1 The End of Time, The Return of Myth
"When time dissolves into unfolding, only story remains. And it is in story that the world is cut again — not into clocks, but into meanings."
We are now living beyond time.
This is not a claim about physics, calendars, or cultural decay. It is a semiotic claim — a recognition that time as we have inherited it was never a neutral backdrop, but a symbolic infrastructure: a grammar of unfolding that served a particular worldview. That grammar is crumbling. And in its place, something older — and perhaps more enduring — is beginning to stir.
We ended the Phasecraft series by dissolving time into perspectival unfolding: not a line, but a field of processes, each undergoing its own mode of becoming. In that move, we displaced time as a container and recast it as an effect of how we phase the world — how we cut it into perceptible, nameable, shareable processes.
But when those cuts become unstable — when phasing fails to deliver the world as coherent or navigable — what then? What orients us, when the temporal scaffolding collapses?
This is where mythos returns.
Time as Myth
The modern notion of time — linear, uniform, divisible, external — is a myth. Not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of being a total symbolic cut: a story that orders experience, anchors causality, and locates the self within a broader unfolding. It is a myth that came to dominate others, installing itself as the background condition for science, economy, and governance. And like all myths, it shaped what could be said, thought, and felt.
But its authority is waning. Climate crisis, planetary computation, cultural unmooring — these have ruptured the coherence of linear time. We no longer move confidently toward “the future.” We no longer believe in progress as unfolding inevitability. We no longer trust that time’s arrow points anywhere in particular.
We are left, instead, with unfolding: plural, perspectival, processual.
Mythos as the Grammar of Meaningful Unfolding
If phasecraft is our method for cutting the world into unfolding processes, then mythos is what gives those cuts weight. Mythos provides the symbolic conditions under which a cut matters — under which it becomes not just a perceptual distinction, but an orientation within a shared world.
Where phasecraft works at the level of semiotic technique, mythos works at the level of symbolic ecology. It shapes what is seen as sacred, tragic, inevitable, redemptive, or possible. It tells us what kind of world we are phasing.
And crucially, it is not optional. Every act of phasing already presupposes a mythos. Even modernity, with all its anti-mythical pretensions, was mythic through and through — its faith in rationality, in mastery, in temporal progress, was nothing less than cosmogonic.
To phase without mythos is to navigate without a horizon. To live-with unfolding without symbolic grounding is to drift in a sea of processes, unable to name what matters.
So myth returns — not as regression, but as the symbolic consequence of time’s collapse.
Living With the Open
What we are seeking now is not a return to traditional mythologies. Those were anchored in cosmoi and ecologies that no longer hold. Nor are we seeking to fabricate new grand narratives, scripted from above.
What we are seeking is something else entirely:
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a grammar for symbolic orientation to the open;
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a practice of worlding that lives-with indeterminacy rather than denying it;
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a poetics of unfolding that cuts meaning without claiming closure.
This is the work of mythos after time.
In the posts that follow, we will explore how different cultures have phased the world through cosmological narrative — and how these symbolic grammars might inform, challenge, or inspire our own. We will examine the colonial wound of imposed temporalities, the more-than-human grammars of mythic ecology, and the emerging symbolic potentials of this transitional moment.
2 Cosmoi of the Cut
“Each cut is already a cosmos. Each unfolding bears the weight of a world.”
If time was never a neutral container, then neither were the worlds that grew within it. Across cultures and histories, people have lived-with unfolding in ways that far exceed the grammar of clocks. They did not name time, but cut the world — into seasons and stories, initiations and returns, births and deaths and rebirths. These cuts were never mere temporal markers. They were cosmoi: entire symbolic orders sustained through ritual, genre, and shared construal.
In this post, we move from the critique of modern time to the plurality of world-cuts: how different cultures have phased becoming through symbolic practice. We’re not here to survey traditions for their quaintness, nor to appropriate cosmologies out of context. We’re here to learn how people have lived-with unfolding, and how they’ve sustained symbolic orientation without collapsing into linearity or chaos.
This is not anthropology. It is an archaeology of possibility.
From Time to Cosmos
To say that mythos returns after time is to say that cosmos returns — not as the universe, but as an ordered whole: a world that holds its unfolding through symbolic structure. Every cosmos is sustained by a grammar of cuts: distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the before and the after, the permissible and the forbidden. These are not abstract metaphysics; they are lived semiotics.
Consider a few examples of such symbolic orderings:
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Spiral temporalities (e.g. in West African or Andean cosmologies), where events do not repeat, but echo — returning with difference, intensifying through layered cycles.
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Kinship calendars, in which unfolding is synchronised with social roles — becoming a parent, elder, ancestor — and the very structure of time is indexed to relational change.
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Agricultural rituals, where sowing and harvesting are not just economic acts, but cosmogonic events — re-enactments of creation, death, and renewal.
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Initiatory thresholds, where unfolding is cut not by age or date, but by symbolic trial — the world becomes different after the ordeal, and so does the self.
Each of these is a cosmos: not a map of space-time, but a grammar for living meaningfully with change.
The Cut as Symbolic, Not Temporal
What these practices reveal is that unfolding has always been lived through symbolic cut, not measured time.
A cut is not just a moment; it is a transvaluation — a shift in the order of meaning. A festival doesn’t merely mark the passage of days; it alters the world, re-activates cosmological grounding. A ritual doesn’t occur in time; it cuts time, orienting the unfolding around a phase shift that cannot be located on a clock.
This is why modern “time management” feels so hollow. It offers division without cosmos, segmentation without symbolism. It phases the world into units, but never into meaning.
In contrast, cosmoi hold the unfolding through cuts that matter — cuts that orient, bind, and renew.
Phasing as Cosmopoiesis
If phasecraft names the act of semiotic cutting — of distinguishing processes in order to live with them — then cosmopoiesis is the symbolic maintenance of those cuts at the level of world. It is not merely phasing; it is worlding.
In this sense, phasing is never just technical. Every cut is already embedded in a mythos. To phase is to participate in a cosmos — to locate oneself, not merely in a process, but in a meaningful whole.
This has profound implications:
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There is no such thing as pure process. All unfolding is construed through a symbolic ecology.
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There is no such thing as universal time. All temporalities are local, perspectival, and cosmopoietic.
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The loss of symbolic grammar is not neutral. It disables the world’s phaseability.
Toward Pluriversal Phasing
What we are now confronting is a collapse of the dominant cosmos — not just its institutions, but its symbolic coherence. In its place is not chaos, but multiplicity — a pluriverse of potential grammars for phasing the world.
We do not need to adopt ancient cosmoi. We do not need to fabricate new meta-narratives. We need to become conscious phasecrafters of the symbolic — not just how we cut, but how we world.
3 Clock Time and the Colonial Cut
“To conquer a people, it is not enough to take their land. You must also take their time.”
So far, we’ve spoken of mythos, cosmos, and the unfolding of lived processes. But the end of time — and the return of myth — cannot be understood apart from the colonial cut that severed peoples from their symbolic ecologies. Clock time did not merely displace cosmoi; it imposed a new symbolic order altogether: abstract, universal, measurable, empty. It was not just a technical convenience. It was an epistemic conquest.
To deconstruct time is not just to philosophise. It is to decolonise the symbolic order that made clock time appear natural, inevitable, and neutral. And it is to understand that reclaiming unfolding means also reclaiming the right to live-with the world in one's own way — to phase it, symbolise it, and belong to it.
The Universalisation of One Cut
Clock time is not universal. It is the outcome of a particular historical trajectory — one that emerged in Western Europe alongside industrialisation, colonial expansion, and the commodification of labour.
But what matters most is how it universalised its cut. Clock time did not merely offer an alternative way of organising the world; it redefined what organisation meant. It replaced local phasing with standardisation. It replaced symbolic significance with synchronicity. It replaced cosmopoiesis with compliance.
And it travelled not through persuasion, but through power.
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Missionaries imposed liturgical schedules that displaced local festivals and ritual cycles.
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Administrators enforced calendars and census regimes that rewrote indigenous genealogies and events.
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Educators retrained children to think in hours and years, not in monsoons or harvests or kinship roles.
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Capitalists converted labour into timed units, destroying the link between work, land, and sacred rhythm.
These were not side effects. They were strategies of domination — severing people from their world, their unfolding, their symbolic infrastructure.
The Violence of Temporal Displacement
To be torn from one’s symbolic unfolding is not just to lose tradition. It is to lose the very grammar of meaning. The colonial cut was a severing of orientation — a disembedding so profound that it left communities not just dispossessed, but disoriented.
This is why so much postcolonial struggle is not just about land or language, but about time. The call to “slow down,” to “reconnect with cycles,” to “honour ancestors” — these are not lifestyle choices. They are attempts to reworld the cut, to regenerate phaseability within a damaged symbolic ecology.
In this light, even modern calls to “manage time better” or “be more productive” carry colonial echoes. They preserve the grammar of compliance, not of orientation. They assume the legitimacy of the clock, even as they lament its effects.
Resisting Temporal Monoculture
Just as biodiversity protects ecosystems, symbolic diversity protects worldability. When only one mode of phasing is authorised — when only one temporal grammar is legitimate — then all other cosmoi become unintelligible. Or worse: romanticised, commodified, or erased.
To resist temporal monoculture is not to reject coordination or technology. It is to reclaim the right to live-with unfolding in ways that honour one’s own symbolic grounding. It is to refuse the idea that meaningful life must submit to abstract universals. And it is to recognise that no symbolic ecology can flourish under conditions of extraction and erasure.
This resistance is already alive — in indigenous language revival, in land-based ritual, in Afro-diasporic futurisms, in queer temporalities, in more-than-human cosmologies. These are not just cultural expressions. They are cosmopoietic acts — cuts against the clock, in defence of unfolding.
Beyond the Reparative Frame
Yet even resistance can be captured by the grammar it opposes. The dream of “restoring” cosmoi, of “undoing” the colonial cut, risks reinscribing the logic of time — as if symbolic healing were a project with a deadline, a future to arrive at, a past to retrieve.
But unfolding does not move backwards or forwards. It moves with. And so the task is not reparation as reversal, but as reconstrual: a living-with the cut as a site of worldmaking, not world-loss.
In the next post, we will turn to how the more-than-human — forests, rivers, winds, fungi — already phase the world in ways that exceed clock time, and how relational ontologies offer an alternative ground for cosmopoiesis in the aftermath of time.
4 More-than-Human Phasecraft
“The wind does not wait for permission to change. The mushroom does not ask if it is time. The forest phases itself.”
Clock time tells us that the world is inert, waiting to be moved. But in truth, the world is always already unfolding — not as background, but as participant. In this post, we turn to the more-than-human: the forests, rivers, fungi, weather-systems, microbial colonies — not as objects in time, but as phasers of world. They are not resources, not scenery, not passive terrain. They are agents of the cut.
And if mythos is to return — if symbolic life is to be reconstituted — it cannot do so within a human-only cosmology. The more-than-human is already phasing the world. We are the ones catching up.
From Environment to Ecophase
Modernity called it “the environment” — a container for human activity, to be studied or saved. But the world does not surround us. It co-constitutes us.
In relational ontology, the world is not a set of things in space-time. It is an ongoing differentiation of process — and that process includes us only as one strand in a vast, dynamic weave. More-than-human life does not simply exist; it orients, cuts, intensifies. It produces symbolic pressure. It phases becoming.
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A fungal bloom reframes the forest’s metabolism.
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A drought realigns the village’s rituals.
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A migration reshapes the semiotic horizon of the land.
These are not effects of “natural forces.” They are symbolic acts, cutting the unfolding into new orientations. The cosmos is not just human; it is composed across scales and species.
More-than-Human Phasecraft
Just as humans ritualise the cut, the more-than-human world actualises it — through shifts that are not only physical, but relationally meaningful.
Let us consider:
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Coral bleaching, not just as an ecological event, but as a cosmological cry — a cut that says: you have breached the relational contract.
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Mushroom networks, not merely as underground highways, but as distributed phasecraft — synchronising decay, renewal, and growth across ecologies.
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Tides and winds, not as background conditions, but as tempo-shaping forces — cutting movement into phases, producing ritual synchrony without a clock.
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Animal migration, not as instinctual behaviour, but as a living semiotic, phasing regions into seasonal orientations and sacred thresholds.
These are not metaphors. They are symbolic operations within ecologies whose semiotic logics do not depend on humans to be meaningful.
Cosmopoiesis Beyond the Human
When the colonial clock cut through symbolic ecologies, it not only severed human cultures — it desevered the more-than-human world. It rendered the world inanimate, unspeaking, passive. But in relational ontology, the more-than-human is symbolically active — co-participant in the phasing of cosmos.
This has consequences:
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There can be no reconstitution of mythos that is not ecosemiotic — involving plants, animals, weather, topologies.
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Cosmopoiesis must be distributed — held across species, not centralised in human institutions.
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Phasecraft must be listened for, not just designed — because the world is already cutting itself, even when we are deaf to it.
This is not to romanticise nature. It is to relocate cosmological power: to understand that the grammar of unfolding is not anthropocentric — and never was.
Learning to Listen With
The task is not to give voice to the more-than-human, but to relearn how to hear it — not as data, but as phasic symbolisation. This means cultivating new forms of attentiveness, new grammars of encounter:
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Ethnobotany as semiotic apprenticeship.
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Ecological restoration as ritual reconstrual.
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Animism not as belief, but as relational literacy.
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Seasonality not as weather report, but as phaseable grammar.
Living-with the more-than-human requires more than science or policy. It requires worlding otherwise — composing cosmoi in which humans are not the sole symbolic agents.
5 Mythos After Time
“Myth is not what we believe. It is what believes us.”
What remains, after time ends? After the colonial cut is revealed as a violent abstraction, after the more-than-human is restored to symbolic agency, after unfolding is reclaimed as the very texture of life — what remains?
This final post invites us to linger here: not in time, but in unfolding. Not in recovery, but in reconstrual. And to ask: what does it mean to live symbolically — now — without the scaffolding of time?
The Mythic is Not the Primitive
Modernity taught us to associate myth with the past: primitive, pre-rational, obsolete. But this framing is itself a product of the temporal cut — of a worldview that treats abstract progression as the only form of development.
The mythic is not primitive. It is phasic. It phases the real through symbolic intensities: narrative, ritual, sacrifice, rebirth, encounter. It creates thresholds and thresholds create cosmos. Where time seeks continuity, myth cuts.
And where time is indifferent to meaning, mythos is saturated with it.
Mythos as Construal
In relational ontology, meaning is not found, but construed. It is not located in objects or in minds, but in the cut — the distinction that makes orientation possible.
Mythos is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is a symbolic construal of unfolding — one that enables a people, a place, a process to phase itself meaningfully.
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A creation story is not a history; it is a symbolic grammar for becoming.
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A taboo is not a rule; it is a cut that holds the cosmos in tension.
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A ritual is not an act; it is a phase-transition in a semiotic ecology.
Symbolic Life Without the Clock
If the clock is no longer our master, then what orients us?
Not a replacement universal. Not a new timekeeper. But shared phasecraft — relational grammars for living-with, living-as, living-through. Symbolic life becomes not a matter of deadlines and durations, but of attentions and thresholds.
It becomes possible to ask:
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What are the rhythms of this forest, and how might I phase with them?
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What are the sacred tensions in this community, and how are they held?
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What cut must we now make, to symbolise our changed relation to the world?
These are not technical questions. They are mythic ones. They call not for solutions, but for orientations — not for certainty, but for meaningful unfolding.
After Time, We Make Cuts
To live without time does not mean to live in chaos. It means to live by the cut: to recognise that every act of meaning is a differentiation — and that we are always already phasing the world through our participation in it.
We do not need to return to old mythologies. But we do need to craft new ones — slowly, carefully, relationally. Mythos is not a relic. It is a method.
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For sensing what matters.
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For orienting in the pluriverse.
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For cutting meaning into the flux of unfolding.
After time ends, mythos begins again — not as belief, but as responsibility: the responsibility to cut meaningfully, to phase with care, and to world otherwise.
Coda: On the Far Side of Time
“To end time is not to end the world. It is to let the world unfold otherwise.”
We have not answered it once and for all — because the question is not one of fact, but of orientation. It is a phasic question, not a temporal one. And every answer cuts the world differently.
We have seen how the idea of time — linear, abstract, colonial — severed unfolding from meaning. How it froze becoming into units, stripped processes of their symbolic force, and claimed the right to organise all life by its grid.
We have also seen how time was never a neutral measure — but a worldmaking force: one that enabled some lives to count, and others to be discounted.
When we no longer believe in time as a container, we begin to see the world again as unfolding — as process, phase, cut, and construal. We rediscover the symbolic life of the more-than-human. We remember that cosmology was always a shared act.
To step through this threshold is not to abandon all structure. It is to accept a different kind of responsibility:
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To listen for phases rather than impose plans.
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To construe rather than control.
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To make meaning not once and for all, but again and again — in relation.
So what becomes of meaning when time ends?
We are simply learning to hear it once more.