Living Patterns: A Relational Ontology of Myth and the Hero’s Journey

1 Myth as Meaning System — A Relational Perspective

In the modern world, myth is often equated with falsehood — something to be outgrown, corrected, or left behind. But for thinkers like Joseph Campbell, myth was anything but obsolete. It was a living system of symbolic guidance — a map of inner transformation and existential orientation. The hero’s journey, in his view, was not a literal tale but a metaphor for the process of becoming.

From our perspective — grounded in a relational ontology — we take up this invitation not to abandon myth, but to rethink its logic.

In place of a cosmology of eternal archetypes or a history of symbolic transmission, we offer a view of myth as a semiotic field: a space of meaning potential structured by patterns of relation. In this light, myth is not merely a story told, but a system of possible meanings — an attractor landscape within which selves can move, transform, and emerge.

The Mythic Field as Relational Semiotic

In a relational ontology, nothing exists in isolation. Meaning arises from patterned relations, not from fixed entities or intrinsic essences. A self is not a unitary object but a temporary configuration in an ongoing process of individuation. Similarly, myth is not a container of truths, but a structured space in which potential meanings are patterned, selected, and actualised through use.

Campbell spoke of myth as the “secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” But from a relational view, this pouring is not from outside in — it is the activation of meaning potential within a semiotic system. Myth does not represent reality — it construes it, enacting patterns of possibility that resonate within a collective field of meaning.

Myth as Attractor System

In this view, myth functions as an attractor in the semiotic dynamics of identity. It shapes trajectories of becoming, drawing subjectivities toward particular transformations. The hero’s journey is one such attractor — a stabilised pattern that guides an unfolding of the self through crisis, reconfiguration, and return.

But unlike a mechanical path, this is not a universal template to be imposed. It is a relational affordance: a potential that may be instantiated in different ways by different selves, in different cultural settings, and under different conditions of meaning. Its power lies not in prescription but in resonance.

This shift — from myth as message to myth as field — allows us to ask new questions:

• What does it mean to enter a mythic space?

• How does a symbolic structure shape the phase space of the self?

• In what sense is myth not just about the world, but of the world — an expression of its relational structure?

Reframing the Journey

Throughout this series, we’ll explore the mythic through the lens of relational individuation. We’ll follow the movements of the self across attractor thresholds, through dissolution and reformation, and into cultural reintegration. We’ll examine archetypes as semiotic functions rather than fixed types, and view mythic transformation not as escape from reality, but as a deepening of the patterns that make life meaningful.

In doing so, we hope to reanimate Campbell’s vision while offering a reframing that places the logic of myth not in the past, but in the field of the possible — a space where meaning unfolds through relation, and where the stories we inherit are not answers, but potentials to be lived.

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2 The Hero as Function — Archetypes and the Dynamics of Meaning

What is a hero? A warrior? A saviour? A seeker?

In the mythologies of the world, the hero appears in countless guises — from trickster to redeemer, from reluctant wanderer to luminous sovereign. Joseph Campbell famously distilled these diverse figures into a single arc: the hero’s journey, a universal pattern of departure, ordeal, and return. But how should we understand this figure — not as a personality type or a historical role, but as a relational function?

In this post, we explore the hero not as an individual, but as a semiotic attractor: a patterned function in the symbolic dynamics of meaning.

Archetypes as Semiotic Attractors

Campbell drew on Jung’s notion of the archetype — not as a fixed symbol or inherited image, but as a psychic structure that shapes the form of experience. In our relational model, we reframe the archetype as a semiotic affordance: a set of possibilities made available within a cultural field of meaning.

Archetypes are not things we carry in our heads. They are patterns that emerge in systems of meaning — functional nodes that guide perception, identity, and narrative across many instances. The hero, then, is not an entity but a vector of becoming: a role available to be taken up, actualised, or resisted in different ways depending on context and relation.

Much like a grammatical function (say, “actor” or “goal” in a clause), the hero is a slot in a system — a position within a patterned unfolding. To identify the hero is to name a function in a process, not to describe a person or their traits.

The Hero as Phase Shift

In Campbell’s monomyth, the hero undergoes a transformation: a movement from the known world into the unknown, a descent into chaos, and a re-emergence with new insight or power. Rather than viewing this as a literal journey, we can understand it as a phase transition — a systemic shift in the attractor dynamics of the self.

The call to adventure destabilises the current pattern of identity. The trials of the journey dissolve the self’s coherence. And the return integrates the reconfigured self into a transformed relationship with the social field. These movements are not merely metaphors — they are semiotic transformations. The hero story narrativises the process of individuation.

From a relational perspective, this is not the expression of a pre-existing inner essence. It is the emergence of new patterning through systemic reconfiguration. The hero is the form through which such transformation becomes symbolically available.

Collective Potential, Instantial Actualisation

Archetypes live in the meaning potential of a culture — they are not bound to any one person, story, or performance. But they are actualised through individual texts, actions, and identifications. This is the cline of instantiation: from shared symbolic potential to concrete meaning instance.

When a person steps into the role of the hero — in myth, ritual, or even everyday life — they activate that function within the shared system. The power of the hero is not in the person but in the pattern. It is the recognisability of this transformation, its resonance across contexts, that gives it symbolic force.

This means the hero is not exceptional in a literal sense. The power of the hero lies precisely in generalisation — in its ability to be instantiated again and again in different lives and settings. Its universality is not a biological constant, but a relational capacity — a function that can be mapped onto new configurations of meaning.

From Hero to Meaning-Maker

Reframing the hero as function invites us to shift our focus from content to structure, from character to relation. It also allows us to recognise that the hero’s journey — as Campbell insisted — is not the preserve of mythic figures. It is an invitation to every self, a pattern of potential within the relational dynamics of meaning.

In the next post, we’ll examine the structure of the journey itself — not as a fixed map, but as a patterned unfolding in semiotic phase space, where thresholds are crossed, identities reconfigured, and new attractors emerge.

3 Thresholds and Transformations — The Journey as Semiotic Phase Space

In the mythic tradition, the hero’s journey is charted by thresholds: the crossing into the unknown, the descent into ordeal, the return with the boon. These moments mark structural shifts — not simply changes of scene or event, but transformations of meaning.

In this post, we interpret the hero’s journey as a traversal through semiotic phase space: a landscape of symbolic potential structured by attractors, thresholds, and emergent configurations.

From Path to Pattern

Rather than treating the journey as a sequence of stages — “call to adventure,” “refusal,” “supernatural aid,” and so on — we can view it as a trajectory in relational space. The hero moves not across geography, but through systems of meaning. What shifts is not the outer world alone, but the attractor structure of the self in relation to the symbolic environment.

Each threshold crossed is a transition between semiotic regimes — from the known to the unknown, the familiar to the alien, the coherent to the chaotic. These are phase changes, not merely plot points. They mark moments when the current system of meaning can no longer contain experience, and a new organisation must emerge.

Thresholds as Bifurcation Points

In complexity science, a bifurcation point is a critical juncture where a system reorganises — where a small change in conditions leads to a qualitatively different outcome. Mythic thresholds operate in much the same way.

To step over the threshold is to risk a break in continuity. The crossing is not only symbolic — it is structurally transformative. The self no longer returns to its prior state; the attractor landscape has shifted. A new basin of possibility is entered, and with it, a new pattern of becoming.

The myth dramatises this danger and necessity. Guardians stand at the gate. Trials await on the other side. But these narrative devices symbolise something deeper: the system resists transformation. Meaning resists reconfiguration. And so thresholds are always charged — places of risk, rupture, and potential renewal.

Descent and Disintegration

One of the most recurrent motifs in hero mythology is the descent — into the underworld, the belly of the beast, the dark forest. This is not merely a narrative convention; it marks a disintegration of the previous pattern. In our relational ontology, it is a traversal into unstructured space — a departure from stable attractors into the chaotic.

In this space, roles collapse, identities dissolve, and meaning becomes fluid. It is the phase of depatterning, essential for transformation. Without this loss of structure, no new structure can emerge.

Importantly, this is not annihilation. It is potentialisation — the opening of meaning into a wider field of possible reorganisation. The descent is not the end of the self, but the precondition for its reformation.

Return as Reintegration

The return is not a return to the same world, nor by the same self. It is a recalibration of relations — between self and world, inner and outer, pattern and potential.

If the journey has succeeded, the self now actualises a new configuration. This is symbolised by the “boon” or “elixir” the hero brings back: not just a gift to others, but a repatterning of the cultural system. The individual transformation becomes collective affordance. The attractor is now available for others to instantiate.

This is why mythic journeys matter. They are not escapist fantasies. They are symbolic maps of transformation — stories that help us navigate the dynamics of meaning when life’s systems break down and must be re-formed.

Myth as Semiotic Navigation

Campbell wrote that myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. Our relational model reframes this: myths are symbolic topologies of semiotic possibility. They chart the shape of transformation — the shifting fields of identity, agency, and relation.

In the next post, we’ll examine how these symbolic structures become internalised as patterns of subjectivity — and how the self, far from being a fixed centre, emerges as a site of patterned re-entry into the cultural field.

4 The Hero Within — Subjectivity as a Cultural Attractor

In myth, the hero is a liminal figure — both part of the world and apart from it, shaped by culture yet stepping beyond its bounds. But what if the hero is not a person at all? What if the journey is not only external, but internal — a transformation of subjectivity?

In this post, we explore the self as a semiotic configuration: not a stable essence but a relational attractor emerging from collective meaning potential. The hero's journey, in this light, becomes a symbolic model of how selves change — how subjectivity unfolds, dissolves, and re-patterns in the dynamic field of cultural meaning.

Subjectivity as a System of Selection

From the perspective of neuronal group selection, the brain's wiring reflects a history of experience-dependent shaping — patterns of perception and action stabilised through feedback and fit. Consciousness, then, is not a unified entity but a dynamically shifting system of selected patterns.

These patterns do not float in a void. They are shaped by, and responsive to, semiotic systems — language, narrative, gesture, myth. The self emerges at the intersection: a configuration of material and semiotic orders, a site of resonance between biology and culture.

This makes the self not a container, but a process — a semiotic event continually actualising itself within a space of shared potential.

Myth as Subjective Resonance

When Campbell speaks of myth as a mirror of the inner life, he is pointing to this resonance. Myths offer not only external models of action, but internal models of becoming. They configure the landscape of possible selves.

Each archetype, each story-form, is a symbolic attractor — a culturally shared shape that can be taken up, inhabited, or resisted. Through repeated engagement, these forms pattern the inner landscape. The hero, then, is not just a character in a story but a recurring structure of transformation within subjectivity itself.

To "see oneself" in a myth is to align with an attractor — to enter a phase space where new configurations of meaning can emerge.

Individuation as Cultural Recursion

We often imagine individuation as separation — the carving of self from society. But in a relational ontology, individuation is recursive: the self emerges through the cultural field, not apart from it.

Each act of subjectivity — of interpretation, reflection, resistance, or resonance — feeds back into the system. In this sense, the individual is not merely shaped by culture; they also participate in reshaping it, actualising new patterns of meaning that may become attractors for others.

Myth becomes a site of this recursion: a place where culture patterns the self, and the self participates in the ongoing reconfiguration of culture. The hero’s journey is thus a meta-pattern — a fractal structure encoding not a fixed identity, but the dynamism of becoming.

The Inner Journey as Transformation of Potential

To journey inward is to navigate semiotic terrain: to encounter the limits of current patterning and press beyond them. It is not the discovery of a hidden core, but the reconfiguration of what is possible.

This is why the journey so often involves suffering, fragmentation, and loss — because the self, as a system, must sometimes fall apart before it can transform. Myth encodes this principle: it tells us that dissolution is not failure, but a necessary phase in the creation of a new coherence.

And so the hero within is not a singular ego, triumphant and resolved. It is the capacity to cross thresholds of meaning, to engage the unknown, and to participate in the ongoing unfolding of the possible.

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In the next post, we turn to the role of myth not just in shaping subjectivity, but in coordinating collective meaning — as a resonant structure that patterns the social field and orients us within shared symbolic space.

5 Myth as Social Syntax — Coordinating Collective Meaning

Myth does not only speak to the individual. It operates in the space between — the cultural membrane where subjectivities converge, align, and diverge. In a relational ontology, myth is not merely a reflection of social life but an active force in coordinating meaning across a community of selves.

This post explores myth as a kind of social syntax: a patterned semiotic system that enables individuals to interpret, align with, or resist shared values and trajectories. Like grammar in language, myth provides the deep structure that organises collective meaning-making.

Meaning as a Shared Field

In systemic-functional terms, meaning is not private but inherently social. Even when internalised, the categories and structures through which we construe experience are drawn from a shared potential — what Halliday calls the meaning potential of the culture.

Myth operates at the deepest layers of this potential, shaping what counts as meaningful in the first place. It provides symbolic scaffolding for existential questions: What is life for? What does it mean to suffer? To succeed? To act well?

These are not universal answers, but culturally patterned orientations — resonant attractors that shape the semantic landscape of a community.

Myth as a System of Alignment

Just as language allows for coordination in action and thought, myth enables alignment in values, roles, and purposes. Through narrative structures and archetypal forms, it provides culturally specific models of:

• What kinds of lives are admirable

• What kinds of struggles are meaningful

• What kinds of transformations are desirable or dangerous

This coordination is not necessarily harmonious. Myths also encode conflict — between roles, between moral codes, between cosmologies. But even here, they provide a symbolic grammar within which those conflicts can be interpreted, enacted, and negotiated.

In this way, myth is not only an aesthetic or spiritual expression; it is a semiotic infrastructure for social life.

Ritual and Reiteration

Ritual is where myth is instantiated — where potential becomes instance. The retelling, re-enactment, and re-embodiment of myth in communal settings allows the shared field of meaning to be periodically recalibrated.

In these moments, individual participants are not simply consuming cultural content. They are re-entering the attractor field, aligning their subjectivity with the resonant patterns of the social whole.

But as with language, each instantiation carries the potential for variation and shift. Through repetition, myths persist; through difference, they evolve. Meaning is not static, but a dynamic interplay between inherited patterns and their lived re-enactment.

The Hero as Social Role

If myth is a syntax, then the hero is not just a symbol — they are a semiotic function. The hero role mediates between levels of the system: between individual and group, known and unknown, structure and change.

By crossing thresholds, the hero both leaves the social order and ultimately returns to renew it. In relational terms, the hero acts as a transducer: converting the potential of personal transformation into a shared symbolic gain.

This is not always conscious or celebratory. The returning hero may be rejected, misrecognised, or silenced. But myth keeps the structure alive, holding open the possibility of transformation within the collective.

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In the next post, we turn to myth not just as a system of shared meaning, but as a technology of transformation — a way of altering the attractor landscape itself, both for individuals and societies.

6 Myth as Transformative Technology — Repatterning the Possible

We have considered myth as a symbolic grammar, a means by which individuals and cultures coordinate shared meaning. But myth also does more than represent what is. It intervenes in what might be. It operates as a technology of transformation — a way of reshaping the attractor landscape of both personal identity and collective orientation.

This post explores myth as patterned possibility, a semiotic mechanism that not only maintains cultural coherence but enables change. From a relational perspective, myth alters the topology of meaning: it shifts the resonances by which experience is construed, subjectivity is formed, and futures are imagined.

Repatterning Meaning Potential

In the relational-semiotic view we’ve been developing, the world is not composed of inert things, but of dynamic relational patterns — semiotic attractors that stabilise and channel meaning over time. These patterns are not fixed; they can be disrupted, redirected, or reframed.

Myth functions here as a cultural operator on the field of potential. Through its narrative structures and symbolic motifs, it introduces new relations among elements of experience:

• Where there was chaos, it offers structure.

• Where there was stasis, it initiates movement.

• Where there was despair, it evokes renewal.

This is not abstract. The story of the hero, for example, doesn’t just reflect a journey — it models a process of change. And when internalised, that model reorganises how future experience is construed: what we attend to, how we interpret suffering, how we project possibility.

In short, myth shifts the parameters of individuation.

Ritual as a Semiotic Interface

If myth is the pattern, ritual is its interface: the operational site where transformation becomes actual. Here, the meaning potential of the myth is instantiated — not only in symbolic action but in felt experience.

Through symbolic performance, communal rhythm, and embodied repetition, ritual activates new configurations of self and world. These shifts are not purely cognitive. They are affective, relational, and deeply material — altering the attractor space of consciousness itself.

And crucially, this transformation is not linear. As in complex systems, small perturbations can lead to bifurcations — sudden shifts to new stable states. Myth, in this sense, is less like a map and more like a strange attractor: a dynamic basin toward which transformation can be drawn, without predicting the precise path.

Cultural Metamorphosis

At the collective level, myths act as agents of metamorphosis. As cultural attractors, they maintain coherence — but they also enable emergence. They can be repurposed, contested, or recombined. And in so doing, they allow communities to reconfigure their semiotic foundations.

We see this in the re-activation of mythic motifs during times of social upheaval — the return of tricksters, the rebirth of the feminine, the proliferation of apocalyptic visions. These are not simply aesthetic choices. They signal shifts in the cultural attractor landscape: the emergence of new configurations of possibility, identity, and value.

As relational beings, we do not stand outside myth. We are inside it — participants in a semiotic ecology that both shapes and is shaped by us.

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In the final post of the series, we will explore the limits and thresholds of mythic individuation: death, dissolution, and the transformations that lie beyond the self. What happens when the hero does not return — or when the story itself begins to unravel?

7 Beyond the Hero — Dissolution, Death, and the End of the Pattern

Every myth begins with separation and ends with return — or so the pattern tells us. But not every story finds its way home. Not every hero survives. Not every self remains intact. If myth serves as a symbolic technology of transformation, then we must also ask: What are its limits? What happens when the pattern itself begins to unravel?

This final post explores the thresholds of individuation — where the coherent self dissolves, where mythic continuity breaks down, and where meaning is no longer stabilised by story but drawn toward something else: silence, chaos, or renewal.

The Other Face of Transformation

The hero’s journey is not a guarantee. Initiation may fail. The abyss may not yield its treasure. And even if it does, return is not assured. In Campbell’s monomyth, the shadow of failure is always present — the descent that becomes madness, the transformation that ends in death.

But in a relational ontology, such dissolution is not necessarily failure. It is a shift in pattern — a release from previous attractors, a letting go of semiotic coherence. Death, here, is not simply the end of life. It is the dissolution of a meaning structure, the breaking of bonds that held a self together.

This can be terrifying. But it can also be generative — clearing space for a reconfiguration of potential.

Mythic Silence

Some traditions acknowledge this threshold directly. In Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, for instance, the self is not the final locus of transformation. Rather, liberation lies in the recognition that the self is itself a construct, a temporary knot in the web of relations. The mythic hero dissolves not in tragedy, but in awakening — the realisation that the journey was never about the hero to begin with.

In these traditions, the end of the myth is not narrative resolution but emptiness — not as void, but as unpatterned potential.

Even in Western myth, echoes of this threshold remain. Consider Orpheus, whose descent ends not in triumph but in loss. Or Moses, who leads his people to the promised land but never enters it. These are not failures of character. They are markers of mythic limit — signs that some journeys reach beyond story.

The Unpatterned Edge

From a systems perspective, individuation cannot proceed forever. Every complex system encounters critical thresholds — bifurcations, breakdowns, phase transitions. The same is true of selves. There are limits to coherence, and moments when stability becomes impossible to maintain.

But in a relational universe, these limits are not terminal. They are passages — transitions into new attractor spaces, even if those spaces lie beyond current comprehension.

Myth, in this view, does not end at the boundary of self. It bends toward what lies beyond: the community, the cosmos, the unspoken. It opens into the more-than-personal — not as a loss of identity, but as its transformation into relation.

Myth as Living System

If myth is a living pattern, then it too is subject to birth, growth, decay, and renewal. It is not a fixed structure but an evolving ecology of meaning — one that responds to shifting cultural landscapes, emergent values, and new configurations of experience.

In this light, even the death of a myth is not its erasure. It is a phase in its transformation. Myths die not when they cease to be told, but when they no longer resonate — when the cultural attractor they once stabilised dissolves into a different pattern.

And sometimes, what emerges in that absence is not a new myth, but the space for a new way of relating — to self, to world, to mystery.

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This concludes Living Patterns: A Relational Ontology of Myth and the Hero’s Journey. As always, the invitation remains: to see myth not just as story, but as a dynamic field of meaning, shaping the way we live, become, and relate.