Every year around August 8th, the spiritual community starts buzzing with talk of “the Lion’s Gate opening.”
Apparently, this is a time when cosmic energy is said to grow stronger. As seen from Earth, the sun sits in the direction of Leo, and it aligns at a special angle with Sirius — which is why people say energy from the direction of Sirius intensifies during this period.
And maybe, just maybe, our human ancestors came from that very direction…? It’s a romantic theory, but if it were true, wouldn’t that be lovely.
This always brings to mind a strange and fascinating legend connected to Sirius, passed down by the Dogon people, an ethnic group in Mali, West Africa. In the 1930s, French anthropologist Marcel Griaule studied the Dogon and found that they had a tradition describing a tiny companion star to “Sigi Tolo” (Sirius), invisible to the naked eye, called “Po Tolo.” What’s more, the details were oddly specific: “Po Tolo orbits Sigi Tolo once every 50 years,” and “it’s made of an extremely heavy substance not found on Earth.”
Here’s why this is so surprising: the real star known as Sirius B is in fact a white dwarf, invisible to the naked eye, orbiting Sirius A roughly once every 50 years, and made of extraordinarily dense matter. In Europe, the idea that Sirius was a binary star wasn’t proposed until 1844, and Sirius B wasn’t actually observed through a telescope until 1862. So how did the Dogon — who had neither telescopes nor written astronomical records — come to know such precise details? This is the origin of what’s known as the “Sirius Mystery.”
Dogon mythology carries this story too: “The creator god Amma made the universe and the Earth, created Nommo, and made humans in Nommo’s image. Nommo descended from the sky to Earth in an ark, together with the ancestors of humankind.” Nommo, it’s said, was a being that came from the Sirius star system. It almost sounds as though the ancestors of humanity themselves journeyed here from that distant star.
Of course, there’s plenty of skepticism about this story too. Much of the astronomical knowledge attributed to the Dogon, aside from the Sirius details, lacks solid supporting evidence, and some researchers suggest the knowledge may have been transmitted through contact with Western missionaries or astronomers before Griaule’s study — so the truth remains unsettled. Still, setting aside scientific verification, the romantic idea that “our ancestors may have come from the direction of Sirius” is something I want to quietly hold onto, especially during this Lion’s Gate season.
What a Physicist Taught Me About the Universe Being 13.8 Billion Years Old
While enjoying the spiritual side of things, I also found myself drawn to a more fundamental question: how did the universe actually begin in the first place?
A while back, I watched a series called “Physics Even an Elementary Schooler Can Understand,” featuring physicist Yasunori Nomura on the YouTube show Rehacq. He explained things in a remarkably clear way, avoiding technical jargon as much as possible. Even as someone with a humanities background who’s had almost nothing to do with physics in my life, I felt that particular thrill of intellectual curiosity — that sense of “oh, I think I get it… but do I really?”
What struck me most was that the universe’s beginning isn’t just something “vaguely said to be true” — it’s been calculated with remarkable precision, through physics, to be approximately 13.8 billion years ago. It wasn’t a bit of a shock to realize that this isn’t a matter of myth or intuition, but something arrived at through the accumulation of equations and observational data.
Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Lion’s Gate
Right now, at this very moment, all sorts of things are arriving on Earth from space. There’s light and electromagnetic radiation, of course, but there’s also something we still don’t fully understand — the mysterious substances called “dark matter” and “dark energy.” They’re believed to make up the majority of all the energy in the universe, and yet their true nature remains unknown. Isn’t that almost too romantic?
If that’s the case, I secretly hope someone will actually verify whether cosmic energy really does increase during the Lion’s Gate period. Questions that sit right on the border between science and spirituality like this one — I’d love it if someone could someday show us the answer with real data.
“I’ll Never Use This in Real Life” — What a Shame
Teenagers often give up on studying math or physics, saying things like, “I’m never going to use this in real life anyway.” But the smartphone we can’t put down, and the AI everyone’s talking about these days — physics and math are packed into their very foundations.
If, back when I was a student, someone had told me, “This equation is what’s going to power that device in your pocket someday,” connecting it directly to everyday technology, I think my relationship with physics and math would have been completely different. I really hope today’s kids get the chance to learn these subjects not as a list of abstract formulas, but as “the true nature of the things you’re using right now.”
So, on August 8th — while gazing up at the sky thinking, “ah, it’s Lion’s Gate today” — maybe also pausing to wonder, “how exactly did the universe begin, 13.8 billion years ago?” Looking at the cosmos through both a scientific and a spiritual lens might just be a rather luxurious way to spend the day.