View source for Claude Levi Strauss

- myths are akin to a musical fugue, in that they can only be translated through another myth

- the drive of myths within humanity is the obsession to solve a paradox that cannot be solved

- in the question of describing reality as experienced by humans, it is meditated by the structure of the nervous system through its management of mind and experience

- structuralism attempts to identify the underlying code to phenomena, something that can be universal or "invariant"

– human intellectual endeavour is to introduce some kind of order to the universe

- non-writing societies still are moved by a desire to understand the world around them through intellectual thought processes

– the human mind is generally the same (capacity-wise) and becomes specialised around the needs of the indivdual

- in order to produce culture, groups must believe in their independent uniqueness – now we are consumers with no originality due to the overabundance of information

- understanding the roots of myths can be achieved through realizing the quality of reality in the story – basic conditions used to describe phenomena (i.e. due to the physical characteristics of the skate fish, it can exist in a binary state of on/off and same with the south wind)

- In all mythology there are deities whom act as conduits between the spiritual world and the real world

– Specific deities can be representative of a dialect in qualities, i.e. the rabbit can be a god beneficent to humanity, but also representative of the good/bad twin oppositional merged into one being

- it is best to analyze myths from a non-linear perspective taking the totality of the events, as you would a piece of music

- returning to the fugue analogy, many myths take the form of group a chasing group b, the distinctions melting away, and the groups become joined

- music took over the function of mythology when the sciences sought to divorce experience from data