Dogon primordial couple

The seated couple introduced an important conceptual theme in African sculpture. The couple asserts the primacy of gender roles. The male figure with a quiver of arrows on his back, symbolized the role of the hunter-warrior, while the female carries a baby on her back, embodies the role of mother and nurturer. The interlocking forms complexity visually conveys the male-female as an ideal social unity; strengthen the importance of the couple in assuring the continuity of life. Because of the reciprocal relations between the supernatural and humans realms in animistic thought, the carved images of order serve to beget order in both human and supernatural worlds. In addition, symbolic references to male and female unity not only serve as a form of sympathetic magic to produce fertility but also as a pleasing device to attract benevolent forces from the ancestors. The attribution as primordial couple may thus be understood by parallel symbolic value of these carved images - depicting sexual unity and order, and the idea of continuity of the generations expressed in the ancestral worship, by the belief that the deceased elder is reborn into the supernatural world, as ancestor and reborn again in a child of the family. (B. DeMott 1982:20-21).