It was in 1977, in Japan, facing the Ise Shrine, that the reflections I am sharing here took shape in a somewhat disorderly fashion. I was struck, as would be most people, by the roof frames, of which the principal rafters cross in an X and jut out past the ridge (see figure 1). The Izumo Shrines, also of archaic style, have a similar appearance, but due to crossbeams which are not part of the structure but are affixed to the roof as a decoration.

This is reminiscent, of course, of islands in the South Seas where the roofs of...

Can the canonical formula of mythic transformations be reduced to an analogy of the type ʹa is to b as c is to dʹ? This is the central question to be addressed in the present paper. The discussion is based on the two cases of the application of this formula in which Claude Lévi-Strauss manifestly attempted to be as clear and pedagogical as possible in this regard. Thus, it will be possible to determine whether analogy and mirror symmetry, itself a substructure of the former, are related to and premised by the formula. There is no question here of reducing...

Claude Lévi-Strauss enunciated the canonic formula in 1955. He did not refer to it frequently in his publications for many years, but towards the end of his career he found several occasions to say that it was fundamental to his scheme of structural analysis of myth and, hence, to structural anthropology. The paradox is that although his scheme for structural anthropology has been immensely influential, hardly any working anthropologists knew what to do with his canonic formula. Recent studies by several specialists, especially Marcus, have cleared up most of the obscurities that made application of the formula virtually impossible. This...

This paper consists, first, of a concise ethnographic description of basic aspects of the traditional life in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita, Solomon Islands. Next, it takes up the ʹontologicalʹ transformation of Lau society through the advent of Christianity. Finally, it applies Claude Lévi-Straussʹs Canonical Formula to summarize the dynamics of a deep cultural change. Thus, the paper begins with a brief monographic presentation of the Lau people, focusing on their traditional life, on their linguistic and mythic expresssions of gender, and on womanhood as the architectural principle of their traditional ontology. Section 2 bears on the subversion of womanhood by...

Instead of considering the variants of a myth as lacunary or distorted versions of a single prototypic tale to be reconstructed by theorists, Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed defining a myth as the collection of all the possible variants or ʹtransformationsʹ of a tale, the mythical characteristics or connotations of which would merely result from its belonging to such a ʹgroup of transformations.ʹ He further suggested that any myth, thus defined, could be represented in logico-mathematical terms by a universal formula – the ʹcanonical formulaʹ of myth – which would read as follows:\[{{\text{f}}_{\text{x}}}\text{(a) : }{{\text{f}}_{\text{y}}}\text{(b) : : }{{\text{f}}_{\text{x}}}\text{(b) : }{{\text{f}}_{{{\text{a}}^{\text{-1}}}}}\text{(y)}\text{.}\]

Since 1955, the Lévi-Straussian definition of myth as...

My study of the texts related to Attis goes back to a short treatise about this Phrygian deity from Asia Minor whose cult was imported to Greece and Rome (Trencsényi-Waldapfel 1981). In an earlier article, I suggested that these myths are but one subset of otherwise typical stories about flower heroes such as Hyakinthos, Narkissos, Kyparissos, or Adonis, who characteristically are wounded and turned into plants at the storyʹs climax. Following this repetitive action, I also offered a Proppian segmentation of the respective myth variants (Darányi 1986). My aim with this study is to suggest the applicability of multivariate classification...

In this article I want to consider a suggestion first put forward by some linguists¹ that Claude Lévi-Straussʹs thought can be seen as a partial rehabilitation of the Ramist tradition of thought that flourished in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.² This tradition covered grammar, rhetoric, and logic, but I restrict myself to the latter here. The Ramist logical tradition, which has its origins in AristotleʹsTopics, was superseded by the rise of the what is now called ʹformalʹ or ʹmathematicalʹ logic. The work of Descartes and Leibniz in the seventeenth century was the beginning of the end of Ramist...

Claude Lévi-Straussʹs canonical formula (CF) for the analysis of myth has been the object of several scholarly papers (see Scubla 1998), but it still remains a mystery of sorts. Controversy persists on its interpretation. Should it be discarded as nonsense, as some would have it? Or is it still to be better understood? Actually, as one may learn from the history of mathematics, it remains imperative to be cautious when dealing with that kind of issue.

Remember the controversies about irrational numbers. Pascal and Barrow saw them merely as symbols – as some do with Lévi-Straussʹs canonical formula. By contrast,...

This chapter stems from a question formulated by Pierre Ouellet in his presentation of an issue of the periodicalRS/SI, entitled ʹSymbolic Representation and Spatial Organizationʹ (1992), and proposes a series of reflections on Lévi-Straussʹs renownedcanonical formula of mythinvolving certain cognitivist themes. The question was as follows: ʹHow does the topological or morphological structure of space give rise to different symbolic representations of a perceptual, conceptual or more broadly socio-cultural nature?ʹ (Ouellet 1992: 186).

We shall address the question on a background of Kantian philosophy by first presenting the Connectionist (hereafter CN) Paradigm and its commitments along with...

This new reflection on the canonical formula for myths (CF) proposed in 1955 by Claude Lévi-Strauss provides me with the opportunity to clarify the morphodynamical model I proposed in 1988 in the journalLʹHomme(H1).¹ During the exciting seminar organized by Professor Solomon Marcus at the Collège de France in Paris in the fall of 1993, I clarified some of its epistemological difficulties. This work was published inLʹHommein 1995 (H2).² I will attempt here to explain in further detail the so-called double cusp model presented inH1. My basis will be the pioneering work of Pierre Maranda³ and...