It is important to notice that there is nothing in this
context-restricted, functionalist definition implying that
myth is fanciful or untrue in a realistic, positivist, historical
sense. This point needs emphasis and exemplification.
The biblical story of the garden of Eden is a myth for
devout Jews and Christians because of its cosmological and
moral implications, and not because it contains such “un-
true” incidents as God and the serpent both conversing with
Adam and Eve. Likewise, the stories that are told about the
signing of the Magna Carta at Runnemede near Windsor in
1215 are myth for all contemporary anglophone upholders
of parliamentary democracy. In this case there is very little
in the basic story which is obviously untrue (in the talking-
serpent sense). Indeed, some parts of it are demonstrably true
in a historical sense, since copies of the original document
still exist. Yet the story is nonetheless a myth, because it is
made to serve as a precedent for customary political conven-
tions which are still significant in the societies in question.
In this approach to myth, the social context in which
the stories are told is fundamental; a myth story isolated from
its proper context is devoid of meaning. It follows that those
who think about myth in this way are bound to regard Lévi-
Stauss’s extraordinary four-volume Mythologiques as largely
a waste of time, since the whole exercise is devoted to the
cross-cultural comparison of very abbreviated versions of
manifestly untrue stories completely isolated from their very
diverse original social settings.
Some of the myth analyses which Lévi-Strauss published
prior to 1962 took note of a functional (contextual) factor,
but in his later work he seems to assume that myth is an un-
differentiated, species-wide phenomenon which the human
mind is predisposed to generate, in much the same way as
it is predisposed to generate speech. He seeks to show how
the patterning and combination of myth stories are capable
of conveying meaning, but the meaning in question is very
general and not context-determined. The superficial differ-
ences between the myths of various cultures are treated as
comparable to the differences of phonology and grammar in
different human languages. At the level of innate capacity,
the deep structure is always the same. The myths that appear
in ethnographic records are all transformations of a single
universal myth which, like phonology, is structured accord-
ing to a system of distinctive features based on binary opposi-
tions. It follows that the themes with which this mythology
is concerned are ultimately human universals of a physiologi-
cal kind such as sex, metabolism, orientation, and life/death,
rather than the solution of local, culturally determined moral
issues.
This view of what mythology is about will not be conge-
nial to anthropologists who feel that their basic concern is
with cultural diversity, but it is not necessarily unacceptable
to the students of universalist religions who may likewise feel
that the metaphysical reality to which religion responds is al-
ways the same reality, no matter what its cultural form may
be. And even those who, like me, believe that myth has a
local rather than a universal significance, have much to learn
from Lévi-Strauss about the way the messages conveyed by
myth are embedded in the patterning and structure of the
presentation, rather than in the manifest content of the sto-
ries themselves.
This contrast of view among structuralists as to whether
myth has universal or local significance is also found in their
view of ritual. For the universalists, ritual equates with non-
verbal communication; what can be said about it is not very
different from what can be said about language as verbal
communication. The study of ritual is seen as a branch of
a more general zoological field, the study of animal behavior.
By contrast, those who see ritual as a localized, culturally de-
termined phenomenon link it quite directly to the local my-
thology and to particular rather than general cosmological as-
sumptions. Myth and ritual are mutual transformations;
each validates the other in its local setting. But in either case
the generalizations of the structuralists concerning binary op-
positions, transformations, combinations, metonymic and
metaphoric associations, and marginal states can prove illu-
minating.
Myths and rituals as related sets. One particular struc-
turalist proposition is especially relevant for my present pur-
poses: the thesis that mythical stories or sequences of ritual
behavior can never be decoded when considered in isolation
but only when considered as related sets. A myth story does,
of course, always have a manifest meaning considered as a
folk tale or as a record of an incident in history. In the same
way, an isolated ritual sequence can always be viewed as a
dramatic performance which the local customary rules re-
quire to be performed at a particular time and place. But the
structuralists assume that there is always another deeper, un-
conscious meaning which is of equal or perhaps greater sig-
nificance. The structuralist thesis is that such deeper mean-
ings are apprehended by the listener to a myth, or by the
participant-observer in a ritual situation, at a subliminal, aes-
thetic or religious level of consciousness. Structuralist analyt-
ical procedures are supposed to make such hidden meanings
explicit.
The structuralists’ thesis is that the auditor of a myth
(or the participant in a ritual) is able to take account of many
other myths and rituals with which he or she is familiar. The
interpretation applied to the text of any particular story will
then be influenced by the moral and aesthetic implications
of other such stories.
Thus, devout Jews and Christians will associate any par-
ticular story from the Old Testament with a host of other
stories both canonical and noncanonical, and it is the struc-
ture of the total set of such stories which carries implication.
Invariably, analyses of myth in the structuralist manner de-
rive their inferences from a comparison of a number of differ-
ent stories treated as members of a single set. At the end of
the analysis, it is the differences and not the similarities
among the stories that prove to have been treated as signi-
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