Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth"
"It
mould seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered
again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments."
Franz Boas1
Despite some recent attempts to
renew them, it seems that during the past twenty years anthropology has
increasingly turned from studies in the field of religion. At the same time,
and precisely because the interest of professional anthropologists has
withdrawn from primitive religion, all kinds of amateurs who claim to belong to
other disciplines have seized this opportunity to move in, thereby turning into
their private playground what we had left as a wasteland. The prospects for the
scientific study of religion have thus been undermined in two ways.
The
explanation for this situation lies to some extent in the fact that the
anthropological study of religion was started by men like Tylor, Frazer, and
Durkheim, who were psychologically oriented although not in a position to keep
up with the progress of psychological research and theory. Their
interpretations, therefore, soon became vitiated by the outmoded psychological
approach which they used as their basis. Although they were undoubtedly right
in giving their attention to intellectual processes, the way they handled these
remained so crude that it discredited them altogether. This is much to be
regretted, since, as Hocart so profoundly noted in his introduction to a
posthumous book recently published,2 Psychological interpretations
were withdrawn from the intellectual field only to be introduced again in the
field of affectivity, thus adding to "the inherent defects of the
psychological school ... the mistake of deriving clear-cut ideas ... from vague
emotions." Instead of trying to enlarge the framework of our logic to
include processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the
same kind of intellectual operation, a naive attempt was made to reduce them to
inarticulate emotional drives which resulted only in hampering our studies.
Of
all the chapters of religious anthropology probably none has tarried to the same extent as studies in the field of
mythology. From a theoretical point of view the situation remains very much the
same as it was fifty years ago, namely, chaotic. Myths are still widely
interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of a kind
of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are
considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods.
Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to
idle play or to a crude kind of philosophic speculation.
In order to understand what a myth
really is, must we choose between platitude and sophism? Some claim that human
societies merely express, through their mythology, fundamental feelings common
to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge or that they try to
provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise
understand--astronomical, meteorological, and the like. But why should these
societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also
acquainted with empirical explanations? On the other hand, psychoanalysts and
many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological
toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation
becomes too easy: If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure,
let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society
grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure
and the social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would
be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for
repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever dialectic will always find
a way to pretend that a meaning has been found.
Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at
first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand it would seem that in the
course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no
continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every
conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But
on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding
similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the
problem: If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain
the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?
It is precisely this awareness of a basic antinomy
pertaining to the nature of myth that may lead us toward its solution. For the
contradiction which we face is very similar to that which in earlier times
brought considerable worry to the first philosophers concerned with linguistic
problems; linguistics could only begin to evolve as a science after this
contradiction had been overcome. Ancient philosophers reasoned about language
the way we do about mythology. On the one hand, they did notice that in a given
language certain sequences of sounds were associated with definite meanings,
and they earnestly aimed at discovering a reason for the linkage between those sounds and
that meaning.
Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very beginning by the
fact that the same sounds were equally present in other languages although the
meaning they conveyed was entirely different. The contradiction was surmounted
only by the discovery that it is the combination of sounds, not the sounds
themselves, which provides the significant data.
It is easy to see, moreover, that some of the more
recent interpretations of mythological thought originated from the same kind of
misconception under which those early linguists were laboring. Let us consider,
for instance, Jung's idea that a given mythological pattern - the so-called
archetype - possesses a certain meaning.
This is comparable to the
long-supported error that a sound may possess a certain affinity with a
meaning: for instance, the "liquid" semi-vowels with water, the open
vowels with things that are big, large, loud, or heavy, etc., a theory which
still has its supporters.3
Whatever emendations the original formulation may now call for,4 everybody
will agree that the Saussurean principle of the arbitrary
character of linguistic signs was
a prerequisite for the accession of linguistics to the scientific level.
We have
distinguished langue and parole by the different time referents
which they use. Keeping this in mind, we may notice that myth uses a third
referent which combines the properties of the first two. On the one hand, a
myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what
gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is
timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future. This can
be made clear through a comparison between myth and what appears to have
largely replaced it in modern societies, namely, politics. When the historian
refers to the French Revolution, it is always as a sequence of past happenings,
a nonreversible series of events the remote consequences of which may still be
felt at present. But to the French politician, as well as to his followers, the
French Revolution is both a sequence belonging to the past - as to the
historian - and a timeless pattern which can be detected in the contemporary
French social structure and which provides a clue for its interpretation, a
lead from which to infer future developments. Michelet,
for instance was a politically minded historian. He describes the French
Revolution thus: "That day ... everything was possible.... Future became
present ... that is, no more time, a glimpse of
eternity."5 It is that double structure, altogether historical
and ahistorical, which explains how myth, while
pertaining to the realm of parole and calling for an explanation as
such, as well as to that of langue
in which it is
expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which, though it
remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two.
A remark can be introduced at this point which will
help to show the originality of myth in relation to other linguistic
phenomena. Myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value. From
that point of view it should be placed in the gamut of linguistic expressions
at the end opposite to that of poetry, in spite of all the claims which have
been made to prove the contrary. Poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be
translated except at the cost of serious distortions; whereas the mythical value
of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation. Whatever our
ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a
myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. Its substance
does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which
it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where
meaning succeeds practically at "taking off" from the linguistic
ground on which it keeps on rolling.
To
sum up the discussion at this point, we have so far made the following claims:
(1) If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, it
cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a
myth, but only in the way those elements are combined. (2) Although myth
belongs to the same category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part
of it, language in myth exhibits specific properties. (3) Those properties are
only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level, that is, they exhibit more
complex features than those which are to be found in any other kind of
linguistic expression.
If the above three points are granted, at least as a
working hypothesis, two consequences will follow: (1) Myth, like the rest of
language, is made up of constituent units. (2) These constituent units
presuppose the constituent units present in language when analyzed on other
levels - namely, phonemes, morphemes, and sememes - but
they, nevertheless, differ from the latter in the same way as the latter differ
among themselves; they belong to a higher and more complex order. For this
reason, we shall call them gross constituent units.
How shall we proceed in order to identify and isolate
these gross constituent units or mythemes? We know
that they cannot be found among phonemes, morphemes, or sememes,
but only on a higher level; otherwise myth would become confused with any other
kind of speech. Therefore, we should look for them on the sentence level. The
only method we can suggest at this stage is to proceed tentatively, by trial
and error, using as a check the principles which serve as a basis for any kind
of structural analysis: economy of explanation; unity of solution; and ability
to reconstruct the whole from a fragment, as well as later stages from previous
ones.
The technique which has been applied so far by this
writer consists in analyzing each myth individually, breaking down its story
into the shortest possible sentences, and writing each sentence on an index
card bearing a number corresponding to the unfolding of the story.
Practically each card will thus show that a certain
function is, at a given time, linked to a given subject. Or, to put it
otherwise, each gross constituent unit will consist of a relation.
However,
the above definition remains highly unsatisfactory for two different reasons.
First, it is well known to structural linguists that constituent units on all
levels are made up of relations, and the true difference between our gross units
and the others remains unexplained; second, we still find ourselves in the
realm of a nonreversible time, since the numbers of the cards correspond to the
unfolding of the narrative. Thus the specific character of mythological time,
which as we have seen is both reversible and
nonreversible, synchronic and diachronic, remains unaccounted for. From this
springs a new hypothesis, which constitutes the very core of our argument: The
true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of
such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can
be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning. Relations pertaining to
the same bundle may appear diachronically at remote intervals, but when we have
succeeded in grouping them together we have reorganized our myth according to a
time referent of a new nature, corresponding to the prerequisite of the initial
hypothesis, namely a two-dimensional time referent which is simultaneously
diachronic and synchronic, and which accordingly integrates the characteristics
of langue on the one hand, and those of parole on the other. To
put it in even more linguistic terms, it is as though a phoneme were always
made up of all its variants.
Two comparisons may help to explain what we have in
mind.
Let us first suppose that archaeologists
of the future coming from another planet would one day, when all human life had
disappeared from the earth, excavate one of our libraries. Even if they were at
first ignorant of our writing, they might succeed in deciphering it - an
undertaking which would require, at some early stage, the discovery that the
alphabet, as we are in the habit of printing it, should be read from left to
right and from top to bottom. However, they would soon discover that a whole
category of books did not fit the usual pattern - these would be the orchestra
scores on the shelves of the music division. But after trying, without success,
to decipher staffs one after the other, from the upper down to the lower, they
would probably notice that the same patterns of notes recurred at intervals, either
in full or in part, or that some patterns were strongly reminiscent of earlier
ones. Hence the hypothesis: What if patterns showing affinity, instead of being
considered in succession, were to be treated as one complex pattern and read as
a whole? By getting at what we call harmony,
they would then see that an orchestra score, to be meaningful, must be read
diachronically along one axis - that is, page after page, and from left to
right - and synchronically along the other axis, all the notes written
vertically making up one gross constituent unit, that is, one bundle of
relations.
The other comparison is somewhat
different. Let us take an observer ignorant of our playing cards, sitting for a
long time with a fortune-teller. He would know something of the visitors: sex,
age, physical appearance, social situation, etc., in the same way as we know
something of the different cultures whose myths we try to study. He would also
listen to the seances and record them so as to be
able to go over them and make comparisons - as we do when we listen to
myth-telling and record it. Mathematicians to whom I have put the problem agree
that if the man is bright and if the material available to him is sufficient,
he may be able to reconstruct the nature of the deck of cards being used, that
is, fifty-two or thirty-two cards according to the case, made up of four
homologous sets consisting of the same units (the individual cards) with only
one varying feature, the suit.
Now for a concrete example of the
method we propose. We shall use the
Oedipus myth, which is well known to everyone.
I am well aware that the Oedipus myth has only reached us under late
forms and through literary transmutations concerned more with esthetic and
moral preoccupations than with religious or ritual ones, whatever these may
have been. But we shall not interpret the Oedipus myth in literal terms, much
less offer an explanation acceptable to the specialist. We simply wish to
illustrate - and without reaching any conclusions with respect to it - a
certain technique, whose use is probably not legitimate in this particular
instance, owing to the problematic elements indicated above. The
"demonstration" should therefore be conceived, not in terms of what
the scientist means by this term, but at best in terms of what is meant by the
street peddler, whose aim is not to achieve a concrete result, but to explain,
as succinctly as possible, the functioning of the mechanical toy which he is
trying to sell to the onlookers.
The
myth will be treated as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly
considered as a unilinear series; our task is to
re-establish the correct arrangement. Say, for instance, we were confronted
with a sequence of the type: 1,2,4,7,8,2,3,4,6,8,1,4,5,7,8,1,2,5,7,3,4,5,6,8. .
., the assignment being to put all the 1's together, all the 2's, the 3's,
etc.; the result is a chart:
|
1 |
2 |
|
4 |
|
|
7 8 |
|
|
2 |
3 |
4 |
|
6 |
8 |
|
1 |
|
|
4 |
5 |
|
7 8 |
|
1 |
2 |
|
|
5 |
|
7 |
|
|
|
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
8 |
We shall attempt to perform the same kind of operation
on the Oedipus myth, trying out several arrangements of the mythemes
until we find one which is in harmony with the principles enumerated above. Let
us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the best arrangement is the
following (although it might certainly be improved with the help of a
specialist in Greek mythology):
|
Cadmos seeks |
|
|
|
his sister Europa, |
|
|
|
ravished by Zeus |
|
|
|
|
Cadmos kills the |
|
|
|
the dragon |
|
|
The Spartoi kill |
|
|
|
one another |
|
|
|
|
|
Labdacos (Laois' |
|
|
|
Father) = Lame |
|
Oedipus kills his |
|
Laois (Oedipus' |
|
father, Laios |
|
father) = left-sided |
|
|
Oedipus
kills the Sphinx |
|
|
|
|
Oedipus= swollen-foot (?) |
|
Oedipus
marries his |
|
|
|
mother,
Jocasta |
|
|
|
|
Eteocles kills his |
|
|
|
brother, Polynices |
|
|
Antigone buries her |
|
|
|
brother, Polynices, |
|
|
|
despite prohibition |
|
|
|
|
|
|
We thus find
ourselves confronted with four vertical columns, each of which includes several
relations belonging to the same bundle. Were we to tell the myth, we would
disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to
bottom. But if we want to understand the myth, then we will have to disregard
one half of the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to
right, column after column, each one being considered as a unit.
All the relations belonging to the same column exhibit
one common feature which it is our task to discover. For instance, all the events grouped in the first
column on the left have something to do with blood relations which are
overemphasized, that is, are more intimate than they should be. Let us say,
then, that the first column has as its common feature the overrating of blood relations. It is obvious that the second column
expresses the same thing, but inverted: underrating
of blood relations. The third column refers to monsters being slain. As to
the fourth, a few words of clarification are needed. The remarkable connotation
of the surnames in Oedipus' father-line has often been noticed. However,
linguists usually disregard it, since to them the only way- to
define the meaning of a term is to investigate all the contexts in which it
appears and personal names, precisely because they are used as such, are not
accompanied by any context. With the method we propose to follow the objection
disappears, since the myth itself provides its own context. The significance is
no longer to be sought in the eventual meaning of each name, but in the fact
that all the names have a common feature: All the hypothetical meanings (which
may well remain hypothetical) refer to difficulties
in walking straight and standing upright.
What
then is the relationship between the two columns on the right? Column three
refers to monsters. The dragon is a chthonian being which has to be killed in
order that mankind be born from the Earth; the Sphinx is a monster unwilling to
permit men to live. The last unit reproduces the first one, which has to do
with the autochthonous origin of mankind. Since the monsters are
overcome by men, we may thus say that the common feature of the third column is
denial
of the autochthonous origin of man.6
This immediately helps
us to understand the meaning of the fourth column. In mythology it is a
universal characteristic of men born from the Earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either
cannot walk or they walk clumsily. This is the case of the chthonian beings in
the mythology of the
Turning back to the Oedipus myth,
we may now see what it means. The myth has to do with the inability, for a
culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for
instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for
humans), to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the
knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman.
Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a
kind of logical tool which relates the original problem - born from one or born
from two? - to the derivative problem: born from
different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of
blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to
escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although
experience contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity
of structure. Hence cosmology is true.
Two remarks should be made at this
stage.
In order to interpret the myth, we
left aside a point which has worried the specialists until now, namely, that in
the earlier (Homeric) versions of the Oedipus myth, some basic elements are
lacking, such as Jocasta killing herself and Oedipus
piercing his own eyes. These events do not alter the substance of the myth
although they can easily be integrated, the first one as a new case of autodestruction
(column three) and
the second as another case of crippledness (column
four). At the same time there is something significant in these additions,
since the shift from foot to head is to be correlated with the shift from
autochthonous origin to self-destruction.
Our method thus eliminates a
problem which has, so far, been one of the main obstacles to the progress of
mythological studies, namely, the quest for the true version, or the earlier one.
On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to
put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such. A
striking example is offered by the fact that our interpretation may take into
account the Freudian use of the Oedipus myth and is certainly applicable to it.
Although the Freudian problem has ceased to be that of autochthony versus bisexual
reproduction, it is still the problem of understanding how one can be
born from two: How is it that we do not have only one procreator, but a
mother plus
a father? Therefore, not only
Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of
the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more "authentic"
versions.
An important consequence follows. If a myth is made up
of all its variants, structural analysis should take all of them into account.
After analyzing all the known variants of the Theban version, we should thus
treat the others in the same First, the tales about Labdacos'
collateral line including Agave, Pentheus, and Jocasta herself; the Theban variant about Lycos with Amphion and Zetos as the city
founders; more remote variants concerning Dionysus (Oedipus' matrilateral cousin and
Athenian legends where Cecrops takes the place of Cadmos, etc. For each of
them a similar chart should be drawn and then compared and reorganized
According to the findings: Cecrops killing the
serpent with the parallel episode of Cadmos; abandonment of Dionysus with abandonment of
Oedipus; "Swollen Foot" with Dionysus' loxias, that is, walking
obliquely; Europa's quest with Antiope's;
the founding of Thebes by the Spartoi or by the
brothers Amphion and Zetos;
Zeus kidnapping Europa and Antiope
and the same with Semele; the Theban Oedipus and the Argian Perseus, etc. We shall
then have several twodimensional charts, each
dealing with a variant, to be organized in a three-dimensional order, as shown
in figure 1, so that three different readings become possible: left to right,
top to bottom, front to back (or vice versa). All of these charts cannot he
expected to be identical; but experience shows that any difference to be
observed may be correlated with other differences, so that a logical treatment
of the whole will allow
simplifications, the final outcome being the structural law of the myth....
The trickster of American mythology has remained so far a
problematic figure. Why is it that throughout
|
INITIAL PAIR FIRST TRIAD |
SECOND TRIAD |
|
Life |
|
|
Agriculture |
|
|
|
Herbivorous animals |
|
|
Carrion-eating animals
(raven; coyote) |
|
Hunting |
|
|
|
Beasts of prey |
|
Warfare |
|
|
Death |
|
The unformulated argument is as follows: carrion-eating
animals are like beasts of prey (they eat animal food), but they are also like
food-plant producers (they do not kill what they eat). Or to put it otherwise,
This kind of process can be followed in the mythology of
the Plains, where we may order the data according to the set:
| Unsuccessful mediator between Earth and Sky_
| (Star-Husband's wife)
|
| Heterogeneous pair of mediators
| (grandmother and grandchild)
|
| Semi-homogeneous pair of mediators
▼ (Lodge-Boy and Thrown-away)
While among the
| Successful mediator between Earth and Sky
| (Poshaiyanki)
|
| Semi-homogeneous pair of mediators (Uyuyewi
and Matsailema)
| Homogeneous pair of mediators
▼ (the two Ahaiyuta)
On the
other hand, correlations may appear on a horizontal axis (this is true even on
the linguistic level; see the manifold connotation of the root pose in Tewa according to Parsons: coyote, mist, scalp, etc.).
Coyote (a carrion-eater) is intermediary between herbivorous and carnivorous
just as mist between Sky and Earth; as scalp between war and agriculture (scalp
is a war crop); as corn smut between wild and cultivated plants; as garments
between "nature" and "culture"; as refuse between village
and outside; and as ashes (or soot) between roof (sky vault) and hearth (in the
ground). This chain of mediators, if one may call them so, not only throws
light on entire parts of North American mythology - why the Dew-God may be at
the same time the Game-Master and the giver of raiments
and be personified as an "Ash-Boy"; or why scalps are mist-producing;
or why the Game-Mother is associated with corn smut; etc. - but it also
probably corresponds to a universal way of organizing daily experience. See,
for instance, the French for plant smut (nielle, from
Latin nebula); the luck-bringing power attributed in Europe to refuse
(old shoe) and ashes (kissing chimney sweeps); and compare the American Ash-Boy
cycle with the Indo-European Cinderella: Both are phallic figures (mediators
between male and female); masters of the dew and the game; owners of fine raiments; and social mediators (low class marrying into
high class); but they are impossible to interpret through recent diffusion, as
has been contended, since Ash-Boy and Cinderella are symmetrical but inverted
in every detail (while the borrowed Cinderella tale in America - Zuni
Turkey-Girl - is parallel to the prototype). Hence the chart:
|
|
|
|
|
Sex |
female |
male |
|
Family Status |
double family |
no family (orphan) |
|
|
(remarried father) |
|
|
Appearance |
pretty girl |
ugly boy |
|
Sentimental |
nobody likes her |
unrequited love for girl |
|
Transformation |
luxuriously clothed |
stripped of ugliness |
|
|
with supernatural help |
with supernatural help |
Thus, like Ash-Boy and Cinderella, the trickster is a
mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two
polar terms, he must retain something of that duality - namely an ambiguous and
equivocal character. But the trickster figure is not the only conceivable form
of mediation; some myths seem to be entirely devoted to the task of exhausting
all the possible solutions to the problem of bridging the gap between two and one. For instance, a comparison between all the variants of the
Zuni emergence myth provides us with a series of mediating devices, each of
which generates the next one by a process of opposition and correlation:
messiah > dioscuri
> trickster > bisexual being > sibling pair > married couple > grandmother-grandchild
> four-term group > triad
In
Cushing's version, this dialectic is associated with a change from a spatial
dimension (mediation between Sky and Earth) to a temporal dimension (mediation
between summer and winter, that is, between birth and
death). But while the shift is being made from space to time, the final
solution (triad) re-introduces space, since a triad consists of a dioscuric pair plus a messiah, present simultaneously; and
while the point of departure was ostensibly formulated in terms of a space
referent (Sky and Earth), this was nevertheless implicitly conceived in terms
of a time referent (first the messiah calls, then the dioscuri descend). Therefore the
logic of myth confronts us with a double, reciprocal exchange of functions to
which we shall return shortly.
Not only can we account for the ambiguous character of
the trickster, but we can also understand another property of mythical figures
the world over, namely, that the same god is endowed with contradictory
attributes - for instance, he may be good and bad at the same time. If we compare the variants of the Hopi myth
of the origin of Shalako, we may order them in terms
of the following structure:
(Masauwu:
x) ≈ (Muyingwu:
Masauwu) ≈ (Shalako: Muyingwu);
≈ (y: Masauwu)
where x
and y represent arbitrary values corresponding to the fact that in the two
"extreme" variants the god Masauwu, while
appearing alone rather than associated with another god, as in variant two, or
being absent, as in variant three, still retains intrinsically a relative
value. In variant one, Masauwu (alone) is depicted as
helpful to mankind (though not as helpful as he could be), and in version four,
harmful to mankind (though not as harmful as he could be). His role is thus
defined - at least implicitly - in contrast with another role which is possible
but not specified and which is represented here by the values x and y. In
version 2, on the other hand, Muyingwu is relatively
more helpful than Masauwu, and in version three, Shalako more helpful than Muyingwu.
We find an identical series when ordering the Keresan
variants:
(Poshaiyanki:
x) ≈ (Lea: Poshaiyanki)
≈ (Poshaiyanki: Tiamom)
≈
(y: Poshaiyanki)
This
logical framework is particularly interesting, since anthropologists are
already acquainted with it on two other levels - first, in regard to the
problem of the pecking order among hens, and second, to what this writer has
called generalized exchange in the
field of kinship. By recognizing it also on the level of mythical thought, we
may find ourselves in a better position to appraise its basic
importance in anthropological studies and to give it a more inclusive
theoretical interpretation.
Finally, when we have succeeded in organizing a whole
series of variants into a kind of permutation group, we are in a position to
formulate the law of that group. Although it is not possible at the present
stage to come closer than an approximate formulation which will certainly need
to be refined in the future, it seems that every myth (considered as the
aggregate of all its variants) corresponds to a formula of the following type:
Fx(a)
Fy(b) ≈ Fx(b) Fa-1(y)
Here,
with two terms, a and b, being given as well as two functions, x and y, of
these terms, it is assumed that a relation of equivalence exists between two
situations defined respectively by an inversion of terms and relations, under
two conditions: (1) that one term be replaced by its opposite (in the above
formula, a and a - 1); (2) that an inversion be made between the function value and the term value of two elements (above, y and
a).
This formula becomes highly significant when we recall
that Freud considered that two traumas (and not one, as is so commonly said)
are necessary in order to generate the individual myth in which a neurosis
consists. By trying to apply the formula to the analysis of these traumas (and
assuming that they correspond to conditions 1 and 2 respectively) we should not
only be able to provide a more precise and rigorous formulation of the genetic
law of the myth, but we would find ourselves in the much desired position of
developing side by side the anthropological and the psychological aspects of
the theory; we might also take it to the laboratory and subject it to
experimental verification.
At
this point it seems unfortunate that with the limited means at the disposal of
French anthropological research no further advance can be made. It should be
emphasized that the task of analyzing mythological literature, which is
extremely bulky, and of breaking it down into its constituent units, requires
team work and technical help. A variant of average length requires several
hundred cards to be properly analyzed. To discover a suitable pattern of rows
and columns for those cards, special devices are needed, consisting of vertical
boards about six feet long and four and a half feet high, where cards can be
pigeon-holed and moved at will. In order to build up three-dimensional models
enabling one to compare the variants, several such boards are necessary, and
this in turn requires a spacious workshop, a commodity particularly unavailable
in
Three final remarks may serve as
conclusion.
First, the question has often been
raised why myths, and more generally oral literature, are so much addicted to
duplication, triplication, or quadruplication of the
same sequence. If our hypotheses are accepted, the answer is obvious: The
function of repetition is to render the structure of the myth apparent. For we
have seen that the synchronic-diachronic structure of the myth permits us to
organize it into diachronic sequences (the rows in our tables) which should be
read synchronically (the columns). Thus, a myth exhibits a "slated"
structure, which comes to the surface, so to speak, through the process of
repetition.
However, the slates are not
absolutely identical. And since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical
model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as
it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates
will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth
grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is
exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process whereas its structure remains
discontinuous. If this is the case, we should assume
that it closely corresponds, in the realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in
the realm of physical matter. This analogy may help us to better
understand the relationship of myth to both langue on the one hand and parole on the other. Myth is an
intermediary entity between a statistical aggregate of molecules and the molecular
structure itself.
Prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between
the so-called primitive mind and scientific thought have resorted to
qualitative differences between the working processes of the mind in both
cases, while assuming that the entities which they were studying remained very
much the same. If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely
different view - namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as
rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the
quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which
it is applied. This is well in agreement with the situation known to prevail in
the field of technology: What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is not
that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made,
but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we may be able to show
that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has
always been thinking equally well, the improvement lies, not in an alleged
progress of man's mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply
its unchanged and unchanging powers.
Notes
1 In Boas' Introduction
to James Teit, "Traditions of the
2 M. Hocart, Social Origins (
3 See, for instance, Sir R. A. Paget, "The Origin of Language," Journal of World History, I, No. 2 (UNESCO, 1953).
4 See Emile Benveniste, "Nature du signe
linguistique," Acta Linguistica, I, No. 1 (1939).
5 Jules Michelet,
Histoire de la revolution française, IV, p. 1. I took
this quotation from M. Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (
6 As we shall point
out below, we selected the Oedipus myth as our first example because of the
striking analogies that seem to exist between certain aspects of archaic Greek
thought and that of the Pueblo Indians, from whom we have borrowed the examples
that follow. In this respect it should be noted that the figure of the Sphinx,
as reconstructed by Delcourt, coincides with two
figures of North American mythology (who probably merge into one). We are
referring, on the one hand, to "the old hag," a repulsive witch whose
physical appearance presents a "problem" to the young hero. If he
"solves" this problem - that is, if he responds to the advances of
the abject creature - he will find in his bed, upon awakening, a beautiful
young woman who will confer power upon him (this is also a Celtic theme). The
Sphinx, on the other hand, recalls even more "the childprotruding
woman" of the Hopi Indians, that is, a phallic mother par excellence. This
young woman was abandoned by her group in the course of a difficult migration,
just as she was about to give birth. Henceforth she wanders in the desert as
the "Mother of Animals," which she withholds from hunters. He who
meets her in her bloody clothes "is so frightened that he has an
erection," of which she takes advantage to rape him, after which she
rewards him with unfailing success in hunting. See H. R. Voth,
"The Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony," Field
Columbian Museum Publication No. 83, Anthropological Series, Vol. 111, No. 4 (Chicago, 1903), pp.
352-3 and p. 383.