Abstract
We introduce Claude Lévi Strauss’ canonical formula (CF), an attempt to rigorously formalise the general narrative structure of myth. This formula utilises the Klein group as its basis, but a recent work draws attention to its natural quaternion form, which opens up the possibility that it may require a quantum inspired interpretation. We present the CF in a form that can be understood by a non-anthropological audience, using the formalisation of a key myth (that of Adonis) to draw attention to its mathematical structure. The future potential formalisation of mythological structure within a quantum inspired framework is proposed and discussed, with a probabilistic interpretation further generalising the formula.
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Notes
- 1.
The classical texts we used as examples come from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/).
- 2.
The particular set of values we assigned to variables in the CF for this example was as follows: complete male/female: fertile/adult, incomplete male/female: infertile/adolescent; complete denial active voice: destroy/kill, complete affirmative active voice: procreate/bear, incomplete denial active voice: wound/hurt, incomplete affirmative active voice: heal; passive voice for the above: be destroyed/killed/begotten/born/wound/healed, plus the above being done either to the other or the self.
- 3.
“It may be significant, however, that an accident in boar hunting [...] is liable to produce wounds somehow equalling castration; then the boar would be just an exchangeable sign for a deeper meaning” [10, p. 108]. Castration as punishment or a voluntary act is frequent in the cult of a group of minor deities from Asia Minor, to which Adonis also belongs. Strictly speaking it is the boar who mutilates Adonis, not he himself, but as far as we know, on a higher level of abstraction these narrative elements belong together.
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Darányi, S., Wittek, P., Kitto, K. (2014). The Sphynx’s New Riddle: How to Relate the Canonical Formula of Myth to Quantum Interaction. In: Atmanspacher, H., Haven, E., Kitto, K., Raine, D. (eds) Quantum Interaction. QI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8369. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54943-4_5
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