Myth and Meaning

I have been reading Claude Lévi-Strauss' Myth And Meaning. I like this passage from the introduction;

Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.

The first chapter, 'The Meeting of Myth and Science', discusses how science had to, by necessity, strive to divorce itself from religion between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And that now, science is coming around to engage in a wider discourse which could be seen to incorporate the concerns of mythology. He also discusses his take on structuralism; about finding the links of meaning between modes of expression. The second chapter, ''Primitive' Thinking and the 'Civilized' Mind'', discusses ways of conceiving the mindset of 'primitive' peoples, and disperses the myth the 'civilized' mind is more, well, civilized.

...myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion.