ABSTRACT
Levi-Strauss draws attention to a structural similarity between mythic relations between Orion and the Pleiades found in the ancient Mediterranean and widespread ideas among the forest peoples of Amazonia, again suggesting – as with the parallel stories from Greece and Australia – a common origin in remote prehistory. In east-central Africa the Tabwa people recognize the ‘hunter’ motif, already encountered in Europe and Australia, in the three visible stars constituting what in European myth is the ‘belt’ of the great hunter called Orion. The sub-science of mythology has come a long way since Max Muller’s nineteenth-century project of reducing all mythical stories to expressions of primeval sun-worship. The celestial information de Santillana and von Dechend have discovered in myths purporting to describe the doings of earth-bound actors conveys the ‘real’ meaning of these ancient tales, one known only to the intellectual elite, or priesthood, of prehistoric human society.
