Griault's spirit does not have hard time finding its way from Sanaga into the neighboring village of Tirelli. The villages in the Dogon country have hardly changed over the period extending from his death almost fifty years ago. Although at the present time, about a third of the Dogon are Muslims and a minority of them are Christians, when you enter a Dogon village you move into a bewitched African kingdom, where supernatural laws reign supreme. Standing at the entrance is a fetish, a sacred object, often an earth mound, which assists people in communicating with the spirits. Next to the fetish are found the remains of the sacrifices offered up to them in exchange for their services. For instance, when a theft is committed, it is customary to sacrifice a hen. As a result of the act of offering a sacrifice, so they believe, the thief will die. Rumor has it, that the Dogon do not take risks: they do not steal.

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The mystery surrounding the origin of the Dogon is a detective riddle exerting the minds of archeologists and linguists. By their own account, they had fled from the Mande region, the heartland of the ancient Mali Kingdom (southern Mali of today) with the spread of Islam, around the 13th century. One day, as the myth runs, four sisters and four brothers left their homeland in order to save and preserve the culture of their tribesmen. Prior to leaving their village, they had sought to take with them the bones of their father, Lebe, but they found a snake in his grave. They took the snake with them, the father's spirit, to their new land. In the rock ravines, members of another tribe used to live at those times: red-skinned dwarfs who were capable of flying. Those small people, called "Tellem", subsisted on hunting and gathering. The two tribes did not speak the same language, but kept up the ancient, pre-Islamic beliefs, for which reason the Tellem people warmly embraced the immigrants and gave them permission to set up their villages at the foot of the cliffs. The settlers, who used to be farmers, brought with them seeds and commenced deforesting the woods. When the trees had become extinct, the dwarfish hunters disappeared, so that the Dogon remained on their own.

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