On the whole, the opposition between rite and myth is the same as that between living and thinking, and ritual represents a bastardization of thought, brought about by the constraints of life … This desperate, and inevitably unsuccessful, attempt to reestablish the continuity of lived experience, segmented through the schematism by which mythical speculation has replaced it, is the essence of ritual.” It is a vision of sad desolation, which runs counter to the transparent harmonia plantarum that Lévi-Strauss loves to contemplate: that harmony between the genetic code, the “savage mind” and—clash of cymbals—the scientific intellect which deciphers both the genetic code and the “savage mind,” all united by the indissoluble and flashing nexus of binary opposites. These, and only these, are the blocks used to build the House of the Discontinuous, the only true Temple of Solomon, which will rise up on the land claimed from the sea.

Lévi-Strauss’s revelations about the world and about himself at the end of his tetralogy help us understand why he is always so unconcerned about the messiest of rituals: sacrifice. But this unwelcome guest in his anthropology could not fail to appear, if only in passing, in the final orchestration of the themes. And it will be at the very point where Lévi-Strauss wants to emphasize, in criticizing Victor Turner, how ritual creates precisely nothing. Indeed, in relation to “categories, laws, or axioms,” adamant agents of the Discontinuous, it can indeed be said that ritual “endeavors rather, if not to deny them, at least to obliterate, temporarily, the distinctions and oppositions they lay down, by bringing out all sorts of ambiguities, compromises and transitions.”^{405, 406} In the geometrical city of the intellect, sacrifice is the harbor area: narrow alleyways, illicit dealings, the smell of the sea. And here Lévi-Strauss gives a rapid analysis in The Savage Mind, where he had sought to separate totemism and sacrifice once and for all, so that the tireless Australian classifiers were finally freed from any suspicion of such a blemish. The opening is already drastic: “That it should have been possible to regard totemism as the origin of sacrifice in the history of religion remains, after so long, a matter of astonishment.”⁴⁰⁷ But the reason for the scandal is immediately clear: the totemic system is based on series of parallel classifications, finely and rigorously developed, according to the sound rules of the discontinuous; sacrifice, on the other hand, is based on contiguity, on tracing and retracing a path from profane to sacred, and from sacred to profane: the principle of substitution, which dominates it, is joined, in the shadow, with the imperative of connection, and this latter implies a sequence of links that cross nature and society in every sense. “Sacrifice therefore belongs to the realms of continuity.”⁴⁰⁸ And this is the realm that Lévi-Strauss will never legitimize, the place of contaminating “ambiguities,” “compromises,” “transitions.” Lévi-Strauss regards the form of the sacrifice as the greatest offense against culture: “sacrifice turns to comparison as a means of effacing differences.”⁴⁰⁹ Here, without pronouncing their name, he evokes, as silent witnesses, the ultimate opponents of his thought: the Vedic seers. For him, no form of thought is as repugnant as their tireless straddling of three worlds, saying “this is that,” with no respect for any taxonomic boundary, without accepting those gaps that should alone guarantee meaning and are each time covered at least with wild orchids. Meanwhile, behind everything, looms the hated category: interdependence, no longer of relationships but of substances, a mystical plexus that envelops every logical mesh. This is the real Enemy: and here pathos ends up betraying the scholar. The confrontation between totemism and sacrifice becomes more and more harsh, until it is transformed into a sort of sorrowful condemnation: “Totemism, or so-called totemism, confines itself to conceiving a homology of structure between the two series [the natural species and social segments], a perfectly legitimate hypothesis, for social segments are instituted, and it is in the power of each society to render the hypothesis plausible by shaping its rules and representations accordingly.⁴¹⁰ The system of sacrifice, on the other hand, makes a nonexistent term, divinity, intervene; and it adopts a conception of the natural series which is false from the objective point of view, for, as we have seen, it represents it as continuous.”