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:
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Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
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Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
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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:
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Value-orientations surface in altered states.
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These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
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Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
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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:
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From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
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From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
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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:
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Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
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Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
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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.
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