  We extend the Microscopic Representation approach to the quantitative study
of religious and folk stories: A story encrypting symbolically the creation is
deconstructed into its simplest conceptual elements and their relationships. We
single out a particular kind of relationship which we call "diagonal (or
transitive) link": given 2 relations between the couples of elements AB and
respectively BC, the "diagonal link" is the (composite) relation AC. We find
that the diagonal links are strongly and systematically correlated with the
events in the story that are considered crucial by the experts. We further
compare the number of diagonal links in the symbolic creation story with a folk
tale, which ostensibly narrates the same overt succession of events (but
without pretensions of encrypting additional meanings). We find that the
density of diagonal links per word in the folk story is lower by a factor of 2.
We speculate that, as in other fields the simple transitive operations acting
on elementary objects are at the core of the emergence and recognition of
macroscopic meaning and novelty in complex systems.
