Every elaborate mythology contains a group of cosmological myths that tell about the primary elements—fire, earth, water, and air—as well as about the cosmos and its parts. The main goal of these myths is to show the systematic structure of the world along with the organization of the cosmos and its difference from chaos. The mythologems of the World Tree or the World Mountain and systems of correspondences demonstrate the structure of the cosmos. These tools insure that all the different elements are connected to each other in a cosmological picture. According to Lévi- Strauss, they serve the mythic mind in “its aim to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe—and not only general but a total understanding.” To him, the need for total understanding is the “totalitarian ambition” of the mythic mind.

Composition as a Total Picture of the Universe

Certain projects and compositions of twentieth-century music evoke this “totalitarian ambition” of the mythic mind when composers attempt to present an all-embracing picture of the world. In 1913, Scriabin intended his Preliminary Action to take seven days, foreshadowing Stockhausen's seven-day-long musical work, his opera Licht. Both Scriabin's unrealized and Stockhausen's realized projects have a common root in Wagner's Romantic-mythological four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The Licht cycle is as ambitious and extravagant as Der Ring must have seemed in Wagner's time. Like Wagner, Stockhausen attempts to present a cosmological picture; however, the critics correctly drew a separation line between the two composers. Some of Wagner's operatic characters carry anti-Semitic implications, while Stockhausen's dramatic personae work towards a renewal of the “genetic quality” of humanity through the recreation of an essentially “musical” human race. Nevertheless, Licht, like Der Ring, is an enormous cycle of operas, even surpassing the latter in number, and corresponding to the seven days of the week. “For the rest of my life,” Stockhausen wrote, “I'd like to make a work incorporating everything I want and am capable of.”