On the canonical formula of C. Levi-Strauss

The anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss has formulated a theory of the structure of myths using a formalism borrowed from mathematics, which has been difficult to interpret, and is somewhat controversial. Nevertheless, LeviStrauss’s old school chum Andre Weil took his work seriously, and in this note I propose an interpretation of LeviStrauss’s `canonical formula’ in terms of an anti-automorphism of the quaternion group of order eight.