Mythological Time

The Time Of The Great Myth-Making Process In The Sahara Has Almost Come To An End, However, Where There Is A Will, There Is Always A Way.

Sahara Myth Is A Rich Tradition, With Berber, Tuareg, Tubu, Bedo And Sub-Sahel Black African All Contributing To Its Rich Heritage.

Traditionally Handed Down From Parent To Child, Myth And Folklore Has An Enormous Potential To Educate. Oral Traditions Stretch Back Millennia To A Time Of The Creation; This Is Not In The Sense The Biblical Creation, More To Do With A Philosophy Of Livelihood, Lifestyle Choices And Survival.

Myth speaks of a place at the Dawn of Time when all that is was formed from the aether.

Every indigenous group in the Sahara have an ancestral lineage stretching back to time immemorial. It comes to us through myth and folklore, crucially fundamental to the identity of indigenous groups.

The recollection is not that it all began at a set point at some undisclosed time in what we would refer to as Prehistory. It is more to do with the ongoing developmental process of cultures that ‘originated’ for wont of a better word at a time far removed from our own experience.

It could be 300, 2,000, 10,000 or even 13,000 years, who is to say, but these time scales are meaningless to cultures that do not time-keep in our sense of the word.  Time-keeping is a very relative and abstract concept generally, to ancient lineages of indigenous desert people.  It can be quite hard to understand what they mean themselves when they describe time-keeping methods that are as alien to us who live in a universe ruled by clocks as it would be to remove a Tuareg child from his desert and put him in the middle of a city.

We are talking here ancient time-keeping survival mechanisms, that for the most part revolved around seasonal movements of the later domesticated livestock to temporary green pastures, or even by the actions and movements of early prey & predator species.

The Sahara does not have seasons as we know them; it has dry periods and wet periods, and something reminiscent of twilight damp, misty-time inbetween. It also has resplendent symbols with what we as westernised ‘civilised’ people would find alien about how desert folk celebrate throughout the year, and how they live a full life generally.

Indigenous desert folk are experts at observing themselves and their environment, day or night. Navigating by the stars at night, and landforms by day they spatially move around a multi-dimension mythical mythological-time model that ensures their continued survival. Myth to them is as much a part of dying as living; it then has no real beginning, middle and certainly, no end.  Richly symbolic it is a continuum in a vacuum; an ever-evolving process.

Myths available to us about the Sahara are few and far between - most written sources that I’ve been able to access are in GERMAN.  A book by a Libyan Tuareg IBRAHIM AL-KONI was published in 2005, translated into English. I haven’t yet been able to obtain a copy.  It speaks of a Libyan Tuareg being brought up in within a world of Tuareg myth, reflecting unnervingly, some of my own experiences in the Sahara. Its called ‘Anubis: A Desert Novel.  The American University in Cairo (AUC) in their APRIL 2005 newsletter, says it is a chilling narrative of thirst, incest, patricide, animal metamorphosis & human sacrifice.  Another book by Al-Koni was published in 2003, its called ‘The Bleeding of The Stone’ and tells of a goat herd Asouf who is the guardian of Wadi Mathrndush in the Fezzan, who protects the Waddan (Mouflon, Barbary sheep) from being hunted.  The Waddan is the oldest surviving ungulate in the Desert.  It is the story of the damage (in metaphor & allegory) of the desert by people outside of it and the consequences of their actions.  A review of this appears on the SAHARA-OVERLAND books website.

For World Myth generally, 1, 2, 3, 4,

AFRICA BOOK CENTRE Limited have a good selection of books on African Myth, as well as loads of other books on African themes.

For some cultures, Creation is first brought about by a feminine creative force; I call these the Old Gods, and many countries have them.  Most are centred around a serpent of some description.  As a researcher on Serpent Energies in Earliest Creation myth, I’ve placed a selection appear here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It is an interesting observation that a serpent or dragon is at the root of many creation (cosmogony) myth; and are found throughout Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even North Africa.  Serpents are ancient achetypes and there is much symbolism surrounding the Serpent.

For Africa generally, the following links on myth will hopefully be informative:

Africa - 1, 2, 3, 4 (high school level; simplified, the basics), 5,

Africa - NORTH (One origin myth)

Africa - East; Origin Myth

Africa - South; Origin Myth SOUTH & EAST

Africa - West; ORIGIN MYTH