Wow. Lévi-Strauss is really good. Some pages on the relationship between "meaning" and "knowledge" in systems of symbols / language. 
Didn't highlight it, but I love how Lévi-Strauss characterizes science: the discovery of complementary patterns, relationships within the totality of signification.
The process through which we construct science leaves a "leftover", which we notice but cannot express within scientific knowledge. For this, we need something else, some "divine totality", to which our poets and artists reach.
Does this need for signifying the "leftovers" of knowledge form our "God shaped hole"? Might we fill it with "just-so stories", pseudo-science of evolution or genetics or psychology, subtly eliding its function as a totality?
I think traditional esoteric techniques like astrology and Kabbalah do a better job than pseudoscience at satisfying a need for symbolic totality (for those of discerning psychic character, at least). Why? Because they're so dense and relationally rich.
I'm merely a beginner, but my sense of Traditional Esoterica is that small sets of rules explode combinatorially when considered in concert.
The relationship of each astrological planet to another is _meaningful_, and the network of available relations is maximally dense.
The relationship of each astrological planet to another is _meaningful_, and the network of available relations is maximally dense.
It makes sense to me: a system with a claim to represent symbolic totality should strive for symbolic totality (or perhaps, maximality) within itself as well.
If an esoteric system is complete within itself, the process of knowledge generation is reversed compared with science. The latter finds the patterns first, and seeks a complementary system. The former starts with a system and places observations within it.
To reject all totalizing systems of belief for empirical reasons, as the classic atheist might, is to reject what Lévi-Strauss saw as a fundamental need within human psychology. More than anything, it shows a failure of reflexive understanding.
But really, the atheist shows nothing new, because if we believe that Science is the dominant authority in our times (which the postmodernists i.e. Lyotard did not), then a rejection of non-science is merely an affirmation of "sanity".
The idea of sanity and social authority ties back to a discussion earlier in the Lévi-Strauss paper, which I submit for your consideration.
(As an aside, anyone who follows the science on coronavirus--not the scientific institutions, but the scientific publications themselves--will see how far removed science is from Science, and yet how the latter, so much more than the former, dictates our collective behavior.)
