Shannon Dorey

Shannon Climbing the
mountain at Montségur,
France in 2011 ©R. Hill
(Montségur was one
of the last strongholds
of the Cathars)

Shannon Dorey is a Canadian author best known for her research on the African Dogon people. She is a graduate of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada with a combined English and History degree. Her interests were expanded to religious studies after studying the New Testament at the University of Windsor in 1991.

Based on the work of ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Dorey has written four books analyzing the symbols found in the Dogon religion. In The Master of Speech, published in 2002, Dorey associated the Dogon symbols with genetics and biological engineering. In The Nummo, published in 2004, Dorey hypothesized that the Dogon religion was an extremely ancient oral tradition with traces of it found in most ancient religions of the world. In Day of the Fish, published in 2012, she compared the Nummo, described by the Dogon elder Ogotemmêli, to the goddesses of the Neolithic period as defined by the Lithuanian-American archeologist, Marija Gimbutas. In 2016, Dorey published The Rose, associating Dogon symbols with knowledge about red giant stars and other aspects of astrophysics.

Dorey has written numerous articles on the Dogon religion including one for New Dawn magazine in 2010, which compared the Australian Rainbow Serpent to the Dogon Nummo, who were also described as being rainbow serpents.

Dorey continues her research uncovering the Dogon oral symbols embedded in the documents recorded by Griaule and Dieterlen.