be persuaded that the demonstration of such a fine-grain hi-
erarchy of relations could possibly be worthwhile.
I would not myself want to suggest that skepticism
should be wholly abandoned, but I recommend a close read-
ing of O’Flaherty’s Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology
of S ́iva (1973), taking special note of the pull-out Chart of
Motifs and of the complexities of Appendix A
(pp. 319–320), which together show what I mean by saying
that, in structuralist analysis, it is assumed that the message
is embedded in relationships between relationships. This is
a one-dimensional study, but it is a very distinguished exam-
ple of its kind.
My own favorite definition of myth is that of Julius Sch-
niewind: “Mythology is the expression of unobservable reali-
ties in terms of observable phenomena” (Bartsch, 1953–
1962, p. 47). This puts myth at the very core of all forms
of religious expression. In the five pages of her concluding
chapter, O’Flaherty provides as good an argument as any
that I know for saying that a structuralist analysis of a corpus
of mythology can show us how these unobservable realities
become apprehensible through close familiarity with a set of
stories which on the face of it are mutually contradictory.
But the determined skeptic can find reassurance in the
fact that competent structuralists analyzing the same materi-
als seldom arrive at the same conclusions. Chabrol and
Marin’s Le récit évangelique (1974) is a multiauthored struc-
turalist monograph on the theme of the New Testament par-
ables. Their work derives its theoretical basis from the semio-
tic theories of A. J. Greimas. Leach and Aycock’s Structuralist
Interpretations of Biblical Myth (1983, chap. 5) is a much
shorter structuralist essay but is also concerned with New
Testament parables, and the underlying theory is similar in
many respects. The argument which Chabrol offers in his
essay “De la sémiotique en question” (Chabrol and Marin,
1974, pp. 193–213) overlaps at many points with what I
have been saying in the present article. Yet with the possible
exception of Chabrol himself (see p. 135), the various French
authors all agree that parable is a meaningful genre for struc-
turalist purposes, while I, in the work cited above, argue
quite specifically that it is not. A critical comparison of the
arguments offered in these two, in some ways very similar,
contributions might be of value for those who find the struc-
turalist/semiotic treatment of religious texts too slippery to
handle.
Conclusion: The Sistine Chapel. I shall conclude by
offering the skeleton of part of one of my own essays showing
how works of art, literary texts, and church practice can be
combined in a meaningful structural pattern.
The nine main panels in the ceiling of the Sistine Chap-
el in the Vatican are of world renown. They are grouped in
three sets of three, a cross-reference to the Holy Trinity. At
the altar end, God as Creator and Light of the World appears
alone without man; at the opposite end are three panels de-
picting Noah/Adam, the sinful but potentially redeemable
man without God. At the center are three scenes where man
and God are together: the creation of Adam, the creation of
Eve, and the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expul-
sion from paradise.
The Sistine Chapel, which is the personal chapel of the
pope, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary of the Assumption as
Queen of Heaven. The Virgin in this role is the Second Eve;
she also stands for the church itself. In the center panel the
figure of the newly created Eve is at the exact center of the
entire ceiling. In the panel depicting the Fall, the serpent
coiled around the tree of life is doubled and effectively cruci-
form. It has two humanoid heads. One, which forms a
branch to the left, is that of the temptress who grasps the vo-
luptuous but still innocent Eve by the hand. The other,
which forms a branch to the right, is that of the angel armed
with the flaming sword which drives the now haggard sinners
into the wilderness. The face of the serpent-temptress is like
that of the newly created Eve, but it looks in the reverse di-
rection; the face of the voluptuous, innocent Eve is that of
the uncreated Eve who appears wrapped in the womb of time
in the panel showing the creation of Adam. According to a
medieval legend, the cross on which Christ died was cut from
the tree of life that had grown in the garden of Eden.
The cruciform depiction of this tree with its double-
headed serpent was originally positioned so as to be directly
above the screen dividing the secular antichapel from the sa-
cred chapel proper. In a more ordinary church of the period,
this position would have been filled by a crucifix standing
above the rood screen.
The theme of the double-headed serpent turned into a
crucifix recurs in the corner panel to the right of the altar,
where the manifest depiction is the story of the healing of
the sinful Israelites smitten by a plague of serpents in the wil-
derness. In this case there is a direct cross-reference to the
passage in the Gospel of John that reads: “And as Moses lifted
up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should
not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:14–15).
This is only a partial outline. Even in minimally con-
vincing form, full analysis calls for an essay substantially lon-
ger than the whole of the present article. Many of the themes
in this analysis have also appeared in other interpretations of
Michelangelo’s iconography, but some are a peculiar product
of structuralist methodology. Some art historians, theolo-
gians, and literary critics find the results convincing. Such
is the only justification which I can put forward for structur-
alism in general. If some readers of structuralist analyses feel
that they have thereby gained insights which they did not
have before, the exercise has been worthwhile.BIBLIOGRAPHY
In no sense at all should the bibliography which follows be regard-
ed as a guide to the literature of structuralism, or even to that
part of structuralist literature concerned with religious
studies. It simply lists references mentioned in the foregoingSTRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION] 8755