1 Myth as Systemic Potential
We are used to thinking of myth as a kind of primitive narrative—something pre-scientific, pre-rational, pre-modern. It is often treated as a historical curiosity, a cultural artefact, or a source of symbolic inspiration. But what if myth is none of these things—or rather, what if its significance lies not in its content, but in its function?
What if myth is not a story at all, but a system?
From the perspective of relational ontology and Systemic Functional Linguistics, we might begin to reconstrue mythology not as a genre of fiction, but as a modality of meaning—a patterned potential for construing experience. Myths, in this light, are not beliefs about the world, but systems through which worlds are made possible. They offer not facts, but fields of construal.
Just as language is modelled in SFL as a meaning potential—a system of choices that can be instantiated in different ways—myth too may be seen as a cultural meaning system: not a set of fixed propositions, but a semiotic architecture within which certain construals become possible. In other words, myth is not a primitive form of explanation, but a structured potential for world-making.
This is not metaphor. It is systemic.
A myth does not merely tell us what is—it organises what can be. It orients us toward certain cuts through the continuum of experience: this is how time unfolds, this is what a self is, this is what the cosmos values. It shapes the conditions of emergence. And just as importantly, it marks the limits of what may not be said, seen, or enacted.
In this sense, mythology is the social semiotics of the possible.
We might then say: myth operates in the same ontological register as context. It is not something added to experience, but something through which experience is patterned. It is not commentary on reality—it is a system that enacts reality, in all the specificity of its construed dimensions.
To treat mythology this way is not to romanticise it. It is to grant it the same systemic dignity we afford to language. Myths are not obsolete—they are ontogenetic. They do not describe a world gone by; they animate the conditions of emergence for a world still unfolding.
And perhaps this is the real challenge: to stop looking at myth as the fossil record of belief, and begin to see it as the semiotic architecture of potential—a system of affordances that, like language, is always available to be reactivated, repurposed, and re-cut.
The myth is not behind us. It is beneath us: a patterned field of possibility, waiting to be construed.
2 Evolution as Mythic Grammar
If myth is a system of potential—a semiotic architecture that patterns what may be meant, felt, or known—then its scope is not limited to ancient cosmogonies or sacred narratives. Mythic construal continues, often unrecognised, in the heart of modernity.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse of evolution.
We are taught to regard evolution as a biological process, a mechanism for explaining the emergence of life-forms through variation and selection. In this view, evolution is not a myth at all, but a scientific account grounded in empirical evidence. And yet, evolution functions mythically in our cultural imagination: not as a set of data, but as a grammar of becoming.
Evolution, in this sense, is not simply a theory of organisms—it is a construal of time, change, and value. It tells us what kinds of transformation are thinkable, what forms of continuity are legitimate, what counts as progress, and what does not. It provides a semiotic orientation to emergence: slow, adaptive, contingent, directional. It models the real as a temporally extended field of selection, competition, and differentiation.
In doing so, evolution enacts a mythic construal of possibility: a story of how new forms can emerge, how complexity arises, how adaptation defines meaning. It is not mythic because it is false, but because it organises potential in patterned ways. It tells us what kind of becoming is intelligible—and what kind is unthinkable.
From a relational perspective, this is not a critique but a recognition. Myth, here, is not the opposite of science—it is the semiotic deep structure of its construals. Evolution functions as a kind of ideational mythos, a way of mapping systemic potential through time. It is a grammar for imagining emergence.
But like all grammars, it also makes cuts.
The discourse of evolution tends to privilege gradualism, adaptation, and external selection. It construes change as slow and responsive, not sudden or systemic. It tends to background construal itself: the emergence of meaning, perspective, and consciousness are often treated as epiphenomena rather than as central to the evolutionary event.
This is not a flaw. It is a systemic commitment. But it also opens space for other construals—other grammars of emergence, other mythic models of how possibility evolves.
What if we treated meaning not as something that arises after evolution, but as something that drives it?
What if evolution itself is not a story of matter becoming complex, but of systems differentiating fields of potential?
What if construal is not an outcome of evolution, but its very mechanism?
Such questions are not challenges to the scientific discourse of evolution, but invitations to see it as one mythic grammar among many—a powerful, patterned construal of becoming, whose limits reveal the possibility of other myths still waiting to be told.
In the next post, we will turn to what was lost when modernity declared the myth dead—and what we might recover by releasing it from the literalist cut.
3 Rescuing Myth from the Literalist Cut
To understand what has happened to myth in modernity, we must examine not how it has been explained, but how it has been cut—reduced, sequestered, and reclassified under a particular ontological regime. This is the regime of literalism, which emerged most forcefully in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific empiricism.
The literalist cut treats meaning as secondary: it assumes that there is a reality out there—objective, observer-independent, propositional—and that any construal of that reality can be measured by how faithfully it maps onto the "facts." From this perspective, myth becomes either a false description (and therefore obsolete) or a poetic allegory (and therefore harmless).
Either way, it is stripped of its systemic power.
This was not a neutral development. It was a reconstrual of construal itself—a shift in what kinds of meaning-making could count as real. The literalist cut severed myth from its function as a semiotic system and recoded it as a primitive error. In doing so, it reconfigured the space of possibility: what could be known, what could be imagined, what could be inhabited.
But the cut was perspectival, not ontological. Myth did not disappear. It was simply displaced, repressed, or disguised. It re-emerged in the margins: in literature, in art, in ideology, in psychology, in the narratives of progress and collapse. And it continued to function—not as entertainment, but as the backgrounding architecture of construal.
Myths never depended on literal belief. Their power was never in their "truth" as facts, but in their potency as systems—systems that enacted worlds, roles, scales, and values. When the literalist cut declared myth irrational, it also foreclosed access to one of the most ancient and sophisticated technologies of systemic meaning.
And this matters.
Because without mythic construal, we are left only with description—flattened worlds, stripped of possibility, amputated from their own conditions of emergence. We lose the capacity to think systemically across domains, to inhabit symbolic fields, to constellate meaning beyond the factual.
To rescue myth from the literalist cut is not to return to superstition. It is to restore myth as a legitimate axis of construal—as a relational grammar of the possible, grounded not in belief but in patterned semiotic potential.
It is to insist that meaning is not derivative. That what we take to be real is not given, but enacted. That the stories we inherit—whether scientific, religious, or philosophical—are not merely representations of a world, but participations in its actualisation.
In the final post, we will ask what it means to treat myth not as memory of what was, but as memory of what might have been—and still could be.
4 Myth as Memory of the Not-Yet
We often think of myth as memory—cultural memory, ancestral memory, deep-time memory. Myths recall a beginning, or a rupture, or a covenant. They mark a primal event, a heroic lineage, a forgotten order. But this view, while not wrong, may be incomplete.
What if myth is not memory of what was, but memory of what might have been?
This is not nostalgia, nor speculation. It is an ontological shift. In a relational model of meaning, what we call the past is not a fixed archive but a field of possible construals, continually re-instantiated in the present. And what we call myth is not a record of what happened, but a system through which certain virtualities are preserved—not-yets that haunt the space of the now.
In this light, myths are not stories about origins. They are traces of unactualised potential—not paths taken, but paths imagined, constrained, suspended, or foreclosed. They do not tell us what happened. They tell us what could have happened, had the world been cut differently. They are semiotic residues of alternative worlds.
This makes myth not primitive, but generative.
It makes myth not a belief system, but a field of unrealised affordances—grammars of value, relation, temporality, and agency that still wait, dormant, in the cultural system. They may lie outside the dominant construals of science, politics, or reason. But they persist as latent systems, ready to be reanimated—not as relics, but as resources.
And here we arrive at a different kind of possibility: not the possibility of prediction, or adaptation, or discovery, but the possibility of reconstrual. The possibility of seeing again. The possibility of inhabiting the real otherwise.
A myth is not a map. It is a memory of a system that might have patterned the world. And like any system, it can be re-entered, re-cut, re-instantiated. To engage myth at this level is not to return to the past, but to reopen the field of potential that was never fully closed.
The not-yet still lives. And myth is how we remember it.