fr) and that of the myth of Lebe. In those narrations as documented in Griaule's famous book ''Dieu D'eau
or Conversations With Ogotemmeli,
originally published in 1948 as Dieu D'eau'', Ogotemmeli described the ancestor Lebe as "an old man" who descended from the eighth ancestor. His body was buried in the primordial field. When the ringing of the blacksmith's
anvil filled the air, the seventh ancestor, who was previously sacrificed, reappeared as the Nummo genie; half snake below, half man above. He "swam the first dance" right up to the old man's grave. He entered it, swallowing the body so that it could be regenerated, and then vomited a torrent of water. The bones were turned into colored stones and laid out in the form of a skeleton. Later on, when men decided to migrate, they opened Lebe's grave and discovered therein "the system of stones vomited by the seventh Nommo and this genie himself in the form of a snake." From then on, the priests wore those stones around their necks. "The body of the second sacrificial victim (Lebe), closely associated with the immortal body of the first (Nommo), serves as a foundation for the organization of human society and the division of totemic clans, just as Nommo's body, cosmologically, symbolizes the passage from primordial unity to sexual division and then to the multiplicity of the categories in the universe." In essence, Lebe did not die. The Dogon believe that
human beings needed to learn the third "
word" which the seventh Nommo ancestor would have taught them had she not been killed at the instigation of the blacksmith. As such, someone had to die in order
to pass over. Therefore, the oldest living man of the eighth ancestral family, who was a perfect embodiment of the "
word", died. That man was Lebe. However, in reality, Lebe did not die, as death was unknown at that primordial time according to Dogon religion and cosmogony. Lebe only appeared to have died and humans buried him in the primordial field. That primordial field "contained the body of the oldest man of the eighth family and the head of the seventh ancestor under the smith's anvil." As his human body was in the grave, the seventh Nommo swallowed Lebe's skull and transformed him and created a current of underground waters which resulted in fiver rivers. ==Veneration of Lebe==