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LIT-807: A Discrete-Event Simulation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Analysis of Myths Based on Symmetry and Double Twist Transformations

3 min read

Properties6
StatusActive — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-632), in full, from the publisher's version deposited in HAL; worth reading as the place where the authors' "transformation model" of Lévi-Strauss is actually specified, and for what that specification turns out to be. A myth is a list of mythemes, each a pair (term a, function x); homology, inversion, opposition and symmetry are all one operation, replacing a term by another term in every mytheme, the inverse, opposite or "symmetric" term being supplied by the user; adding and removing a mytheme complete the set. The canonical formula is explained by Lévi-Strauss's Jealous Potter example and listed as selectable, but no rule for computing it on a mytheme list is given. The "validation" generates 70 myths of the Mythologiques and 28 Corsican folktales by choosing, each time, the transformations that produce them, and reports them correct against Lévi-Strauss's books and Corsican specialists, with no measure. It encodes an analyst's transformations; it does not find or test them.
Tagsmyth-and-folklore, social-science
SupportsCLAIM-145 — Trope analysis of the kind A155 proposes is Propp's and Lévi-Strauss's transformational analysis, whom the manuscript should cite as precursors
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-019 — Lévi-Straussian transformational analysis, as Descola reads it and as it has been modelled computationally, is direct prior art for structural transport, not only a philosophical precursor
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-632 — Discrete-event simulation of Lévi-Strauss's myth analysis
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-432 — In Lévi-Straussian analysis of myth the group of transformations is not given by the material: which variants count as transforms of which, and by what operation, is cut by the analyst from a continuum, unlike transformations that develop an initial form by a rule, and the computational encodings of the method confirm this by taking the analyst's table of oppositions as input

Graph View

Jean-François Santucci, Albert Doja and Laurent Capocchi (2020), Symmetry 12(10):1706, 23 pp., MDPI, CC BY 4.0 — DOI-10.3390/sym12101706

Key takeaways

  • The representation. A myth is a coupled DEVS model whose atomic models are mythemes, each two variables: a term a (a person, animal, divinity or thing) and a function x (its role). A myth is stored as a text file of such pairs; the reference myth is Lévi-Strauss’s M1 (Bororo), loaded by a MythGen model.
  • The transformations, as specified (§2.2). Homology replaces term a by term b in every mytheme; inversion replaces a by “1/a”, opposition by “a⁻¹”, symmetry by “−a”, in every mytheme. The worked examples show that each is the same substitution with a different label: ogre → “Sybille” (homology), ogre → devil (inversion, because “in the Corsican culture, the devil is often considered as having an inverse character to the ogre”). Adding and removing a mytheme are the other two operations. Functions are not transformed by any basic operation.
  • The canonical formula f_x(a) : f_y(b) :: f_x(b) : f_{a⁻¹}(y) is glossed as the double twist (a term replaced by its opposite; a term value and a function value exchanged) and illustrated by The Jealous Potter (nightjar, woman, jealousy, potter; nightjar⁻¹ = ovenbird). It is listed among the operations a user may select, but the paper gives no rule for computing it on a mytheme list, and the example’s key step (which bird inverts the nightjar) is ethnographic knowledge.
  • Who supplies the transformation. Each TransformationADEVS instance holds a transfolist attribute naming the new myth and a list of (operation code, parameters); a chain of instances generates a variant step by step, and a Collector draws the resulting graph of myths. The Discussion says it outright: the inverse of the ogre, and every such value, “is not obtained from the software system”, and without it “it is impossible to define the transformation”. Simulation time only orders the chosen operations.
  • The validation (§5). “We have been able to generate all the considered 70 myths” of the Mythologiques, and 28 Corsican folktales, “by selecting each time a set of transformations to be applied on a given myth”; correctness was checked against Lévi-Strauss’s own variations and by “specialists of Corsican oral literature”. No list of the myths, the transformations used, or any disagreement is given, and nothing is measured.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-09 from the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation) at the owner’s request: the reader of Doja, Capocchi and Santucci 2021 (LIT-804, NOTE-609) flagged it as the paper in which the transformation engine summarised there is described. It is read here on its own merits. See the curation entry of that day.

Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-632). No THEORY is filed: the paper specifies software and reports that it reproduces analyses given to it, which is not a finding about myth. It answers the 2021 reader’s open question: the “transformation model” is a substitution grammar over (term, function) pairs driven by the analyst’s choices, so the 2021 paper’s summary was faithful and adds nothing it hid. It models Lévi-Strauss (LIT-775, unread here) and cites Propp’s Morphology (LIT-828) among earlier formalisations. Descola’s point that in myth the analyst makes the cuts (LIT-822) describes this software exactly.

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