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Views on the Papae and the Peti

The two cultures known to have been living on Orkney Island in ancient times, identified as the clerical Papae and the pygmy-like Peti, have potential bearing on our outlook on the cosmological history of the region. So far in our discussions, we have outlined several points by which we might favorably compare one of these two groups of ancient inhabitants--the clerics who wore white called the Papae--to the priestly Dogon, or more precisely to predynastic Egyptian ancestors whom we believe to have been contemporaries of the Dogon in the era of 3200 BC.

Since both the earliest Egyptian Pharaohs and the Dogon were descended from Black Africans, and modern Scandinavians are outwardly Caucasian, the most obvious point to look for as confirmation of our outlook would be any overt reference to the Papae in which it is suggested that they may have been of a different race than the Scandinavians. The local tradition in various locales in Northern Scotland such as Caithness is that early inhabitants of the island were black-skinned.

An account given by Herodotus, if we can associate it with Orkney Island based on the geography he cites, tells of a group of men called the Nasamonians who, attempting to follow the outflow of the Nile River in a westerly direction beyond Libya, were captured and carried off by a group of dwarfish men “under middle height” to a land beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), located near the Celts. There the group crossed marshy land to a plain with trees, and to a town inhabited by men of their own stature who were “black complexioned.” The captured men were later able to return safely to their own country. There they described their captors as “a nation of sorcerers.”2

If as we surmise, Orkney Island was created as a ritual training sanctuary and the Dogon, who we take as the Papae, were among the initiates trained there, then the strange pygmy-like Peti stand in the conceptual place of the teachers of the Dogon. One term that the Dogon give to their ancestor/teachers is Nummo. Symbolically, the Dogon associate their teachers with birds and with water. The Dogon priests suggest that their teachers had an actual physical need to be close to water and are described by Marcel Griaule as having deliberately situated themselves near water. Cosmology is closely intertwined with Dogon life, and the term Nummo also carries cosmological meanings that relate to water.

Robert K. G. Temple, in his book The Sirius Mystery, makes the argument that instruction from these mythic teachers constituted an alien contact. We know that both the Dogon and the Buddhists openly assign their “most sacred” knowledge to a non-human source, and that the Dogon describe this source as having been a spiritual one, that was nonphysical or nonmaterial in nature. However, the concerns reportedly expressed by those teachers regarding possible detrimental effects that prolonged contact with them might have on humans imply that there must also have been an actual, physical presence involved, one that would necessarily go beyond mere shamanic insights into some spiritual realm.

Modern researchers are uncertain to whom the term Peti referred, and the consensus opinion is to link them ancestrally to the Picts, an enigmatic and reportedly fierce pygmy tribal group that is known to us from Roman times, some 2,500 years or more after the period of Skara Brae. Beyond this presumed relationship with the ancient Picts of Scotland, a sensible first step toward inferring the possible identity of the Peti would be to again look to related Egyptian words. Budge gives the Egyptian word Peti as the name of a god. The glyphs of the word read “space,” “and earth/matter,” “together,” a meaning that would seem to define the fundamental nature of Dogon contact with their teachers. The word is based on a phonetic root pet that implies the simple question “what?”3 This is the same question that an initiate of the Dogon esoteric tradition is required to continue asking of an informed teacher. From the perspective of the archaic Sakti tradition, through which we trace our instructed cosmology, the word peti could be described in relation to the terms “reveal” or “revelation.”

In that context, it is extremely interesting that Budge defines an Egyptian word for “pygmy” that he pronounces nem.4 The symbols of one spelling for the word can be interpreted to mean “transmitted,” “knowledge,” “spoken”. Another spelling is given simply with a single glyph that is the image of a pygmy. It is also suggestive that the Faroese word nema means “to learn,” and that the Icelandic term for “student” is nemandi.

Budge also lists a second Egyptian word Nemma that he defines as “a man-hawk god, a form of Menu,” whose glyphs define the same pygmy glyph. Budge’s definition calls to mind an enigmatic sculpted hawk-like deity that was found at Gobekli Tepe, and so would associate the term with our archaic matriarchal tradition. This sculpted image, which no hunter-gatherer should have had a worldview to simply imagine, gives Budge’s definition a tangible form and the birds-of-prey symbolism of our archaic tradition a physical rationale. The positioning of the hands of the sculpted hawk-god call to mind the amorphous arms and hands that wrap around the end of the Gobekli Tepe pillars, as if in an embrace.

Yet a third word from Budge that is based on the phonetic root nem, given as nemai, means “island,”5 and so defines the very locale in which we now place the Nemma. The persistent implication is that the ancient group of strange-mannered, sorcerer-like pygmies that were reported to have comported with the Dogon-like clerics on Orkney Island could actually have been the mythic Nummo teachers of the Dogon tradition.