The Pale Fox

by Marcel Griaule

Originally published in French as Le renard pâle by Paris Institut d'ethnologie in 1945, The Pale Fox was translated into English by Stephen C. Infantino and published by the Continuum Foundation of Chino Valley, AZ in 1986.

Genres: Spirituality, Africa, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Research

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Gavin White · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Pale Fox' is one of those seminal books that has had a considerable effect on modern non-conventional thought, which very few people have actually read. The story that the Dogon (a tribe in Mali, West Africa) knew of the binary nature of Sirius and knew of Saturn's rings all hails from this work.
To be sure, the material treated here is fascinating but it is often so dense that it is incredibly difficult to grasp the bigger picture. The sheer amount of variant traditions recorded also makes it difficult to form any clear idea of the underlying narrative. Yet I have to give this book a high rating because of the rich and unique symbolic material it contains.
The anthropological community has largely dismissed this work as a creative aberation formulated by an over zealous investigator investing his material with a significance not accorded it in the native culture. However, its value for me was the way it described the sacred landscape as a setting for a series of cosmological rites. A true mythopoeic challenge which I will be returning to!

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will never find a more complicated mythology, or one stranger, or perhaps even funnier, and there's the whole
thing about Nommo, the alien fish-being whose name (hear that, like nomme, means word in many african languages) was crucified by a fox. Robert KG Temple has an amazing book about this because the Dogon have based their religion on a synchronization with the rotation of a dwarf star around its partner and they couldn't have possibly been able to see that
or have that concept, yet they do! This is probably one of the weirdest anomalies in the world. I've been researching this since I was 17. People have tried to poo-poo this, but this is the real deal. Maybe. Something "fishy" is going on for sure!

:)

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not necessarily the most lay-reader-friendly introduction to Dogon cosmology -- an understanding of which is vital to an appreciation of Afrocentric and Afrofuturist thought -- but the most thorough and least touched with hokum. And while the Sirius B esoterica is fascinating, more so the Dogon's four-fold theory of signs. Griaule's parsing of these figures produces some of the most memorable passages in the book. Tip to future readers: best to make your own glossary; you will need to be able to recognize many words from the Dogon as you read through this translation.

[Bennie Herron]

I really dig dean youngs poems they are very psychological...