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.
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