03 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Philosophy

1 Being as Relation, not Substance

Philosophy often begins with the question: what is real? Traditionally, answers have centred on substance — what endures behind change, the hidden “stuff” of the world. Yet, in certain strands of thought, reality is anticipated not as substance but as relation.

Heraclitus declared, “Everything flows,” highlighting that the world is defined by change and interaction, not by static entities. Parmenides emphasised unity, but not as atomistic being — rather as the interdependent whole of existence. Even Plato, in his theory of Forms, hints that reality is structured not merely as objects but as patterns of relation — the forms acquire meaning through participation and interconnection.

Much later, process philosophy, especially in Whitehead, explicitly rejected substance as primary. Entities are “actual occasions,” constituted through their relations, events, and interactions. Being is not a static thing but a network of relations in continual flux.

From a relational ontology perspective, these anticipations are profound. Being is not first substance, then relation; being is relation. Entities exist only in perspectival alignment with other entities and potentialities. Reality is cut, instantiated, and sustained through relational structuring.

Philosophy’s early and modern anticipations thus echo the core moves of relational ontology: the world is not an assembly of independent things, but a patterned constellation of interdependencies. Substance is never ultimate; relation is constitutive. Being is always already relational.

2 Knowledge as Construal

If being is relational, then so too is knowledge. Philosophy has long anticipated that we do not encounter “raw” reality, but only reality as it is construed through relational frameworks.

Kant made this explicit: phenomena are always mediated by the structures of cognition. We do not know things-in-themselves; we know them as they appear through the organising patterns of the mind. Husserl extended this insight with intentionality: consciousness is never a passive mirror of reality but an active constitutor of objects, always relationally directed.

From a relational ontology perspective, these moves anticipate the principle that meaning is not a property of things themselves, but of their instantiation in a network of potential and perspective. Knowledge is not merely representation; it is a perspectival cut, a symbolic alignment between the knower and the known.

Even contemporary philosophy of science echoes this: observations, models, and measurements are constrained by the conditions of the system and the observer. Knowledge emerges not in isolation but in the relational interplay of observer, observed, and horizon of possibility.

Thus philosophy anticipates what relational ontology insists upon: phenomena are always construed, and reality as we engage it is inseparable from the relational conditions of its instantiation. Knowing is not uncovering an independent world; it is participating in the alignment of relational potential.

3 Individuation and the Social Horizon

If being is relational and knowledge is construed, then the self itself is never isolated. Philosophy has repeatedly anticipated that individuation emerges only in relation to a collective horizon.

Hegel’s notion of recognition (Anerkennung) makes this explicit: the self achieves selfhood through acknowledgment by others. Identity is not a private possession but a relational phasing, realised in the interplay of self and social whole. Dewey and pragmatist thinkers echo this: meaning, action, and value emerge through coordinated engagement within communities, not from isolated reasoning.

From a relational ontology perspective, these insights prefigure a core principle: individuation is perspectival. The individual is a node in a network of collective potential. Personal growth, ethical responsibility, and social agency are phased through the alignment of individual and collective horizons.

This reading dissolves the classical dichotomy of individual versus society. The self does not precede relation, nor is it subordinated to the group. It is a perspectival articulation along the cline between collective and individual potential, continually staged and re-staged.

Myth anticipates this relational phasing in heroic cycles; philosophy anticipates it conceptually. In both, individuation is never a solipsistic unfolding, but a symbolic or conceptual alignment within the larger field of relational being.

4 Contingency and the Limits of Absolutes

Philosophy, like myth, often anticipates the insight that order, law, and meaning are contingent rather than absolute.

Nietzsche argued that values, morality, and “truths” are perspectival constructions, arising from historical, cultural, and relational conditions. There are no eternal moral absolutes; each system of value is provisional and context-dependent. Derrida extended this critique to the very structures of language and thought, showing that any system of meaning is contingent, always open to reinterpretation, inversion, or deconstruction.

From a relational ontology perspective, these philosophical moves prefigure the trickster logic of myth: every order is a cut, but no cut is final. Horizons of meaning, once established, are never impermeable; they remain open to revision, disruption, and realignment. Contingency is not weakness — it is the ontological fact of relational being.

This insight resonates with relational ontology’s core principles: systems are perspectival, alignments are provisional, and reality is always open to re-cutting. Philosophy anticipates this through the conceptual recognition that absolutes are always contingent, and that understanding, being, and value emerge only in context and relation.

5 Reflexivity, Cycles, and the Web of Being

Philosophy, in certain traditions, has anticipated the deeply relational and reflexive character of reality.

Eastern philosophies such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, Daoism, and Huayan thought emphasise interdependence, non-substantiality, and infinite mutual reflection. The Huayan Net of Indra, for example, imagines each phenomenon reflecting all others, producing an infinite web of relationality — a cosmos without discrete, self-contained entities.

Western thinkers, too, have anticipated these insights. Cybernetics, autopoiesis, and systems theory treat entities as nodes in self-organising, feedback-rich networks. Knowledge, meaning, and being are sustained only through reflexive interaction; nothing exists in isolation.

From a relational ontology perspective, these ideas anticipate the insight that reality is co-constituted across scales: events, entities, and meanings emerge through ongoing alignment, reflection, and relational phasing. There is no final cut, no static cosmos; all is dynamically interdependent.

Philosophy, like myth, gestures toward this relational horizon. In thought, as in story, reflexivity, cycles, and infinite relationality are recognised as constitutive of being. Knowledge, action, and existence are never self-contained but always enacted within the web of being.

Coda: Philosophy as Experimental Construal

Taken together, these philosophical anticipations form a striking pattern: reality is relational, knowledge is perspectival, individuation emerges within collective horizons, orders are contingent, and being is reflexively constituted.

Just as myths stage relational experiments symbolically, philosophy stages them conceptually. Heraclitus’ flux, Kant’s mediation, Hegel’s recognition, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Net of Indra all explore, in different registers, the same insight: there is no unconstrued phenomenon. Being, knowing, and meaning are always instantiated through relational cuts, alignments, and phasings.

Philosophy, therefore, is not only a search for timeless truths; it is an ongoing experiment in relational construal. Concepts are cuts, arguments are alignments, theories are reflexive projections. Each philosophical system constitutes a horizon within which reality is made intelligible — always provisional, contingent, and interdependent.

Reading philosophy in this way reveals an echo of relational ontology across time and tradition. It is a reminder that the questions we pose, the distinctions we draw, and the patterns we discern are themselves part of the unfolding web of being. Philosophy, like myth, invites us to construe anew, to re-align, and to participate in the continual making of worlds.

02 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Myth

1 Creation as Cut

When myth turns to creation, it rarely describes a smooth, linear unfolding. Instead, creation is staged as a cut.

In Genesis, “Let there be light” is not a chronological step in a physical process — it is a division: light from darkness, order from chaos, world from void. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk slays Tiamat and cuts her body into heavens and earth. In Māori cosmogony, Rangi and Papa — Sky and Earth — are separated by their children, and the world becomes possible through their parting. Again and again, the world is not “made” but divided, named, separated.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate a crucial insight: creation is not an absolute beginning in time, but a perspectival cut in potential. Systems, as we understand them, are structured possibilities. Instantiation is not the gradual accumulation of substance, but the sudden construal of relation — the drawing of a line that makes inside and outside, self and other, earth and sky.

This is why creation myths often begin with chaos, undifferentiated night, or primal waters. These are not failed attempts at proto-science. They are symbolic construals of uncut potential. What follows is always the cut: the division of one into two, the naming that distinguishes, the separation that instantiates.

Creation myths thus encode, in symbolic form, the insight that being arises from differentiation. Reality is not first substance, then relation; it is relation from the start. Without the cut, there is no cosmos, no world, no possibility of meaning.

Seen this way, myth anticipates relational ontology’s own insistence: there is no unconstrued phenomenon, no reality independent of cut. To be is to be distinguished within a horizon of possibility.

Creation, in myth, is not the origin of matter but the staging of meaningful cosmos. It is the symbolic alignment of a collective to a world that has become cut, named, and oriented.

2 Cosmos as Reflexive Projection

Once creation is cut, myth turns to cosmos: the world not as brute matter but as an ordered horizon.

In many traditions, the cosmos is not an external reality to be observed; it is a mirror, a projection, a symbolic alignment between collective life and the wider whole. Among the Navajo, the stars are placed in the sky through a tale of order and disorder, their pattern reflecting principles of balance that also govern human life. In ancient Egypt, the cosmic order of Ma’at was simultaneously the structure of the heavens and the basis of justice. In Polynesian voyaging traditions, the sea is not just geography but a patterned cosmos, oriented through stars, swells, and ancestral guidance.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that cosmos is reflexively construed. The stars are not merely “out there”: they are aligned with the collective, staging a horizon of meaning and possibility. Cosmos is not discovered but constituted. It functions as a symbolic mirror through which collectives experience themselves as part of a larger whole.

In this way, myth resists the division between inner and outer. What Campbell framed as archetype, we can instead read as reflexive projection: the alignment of collective construal with the patterns of the world. Cosmos is the collective turned inside-out, a world whose shape is the shape of symbolic life itself.

To call the cosmos reflexive is not to deny its materiality, but to foreground how it becomes meaningful. Every constellation, every seasonal cycle, every sacred mountain or river is not simply “there”: it is construed as part of a symbolic horizon, binding the collective into alignment with the world.

Thus myth anticipates another of relational ontology’s core moves: reality is not independent of construal. The cosmos is not simply a background against which life unfolds; it is the symbolic horizon through which life takes shape.

3 Individuation as Relational Phasing

Myth does not only align cosmos and collective. It also stages the place of the individual. But here again, individuation is not construed as autonomy in the modern sense. It is always relational.

Initiation rituals, heroic cycles, shamanic journeys: these myths place the individual in trial or transition. The novice undergoes ordeals, the hero departs, suffers, and returns, the shaman descends into other worlds. Yet in every case, individuation is only complete when it is reintegrated into the collective. The initiate becomes an adult for the community. The hero returns with gifts of knowledge, power, or renewal for the people. The shaman’s journey heals not themselves, but the social whole.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate individuation as phasing. The individual is not a unit that precedes relation; they are a cut within collective potential. Individuation is a perspectival articulation along a cline between the shared horizon and the particular node.

The mythic hero is not an archetype of inner psyche, but a symbolic construal of this phasing. Their journey dramatises how individual potential is actualised only through relation to collective possibility. To individuate is to take up a place in the web, not to stand outside it.

This explains why myth so often insists on ordeal, trial, or death before transformation. Individuation is not a simple flowering of inner essence, but a restructuring of relational alignment. The ordeal symbolises the re-cutting of possibility, the shift of perspective that allows a new constellation of self and collective to emerge.

In this way, myth again anticipates relational ontology’s move: there is no individual outside relation, no self without collective alignment. Individuation is the reflexive phasing of the whole through the part.

4 Trickster and the Contingency of Cuts

If creation myths stage the cut, and heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing, then trickster tales reveal another truth: the cut is never final.

Tricksters appear across traditions: Loki in Norse tales, Coyote and Raven in Native American stories, Eshu in Yoruba cosmology. They deceive, disrupt, invert, and play. They mock the gods, steal fire, blur boundaries, turn order into chaos and chaos into unexpected renewal.

From a relational ontology perspective, trickster figures anticipate the insight that symbolic orders are contingent. No cosmos, no law, no meaning-system is absolute. Every cut that instantiates an horizon of order is open to inversion, disruption, or re-cutting.

Trickster shows that systems are perspectival. Where the gods impose structure, the trickster reveals fissures. Where norms stabilise, the trickster exposes arbitrariness. Where horizons seem fixed, the trickster reminds us they are only ever symbolic alignments — provisional, not eternal.

This is why trickster stories oscillate between comedy and danger. They carry both the joy of freedom and the risk of collapse. The trickster destabilises order, but also makes renewal possible. By revealing contingency, trickster opens the space for re-alignment.

In this sense, trickster is myth’s anticipation of ontology’s critical move: that reality is not a closed system of absolutes, but an ongoing construal, always susceptible to being cut again.

What Campbell might call archetype, we instead read as a symbolic dramatisation of the ontological fact of contingency. Trickster is not an eternal form, but a reflexive reminder: no cosmos is final, no meaning immune to play.

5 Reflexive Cycles of Renewal

If trickster reminds us that no cut is final, many myths go further: they portray the cosmos itself as cyclically dissolving and reforming.

Seasonal myths stage this rhythm through the death and rebirth of deities — Persephone descending into the underworld, Osiris dismembered and restored, Inanna passing through death’s gates and returning renewed. Cosmic myths stage even larger cycles: Hindu traditions speak of kalpas, vast spans of creation and dissolution; Norse myth anticipates Ragnarök, the world’s destruction and its rebirth from the sea.

These cycles are not mistakes of “primitive science.” They are symbolic construals of a deeper ontological truth: reality is not static, but reflexive. Horizons of meaning are constituted, dissolve, and must be constituted again. Cosmos is not once-and-for-all but ongoing, a patterned renewal of collective alignment.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that construal is never finished. To live in a symbolic cosmos is to live within cycles of renewal, where meanings and worlds must be re-cut, re-aligned, and re-staged. Death and rebirth are not only biological or seasonal facts; they symbolise the reflexivity of being itself.

This is why myth so often insists on ritual repetition. Festivals, sacrifices, and commemorations are not simply commemorative. They are re-instantiations of cosmos, symbolic acts of keeping the horizon alive. Renewal is not automatic; it requires reflexive participation.

In this way, myths of cyclic renewal stage one of relational ontology’s deepest insights: reality is constituted through ongoing reflexive alignment. What is cut must be cut again. What is aligned must be re-aligned. The cosmos is never finished; it is always in the making.

6 The Net of Indra

Among the most striking anticipations of relational ontology comes from the Buddhist and Hindu image of the Net of Indra.

The image is simple but profound: an infinite net stretches across the cosmos, and at each intersection rests a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel, and in each reflection the whole net is mirrored again. Nothing exists in isolation; everything is constituted in relation to everything else.

From a relational ontology perspective, this mythic image is astonishingly prescient. Reality here is not composed of independent substances but of relations. Each node exists only through its reflexive entanglement with all others. To perceive one jewel is to perceive the entire net, since each reflection contains the whole.

The Net of Indra thus dissolves the idea of an unconstrued phenomenon. There is no jewel that exists outside of relation, no being that is self-sufficient. Everything is cut, aligned, and constituted within the relational whole.

In mythic terms, the net stages the insight that cosmos is not a hierarchy of absolutes but a reflexive web. In ontological terms, it anticipates our insistence that meaning and reality are co-constitutive, that construal always scales through relational alignment, and that the part and the whole are perspectival, not separate.

What modern metaphysics strains to articulate in abstractions, the Net of Indra gives us in a single shimmering image: reality as infinite reflexivity, relation all the way down.

Coda: Myth as Ontological Experiment

What, then, do these myths reveal?

Creation myths show that being emerges through cut. Cosmological myths show the reflexive projection of collective horizons. Heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing. Trickster tales reveal the contingency of symbolic orders. Renewal cycles dramatise the reflexivity of worlds dissolving and reforming. And the Net of Indra offers a dazzling image of infinite relationality.

Taken together, these are not primitive attempts at science. They are experimental ontologies. Myths are not naïve explanations of nature; they are symbolic construals of possibility. They test, stage, and explore what it means to live in a world constituted by relation.

Seen through the lens of relational ontology, myth is not a failed epistemology but an archive of insight. It anticipates, in symbolic form, many of the moves we now make philosophically: that there is no unconstrued phenomenon, that instantiation is a cut in potential, that cosmos is reflexive, that individuation is perspectival, that every order is contingent, and that reality itself is relational all the way down.

This is why myths endure. They do not only tell stories; they hold open ontological horizons. They invite us to construe again, to re-align, to imagine new worlds.

Myth, then, is not the dream of an unconscious psyche, nor the failed hypothesis of an early science. It is an experiment in being. And in its shimmering cuts, cycles, and nets, it continues to anticipate the relational insight: reality is always already construed, and meaning is the way the world comes to be.

01 October 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Function to Horizon

The Functions of Myth Reframed: A Relational Ontology

Joseph Campbell suggested that mythology has four core functions: mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, and sociological. Each, in his telling, expresses a timeless role of myth in the psychic and cultural life of humanity.

But Campbell’s functions rely on an archetypal ontology: they presuppose a universal psyche, whose needs for awe, order, guidance, and structure are timeless and given. In this frame, myths become symbolic tools for eternal psychic functions.

Relational ontology makes a different cut. It resists the idea of universal psychic functions and treats myths instead as semiotic operations: symbolic construals that transform value into meaning-of-meaning and phase collective life. What Campbell names as four functions can be reframed as four relational operations:

Symbolising Alterity (reframing the mystical) — constraining the inassimilable through symbolic projection.
Projecting a Reflexive World (reframing the cosmological) — weaving value and meaning into a cosmos reflexively sustained by the collective.
Phasing Individuation (reframing the pedagogical) — aligning life-course transitions within symbolic horizons of the collective.
Synchronising the Collective (reframing the sociological) — binding orientations, practices, and institutions into symbolic unity.

In what follows, we will reread Campbell’s four functions through this relational lens. Myth is not the servant of universal psychic needs; it is the symbolic technology of collective life, staging horizons of possibility, binding individuals to worlds, and weaving worlds into collectives.

1 Symbolising Alterity (Reframing the Mystical)

Campbell’s first function of mythology is the mystical: to awaken awe before the mystery of being. In his telling, myths serve as reminders of a transcendent order beyond comprehension, stirring reverence for life’s unfathomable ground.

From a relational ontology perspective, however, this mystical function is not about awakening a pre-given psychic response. It is about symbolising alterity — giving semiotic form to what cannot otherwise be assimilated.

Every collective confronts what exceeds its grasp: death, catastrophe, the infinite, the unknown. These are not simply external “mysteries,” but relational limits where construal breaks down. Myth does not reveal these mysteries; it contains them by projecting them into symbolic horizons — gods, spirits, primordial forces.

In this sense, myth’s so-called mystical function is really a semiotic operation of constraint. It takes intensities that bypass perception — terror, awe, ecstasy — and anchors them in symbolic form. The storm becomes the anger of the sky-god; death becomes the journey to an underworld. These projections do not explain alterity but make it inhabitable.

The point is not reverence before mystery but the symbolic domestication of alterity. Myth gives a community the means to live with what it cannot master, to align around the inassimilable without collapsing into disorientation.

Thus the mystical reframed: not universal awe, but the symbolic construal of limits. Myth does not open the psyche to eternal mystery; it stabilises a collective against what it cannot otherwise endure.

2 Projecting a Reflexive World (Reframing the Cosmological)

Campbell’s second function of mythology is the cosmological: to explain the structure and order of the universe. For him, myths provide a symbolic map of the cosmos, situating human life within a grand design.

Relational ontology reframes this. Myths are not proto-scientific explanations of an objective universe. They are acts of world-making: symbolic projections that generate a cosmos reflexively structured by the collective.

A cosmos, in this sense, is not the physical universe but a horizon of meaning. Mountains become ancestors, rivers become life-givers, stars become guides. Myths weave these elements together into a symbolic whole where natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations are inseparable.

This is not explanation but projection: the cosmos appears to precede the collective, yet is constituted through its symbolic practices. The order of the world is reflexive — it reflects and sustains the order of the collective itself.

Thus, when a people tells of creation, they are not accounting for physical origins; they are articulating the relational architecture within which they live. The world is narrated into being, and that narration aligns collective existence.

Reframed this way, the cosmological function is not about explaining the universe, but about projecting a reflexive world. Myth generates a cosmos that feels given and necessary, but is in fact the symbolic articulation of collective construal.

3 Phasing Individuation (Reframing the Pedagogical)

Campbell’s third function of mythology is the pedagogical: to guide individuals through the stages of life, from birth to death. Myths, he suggests, provide symbolic models for navigating universal thresholds of existence.

From a relational ontology standpoint, individuation is not a solitary psychic process. It is always phased within the horizon of the collective. Myth provides not universal life-stages, but symbolic patterns through which a community aligns individual becoming with collective being.

Birth is not just a biological event; it is ritually phased into kinship, lineage, and belonging. Puberty is not merely biological change; it is semioticised through initiation, binding a young person into new roles and responsibilities. Death is not raw cessation; it is framed as passage, transformation, or ancestral return, situating the loss within a symbolic cosmos.

These are not timeless, archetypal stages. They are collective construals of individuation, ensuring that each life course is tethered to the symbolic fabric of the whole. The pedagogical is thus really a semiotic phasing: myths provide architectures of becoming that keep the individual and collective aligned.

Reframed this way, the pedagogical function is not about instructing a universal human journey. It is about phasing individuation into symbolic synchrony with the collective horizon. Myth does not teach individuals what they must universally do; it symbolically situates their becoming in relation to their world.

4 Synchronising the Collective (Reframing the Sociological)

Campbell’s fourth function of mythology is the sociological: to support and validate a given social order, prescribing norms and legitimating institutions. In this view, myth operates as a kind of ideological charter, stabilising the status quo.

From a relational ontology perspective, this framing is too static. Myth does not simply endorse or enforce order; it provides the symbolic infrastructure through which collective life is synchronised.

Myths are the semiotic architectures that align values, roles, and institutions within a reflexive cosmos. They bind different spheres of life — kinship, economy, ritual, governance — into a coherent symbolic pattern. What might appear as mere justification is in fact a process of symbolic synchronisation, ensuring that individual action, social role, and cosmic order resonate together.

Importantly, myth also allows for transformation. By shifting symbolic patterns, myths can recalibrate collective synchrony, enabling new orders of life to emerge. This is why myths often appear both conservative and revolutionary: they stabilise alignment, but they also provide the symbolic means to shift it.

Reframed this way, the sociological function is not about legitimating a fixed order. It is about synchronising the collective — sustaining alignment across scales of existence and providing a symbolic horizon through which change can be navigated.

Coda: From Functions to Reflexive Horizons

Campbell’s schema of four mythological functions — mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, sociological — remains influential because it gestures toward the breadth of myth’s role. But reframed through relational ontology, we can see that what appears as four separate functions are in fact four horizons of reflexive construal.

The mystical is not about private awe before transcendence, but about attuning collective construal to the openness of possibility itself.
The cosmological is not an attempt to explain the universe, but a means of projecting a reflexive world that holds together the collective’s symbolic life.
The pedagogical is not the charting of universal life-stages, but the phasing of individuation so that becoming remains aligned with the collective horizon.
The sociological is not static justification of order, but the synchronisation of collective life across roles, institutions, and symbolic structures.

Seen this way, myth is not a collection of stories that decorate human life, nor is it a proto-scientific attempt at explanation. It is the symbolic scaffolding through which life is oriented, synchronised, and projected into cosmos. Myth is not about gods above or instincts below; it is about the reflexive infrastructures of meaning that bind value, being, and world into coherence.

Thus, instead of “functions of mythology,” we might better speak of horizons of symbolic reflexivity. Myth does not explain, command, or instruct; it enables collective life to construe itself, to phase its becoming, and to project its cosmos.

30 September 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Value to Cosmos

1 Myth as Adaptive Semiotic Technology

Myth has too often been burdened with essentialist weight — universal archetypes, eternal patterns, psychic blueprints. What if we took another approach? Rather than searching for mythical constants across cultures, we might ask: what work does myth do?

Seen through a relational ontology, myth emerges as a technology of construal: a cultural means of bringing value-orientations into the domain of meaning. Following Gerald Edelman, we can distinguish value systems — biological regulators of adaptive behaviour — from semiotic systems, which create meanings and meanings-of-meanings. Myth stands precisely at this junction.

In ritual, trance, and altered states, perception is loosened, bypassed, suspended. These are not errors of the senses but different cuts into potential, where deep value-orientations surface unfiltered. Left unshaped, they remain fleeting intensities. But when narrated, dramatised, chanted, storied, they are semioticised — given symbolic form that can be shared, remembered, and transformed.

This is the adaptive work of myth: to take the orienting pull of value, and weave it into systems of meaning that align a collective. Myths are not eternal; they are provisional symbolic architectures, adaptive semiotic technologies that let communities survive, flourish, and re-align in shifting worlds.

Dreams offer a hint of this work. In Campbell’s famous aphorism, “dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.” Stripped of its archetypal undertones, we might hear this differently: dreams are private experiments in symbolic construal, while myths are collective architectures of the same process. Both cut into value-laden orientations beyond perception; both shape them into symbolic meaning.

In this way, myth can be seen not as universal story but as reflexive cultural adaptation — an ongoing negotiation between the values that orient life and the meanings that organise worlds.

2 Bypassing Perception: Altered States and Symbolic Access

In everyday life, perception construes the world for us. It is tuned to survival: selecting what is relevant, filtering what is not, delivering a stable horizon of meaning. Yet perception is also a narrowing. It keeps us oriented in the familiar, but it occludes other possibilities.

Mythic practice begins precisely where perception loosens. Across cultures, ritual, trance, dream, and vision have long been cultivated as technologies of altered state. These are not accidents or failures of cognition, but deliberate suspensions of the perceptual cut. They open onto potentials otherwise inaccessible.

In these states, value-orientations rise to the surface. The emotional intensities, the urgencies of desire, fear, and awe — the deep regulators of adaptive life — appear unmediated. Not yet tied to everyday construals, they pulse as raw orientations. But left alone, they vanish as soon as waking perception reasserts itself.

The genius of myth is to catch these intensities in symbolic nets. Through chant, dance, story, and image, altered-state experience is shaped into semiotic form. What was fleeting becomes narratable; what was ineffable becomes shareable; what was private becomes collective.

This is why myths so often bear the marks of altered states: their dreamlike illogic, their kaleidoscopic transformations, their refusal of ordinary causality. They are not faulty stories, but symbolic echoes of perception’s suspension. By bypassing perception, myth accesses orientations otherwise hidden; by symbolising them, it aligns a community around new meanings.

In this sense, altered states are not departures from reality but different relational cuts into it. They access potentials beyond ordinary construal. Myth is the cultural practice of bringing those potentials back into the semiotic weave of collective life.

3 From Value to Meaning-of-Meaning

To understand the unique work of myth, we need to distinguish between two very different systems: value systems and semiotic systems.

Value systems, as Gerald Edelman describes them, are biological regulators. They orient behaviour by amplifying what is adaptive and suppressing what is not. Hunger, fear, desire, attachment — these are not meanings, but biases in action, ensuring that life turns toward viability. They are adaptive, not interpretive.

Semiotic systems, by contrast, do not orient behaviour directly. They generate meanings, and even more crucially, meanings-of-meanings — symbolic architectures that reflect on, refract, and reorganise what construal can be. Semiotic systems make worlds, not just moves within them.

What myth does is to bridge these two strata. In altered states, value-orientations surface: intensities without symbolic form. Through story, chant, and ritual, they are semioticised — drawn up into symbolic patterns that can be shared and remembered. In this way, myth turns adaptive orientations into symbolic horizons.

This is why myths are not just stories about the world but stories about the meaning of the world. They do not merely map terrain; they map how terrain itself comes to matter. They are reflexive, second-order constructs: meanings-of-meanings that give value-laden orientations a symbolic architecture.

Consider how myths encode fear: not simply as a reaction, but as a cosmic order of danger and protection. Or how they encode desire: not as raw appetite, but as narratives of quest, union, or transformation. Myth transposes value into meaning, and then folds meaning back into the collective as an organising horizon.

This reflexive turn is the heart of myth. It does not universalise archetypes, nor reveal timeless essences. Instead, it functions as a cultural semiotic technology, transforming value into symbolic meaning-of-meaning, aligning collectives to new adaptive horizons.

4 Myth as Collective Alignment

If myth transforms value into meaning-of-meaning, then its real power lies in collective alignment.

A biological value is individual — hunger, fear, desire, attachment. Myth amplifies and transposes these orientations into shared symbolic patterns that organise not just personal behaviour but the very horizon of collective being.

Ritualised myth brings this into effect. Through chant, dance, story, or spectacle, individuals are not only exposed to symbolic construals — they are synchronised by them. Myth functions as a phase mechanism: it binds many bodies, many perspectives, into a shared symbolic rhythm. The telling is never private. Even when recounted alone, the myth orients the teller within a larger symbolic horizon that already belongs to the collective.

This is why myth is central to early social formations. It does not just explain the world, nor simply entertain. It aligns collectives by:

Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
Staging possibilities: myths articulate what can and cannot be done, who one may become, and how the world itself might unfold.

Seen this way, myth is not a “public dream” in Campbell’s sense — an archetypal structure projected into communal life. Rather, it is a symbolic architecture of alignment, continuously remade in performance, synchronising individual orientations into a shared horizon of possibility.

Myth thus phases the collective: it turns value into meaning-of-meaning, and then uses those meanings to hold together, orient, and project the social whole.

5 Myth as Reflexive Cosmos

When myth aligns a collective, it does more than coordinate social life. It projects an entire cosmos — a world reflexively structured through meaning-of-meaning.

A cosmos is not simply “the universe” as physical environment. It is the symbolically construed horizon within which beings, relations, and possibilities take shape. Myth generates such horizons. It binds together natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations into a single symbolic weave.

In this sense, myth is cosmogenetic. It does not merely describe the world but actively brings a world into being for a collective. Mountains and rivers become ancestors, stars become guides, animals become totems. Social orders are not grounded in brute force but in symbolic alignment with cosmic patterns. The cosmos is not external backdrop; it is a reflexive projection of collective construal.

What makes myth distinctive here is the reflexive turn:

Value-orientations surface in altered states.
These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
That alignment is then mirrored back as a cosmos — a world that seems always already there, but is in fact the projection of collective construal.

The cosmos of myth is thus a reflexive reality: it appears to precede the collective, but is continually constituted through its symbolic practices. The divine order, the ancestral lineage, the cycle of life and death — these are not discovered truths but symbolic architectures that organise existence.

This is why myth can endure across generations. It is not just a narrative but a cosmological infrastructure, sustaining reflexive reality itself. The cosmos of myth is the collective seeing itself, its values, and its possibilities, refracted and stabilised in symbolic form.

Coda: Myth without Archetype

What, then, remains of myth once we set aside archetypes, universal essences, and timeless psychic structures?

Not absence, but clarity.

Myth appears not as a coded expression of eternal forms but as a symbolic technology of life itself — a way of transposing value into meaning, synchronising collectives, and projecting worlds. Its power lies not in universal sameness but in situated resonance, each myth staging horizons of possibility unique to its collective.

We have traced three moves:

From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
From alignment to reflexive cosmos: myth projects those horizons outward, making a world appear as given — a cosmos reflexively constituted through symbolic practice.

In this light, Campbell’s claim that “myths are public dreams” can be reframed. Dreams are not private myths, and myths are not collective dreams. Dreams are idiosyncratic symbolic events of the sleeping body; myths are collective semiotic architectures that turn value into world. Their relation is not one of equivalence but of scale: both are reflexive construals, but only myth stabilises them into the symbolic infrastructure of a cosmos.

This is myth without archetype: not eternal, not universal, not psychic essence — but semiotic reflexivity. A cultural technology for making values into meanings, meanings into alignments, and alignments into worlds.

To study myth in this key is to study how collectives construe themselves into being, again and again, by telling the world into form.

Postscript: Beyond Campbell, Beyond Consciousness

One striking implication of this relational reading of myth is that consciousness — as introspective experience or psychic interiority — is not required to understand myth’s power. Myth operates through value-oriented intensities, semiotic transformation, and collective alignment, not through private reflection or archetypal recognition.

This moves myth studies into a new terrain:

Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
Toward an understanding of myth as a distributed, relational, adaptive practice: enacted, shared, and phasing across collective horizons.

In this light, myths are best seen as symbolic infrastructures, coordinating life and projecting worlds, regardless of whether any individual consciously apprehends their full import. Consciousness is neither a cause nor a necessary substrate; it is just one node among many in the network of relational construal that myth enacts.

This perspective opens a path for a more ecological, socially embedded, and adaptive study of myth, one attentive to how symbolic practices shape life itself, rather than how inner psychic patterns are mirrored in stories.