Rigor in Myth and Science--Same Difference

"Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at 'taking off' from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling.... [T]he kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science and... the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied."

Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth"