잃어버린 낙원을 찾아서 - 엘리아데와 레비스트로스의 신화 -

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the characteristics of mythical mind which Levi-strauss and Eliade have elucidated with brilliant insight. In an age when mythical thingking prevails among the realm of mentality, people's lives have a close relationship with nature. Today scientific and rational thingking is in a prevelent position, but its overuse has revealed limits and problems everywhere. For example there has been wars of massacre and relentless destruction of nature caused by the enlargement of industrial capitalism and the development of scientific techonology. As a result we lives in a 'risk society' where all sorts of disasters threaten our everyday lives. According to Levi-strauss and Eliade, mythical mind is a religious and a harmonizing one that seeks to integrate itself constantly within the admiring rythme of nature or of God. Thus they expected that it would play a soteriological role that unify the fragmented universe and human being, though each author illuminated different aspects of it. Levi-strauss shows that mythical mind harmonized nature and human being, or reason and emotion, while Eliade shows that it allowed communication between God and human being. This leads us to conclude that mythical mind is an integrating thingking that recognizes the whole world as meaningful and cooperative.