Mit ve Anlam
Claude Levi-StraussMit ve Anlam Gönderileri
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If we try to read a myth as we read a novel or a newspaper article, that is line after line, reading from left to right, we don’t understand the myth, because we have to apprehend it as a totality and discover that the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events but—if I may say so— by bundles of events even although these events appear at different moments in the story.
Among some North American Indians, the pregnant woman is forbidden to turn around too fast when she is lying asleep, because if she did, the body fluids would divide in two parts, and she would give birth to twins.
We can easily now conceive of a time when there will be only one culture and one civilization on the entire surface of the earth. I don’t believe this will happen, because there are contradictory tendencies always at work—on the one hand towards homogenization and on the other towards new distinctions. The more a civilization becomes homogenized, the more internal lines of separation become apparent; and what is gained on one level is immediately lost on another.
We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature while, of course, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe.
Science will never give us all the answers. What we can try to do is to increase very slowly the number and the quality of the answers we are able to give, and this, I think, we can do only through science.