Griaule's Dogon corpus became the most contested body of work in Africanist anthropology. The questions sharpened after his death, as the posthumous Le Renard pale, completed by Germaine Dieterlen, presented an esoteric system deeper and more elaborate still, and as claims from the Sirius material, alleged Dogon knowledge of the star's invisible companion, escaped into popular occultism and ancient astronaut literature that Griaule himself never endorsed. In 1991 the Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek published the sharpest test: a decade of restudy among the Dogon found no living knowledge of Ogotemmeli's cosmology, no esoteric corpus of the kind Griaule described, and elders who did not recognize the system published in their name.
The ensuing argument, still open, is about method as much as fact. Critics hold that Griaule's interrogative style, his announced conviction that African thought concealed a deep philosophy, and his reliance on a few privileged informants together manufactured a system, with Ogotemmeli and later specialists synthesizing under his questioning. Defenders, including Dieterlen and part of the French school, reply that esoteric knowledge is by definition unevenly held, that van Beek worked in different villages in a different generation, and that the depth of the corpus could not be conjured from nothing. The atlas records the controversy as genuinely debated: the fame of Dogon religion is inseparable from Griaule, and so is the question of how much of its published form is his.