Showing posts with label mythos. Show all posts

02 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Myth

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.

01 October 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Function to Horizon

The Functions of Myth Reframed: A Relational Ontology

Joseph Campbell suggested that mythology has four core functions: mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, and sociological. Each, in his telling, expresses a timeless role of myth in the psychic and cultural life of humanity.

But Campbell’s functions rely on an archetypal ontology: they presuppose a universal psyche, whose needs for awe, order, guidance, and structure are timeless and given. In this frame, myths become symbolic tools for eternal psychic functions.

Relational ontology makes a different cut. It resists the idea of universal psychic functions and treats myths instead as semiotic operations: symbolic construals that transform value into meaning-of-meaning and phase collective life. What Campbell names as four functions can be reframed as four relational operations:

Symbolising Alterity (reframing the mystical) — constraining the inassimilable through symbolic projection.
Projecting a Reflexive World (reframing the cosmological) — weaving value and meaning into a cosmos reflexively sustained by the collective.
Phasing Individuation (reframing the pedagogical) — aligning life-course transitions within symbolic horizons of the collective.
Synchronising the Collective (reframing the sociological) — binding orientations, practices, and institutions into symbolic unity.

In what follows, we will reread Campbell’s four functions through this relational lens. Myth is not the servant of universal psychic needs; it is the symbolic technology of collective life, staging horizons of possibility, binding individuals to worlds, and weaving worlds into collectives.

1 Symbolising Alterity (Reframing the Mystical)

Campbell’s first function of mythology is the mystical: to awaken awe before the mystery of being. In his telling, myths serve as reminders of a transcendent order beyond comprehension, stirring reverence for life’s unfathomable ground.

From a relational ontology perspective, however, this mystical function is not about awakening a pre-given psychic response. It is about symbolising alterity — giving semiotic form to what cannot otherwise be assimilated.

Every collective confronts what exceeds its grasp: death, catastrophe, the infinite, the unknown. These are not simply external “mysteries,” but relational limits where construal breaks down. Myth does not reveal these mysteries; it contains them by projecting them into symbolic horizons — gods, spirits, primordial forces.

In this sense, myth’s so-called mystical function is really a semiotic operation of constraint. It takes intensities that bypass perception — terror, awe, ecstasy — and anchors them in symbolic form. The storm becomes the anger of the sky-god; death becomes the journey to an underworld. These projections do not explain alterity but make it inhabitable.

The point is not reverence before mystery but the symbolic domestication of alterity. Myth gives a community the means to live with what it cannot master, to align around the inassimilable without collapsing into disorientation.

Thus the mystical reframed: not universal awe, but the symbolic construal of limits. Myth does not open the psyche to eternal mystery; it stabilises a collective against what it cannot otherwise endure.

2 Projecting a Reflexive World (Reframing the Cosmological)

Campbell’s second function of mythology is the cosmological: to explain the structure and order of the universe. For him, myths provide a symbolic map of the cosmos, situating human life within a grand design.

Relational ontology reframes this. Myths are not proto-scientific explanations of an objective universe. They are acts of world-making: symbolic projections that generate a cosmos reflexively structured by the collective.

A cosmos, in this sense, is not the physical universe but a horizon of meaning. Mountains become ancestors, rivers become life-givers, stars become guides. Myths weave these elements together into a symbolic whole where natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations are inseparable.

This is not explanation but projection: the cosmos appears to precede the collective, yet is constituted through its symbolic practices. The order of the world is reflexive — it reflects and sustains the order of the collective itself.

Thus, when a people tells of creation, they are not accounting for physical origins; they are articulating the relational architecture within which they live. The world is narrated into being, and that narration aligns collective existence.

Reframed this way, the cosmological function is not about explaining the universe, but about projecting a reflexive world. Myth generates a cosmos that feels given and necessary, but is in fact the symbolic articulation of collective construal.

3 Phasing Individuation (Reframing the Pedagogical)

Campbell’s third function of mythology is the pedagogical: to guide individuals through the stages of life, from birth to death. Myths, he suggests, provide symbolic models for navigating universal thresholds of existence.

From a relational ontology standpoint, individuation is not a solitary psychic process. It is always phased within the horizon of the collective. Myth provides not universal life-stages, but symbolic patterns through which a community aligns individual becoming with collective being.

Birth is not just a biological event; it is ritually phased into kinship, lineage, and belonging. Puberty is not merely biological change; it is semioticised through initiation, binding a young person into new roles and responsibilities. Death is not raw cessation; it is framed as passage, transformation, or ancestral return, situating the loss within a symbolic cosmos.

These are not timeless, archetypal stages. They are collective construals of individuation, ensuring that each life course is tethered to the symbolic fabric of the whole. The pedagogical is thus really a semiotic phasing: myths provide architectures of becoming that keep the individual and collective aligned.

Reframed this way, the pedagogical function is not about instructing a universal human journey. It is about phasing individuation into symbolic synchrony with the collective horizon. Myth does not teach individuals what they must universally do; it symbolically situates their becoming in relation to their world.

4 Synchronising the Collective (Reframing the Sociological)

Campbell’s fourth function of mythology is the sociological: to support and validate a given social order, prescribing norms and legitimating institutions. In this view, myth operates as a kind of ideological charter, stabilising the status quo.

From a relational ontology perspective, this framing is too static. Myth does not simply endorse or enforce order; it provides the symbolic infrastructure through which collective life is synchronised.

Myths are the semiotic architectures that align values, roles, and institutions within a reflexive cosmos. They bind different spheres of life — kinship, economy, ritual, governance — into a coherent symbolic pattern. What might appear as mere justification is in fact a process of symbolic synchronisation, ensuring that individual action, social role, and cosmic order resonate together.

Importantly, myth also allows for transformation. By shifting symbolic patterns, myths can recalibrate collective synchrony, enabling new orders of life to emerge. This is why myths often appear both conservative and revolutionary: they stabilise alignment, but they also provide the symbolic means to shift it.

Reframed this way, the sociological function is not about legitimating a fixed order. It is about synchronising the collective — sustaining alignment across scales of existence and providing a symbolic horizon through which change can be navigated.

Coda: From Functions to Reflexive Horizons

Campbell’s schema of four mythological functions — mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, sociological — remains influential because it gestures toward the breadth of myth’s role. But reframed through relational ontology, we can see that what appears as four separate functions are in fact four horizons of reflexive construal.

The mystical is not about private awe before transcendence, but about attuning collective construal to the openness of possibility itself.
The cosmological is not an attempt to explain the universe, but a means of projecting a reflexive world that holds together the collective’s symbolic life.
The pedagogical is not the charting of universal life-stages, but the phasing of individuation so that becoming remains aligned with the collective horizon.
The sociological is not static justification of order, but the synchronisation of collective life across roles, institutions, and symbolic structures.

Seen this way, myth is not a collection of stories that decorate human life, nor is it a proto-scientific attempt at explanation. It is the symbolic scaffolding through which life is oriented, synchronised, and projected into cosmos. Myth is not about gods above or instincts below; it is about the reflexive infrastructures of meaning that bind value, being, and world into coherence.

Thus, instead of “functions of mythology,” we might better speak of horizons of symbolic reflexivity. Myth does not explain, command, or instruct; it enables collective life to construe itself, to phase its becoming, and to project its cosmos.

30 September 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Value to Cosmos

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:

Synchronising value orientations: fear becomes taboo, hunger becomes ritual feast, desire becomes covenant.
Scaling experience: individual dilemmas are reframed as cosmic dramas, situating each life within a larger order.
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:

Value-orientations surface in altered states.
These are semioticised into meanings-of-meanings.
Through collective performance, they align the social whole.
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:

From value to meaning-of-meaning: myth semioticises adaptive orientations, giving form to intensities that perception cannot grasp directly.
From individual to collective alignment: myth phases bodies and voices into synchrony, binding many into one symbolic horizon.
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:

Away from Campbell’s psychic universalism and Jungian archetypes.
Away from models that treat myth as a projection of individual or collective consciousness.
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.

29 September 2025

Myth as Construal: Rereading Campbell through Relational Ontology

Preface: From Monomyth to Relational Worlds

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces has long been celebrated for unveiling the “monomyth,” a universal narrative arc underlying global mythologies. Across cultures and eras, Campbell traced a single heroic itinerary: departure, initiation, and return. His work promised a unifying vision of myth as the manifestation of timeless psychic patterns.

Yet this universalising lens obscures a fundamental ontological distinction: the stories themselves are not instances of a preordained archetype, but situated, collective, and contingent acts of symbolic construal. Each myth phases its community into alignment, projects the collective into relational landscapes, and opens possibilities for action and imagination. The patterns Campbell detects are echoes — recurrent solutions to relational tensions — not proof of a singular, eternal monomyth.

This series, Myth as Construal, undertakes a relational rereading of Campbell. Its six posts trace a careful progression:

The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data – distinguishing Campbell’s universalising model from the plural, situated ontology of the myths themselves.
From Archetype to Reflexivity – reframing archetypes not as psychic essences but as effects of collective reflexive alignment.
From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures – dissolving the singular hero’s journey into heterogeneous construals of collective being.
Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process – exploring how each telling stages collective alignment through time.
Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes – showing how myths scaffold understanding across social, ecological, and symbolic horizons.
From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis – synthesising the series to foreground myth as the architecture of possibility, and Campbell’s monomyth as artefact.

The guiding move of this series is a relational cut: to treat myth not as a reflection of a timeless inner truth, but as an active, plural, and phasing construal of collective possibility. In doing so, it reframes Campbell’s project, highlighting the richness, heterogeneity, and creative dynamism of myth as it is actually enacted, rather than as it is universalised into theory.

By the end, the series invites readers to inhabit myth not as a static template of the psyche, but as a symbolic instrument, a field in which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their worlds. Campbell’s monomyth is a mirror; relational ontology invites us to step off the mirror and into the plurality of mythic life itself.

1 The Ontology of the Model vs. the Ontology of the Data

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is often celebrated for uncovering a universal pattern at the heart of mythology: the so-called “monomyth,” or hero’s journey. His comparative lens spans continents and centuries, stitching together myths from Greece to India, Polynesia to Sumer. What results is a grand synthesis, a single archetypal itinerary of separation, initiation, and return.

But this ambition conceals a crucial slippage: the ontology of Campbell’s model is not the ontology of his data.

The myths Campbell draws upon are symbolic construals, each situated within its own collective horizon. They are not “instances” of a timeless archetype; they are ways of aligning a community through shared symbolic potential. A Navajo emergence story, a Polynesian voyage tale, and a Greek heroic cycle each construe different relations of collective, individual, cosmos, and possibility. Their meanings are grounded in their social-symbolic contexts, not in an abstract, transcendent psyche.

Campbell’s model, by contrast, is not relational but archetypal. Anchored in Jungian psychology, it treats myth as an expression of timeless psychic structures. Similarities across myths are gathered into a universal narrative sequence, which is then taken as the truth of myth itself. In doing so, Campbell conflates the patterned potential of symbolic construal with the absolutised structure of a monomyth.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is the decisive cut: the data are plural, situated, and collective; the model is singular, universalising, and psychic. Campbell mistakes the resonances of symbolic construal across cultures for proof of an underlying universal form. The relational move is to resist this collapse, and to treat myth instead as a field of heterogeneous construals — each staging possibilities for being-together, none reducible to a single archetypal template.

In this series, we will reread Campbell through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than a monomyth of timeless individuation, myth will be approached as symbolic construal: the staging of ontological possibility, the phasing of collective alignment, the architecture of what a world can mean.

2 From Archetype to Reflexivity

At the core of Campbell’s model lies the concept of the archetype. Myths, in his account, are symbolic expressions of deep psychic patterns: timeless forms residing in the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not a cultural invention but a universal structure of the psyche, surfacing again and again in different guises.

This is where Campbell’s ontology reveals its essentialist foundations. Archetypes are conceived as givens — eternal forms that precede and determine symbolic expression. Myth, in this view, is not a situated act of meaning-making but a coded manifestation of an inner truth.

A relational ontology cuts this differently. It denies the existence of timeless, pre-given forms. Instead, it understands meaning as construal: the perspectival shaping of potential into symbolic actuality. From this vantage, what Campbell calls an “archetype” is not a psychic essence but an effect of reflexive alignment.

When a collective tells a myth, it symbolically projects itself into form. This projection aligns individual and collective experience within a shared horizon. The figure of the hero, for example, does not derive from an eternal archetype of individuation; it arises as a symbolic construal of how individuation can be oriented within a particular collective. The hero is not an archetype of the psyche but a reflexive articulation of possibility.

This shift matters. Archetype freezes myth into essence; reflexivity restores myth as event. Archetype says: the hero’s journey is eternal. Reflexivity says: this telling stages individuation against the collective whole here, now, within this symbolic horizon.

From a relational perspective, then, Campbell’s archetypes are not the source of myth but its retrospective abstraction. They are second-order readings of recurrent symbolic construals, elevated into timeless universals. Myths themselves do not reveal archetypes; they enact reflexivity.

In other words: myth does not express the unconscious. It constitutes the horizon of the possible.

3 From Monomyth to Plural Mythic Architectures

Campbell’s “hero’s journey” presents a sweeping narrative: separation, initiation, return. Across cultures, he finds the same beats, the same archetypal itinerary. The monomyth promises universality: one path, one sequence, one story of individuation.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is precisely the move that flattens myth into abstraction. The monomyth treats similarity as essence, pattern as law, and recurrence as evidence of universality. It neglects the situated, collective, and contingent work that myths perform within their own horizons.

Relational ontology reframes this: there is no single journey, only plural mythic architectures. Each myth constructs a horizon of possibility for its collective, shaping alignment, scaling individuation, and orienting action. The apparent “recurrences” that Campbell notes are not proofs of a universal plot; they are resonances — structural echoes that arise whenever certain relational tensions are negotiated in symbolic form (life and death, self and collective, known and unknown).

In this view:

The hero’s journey is not a template but one construal among many. A Polynesian navigation epic, a Greek tragedy, and a Navajo emergence myth do not share a hidden “monomyth” but instead instantiate different solutions to recurring relational challenges.
Myth is an architecture, not a map. It scaffolds collective experience, guiding what a community can imagine, enact, and align toward, rather than reporting an eternal psychic itinerary.
Plurality is fundamental. Each telling opens a new trajectory of being-together; the multiplicity of myths is not noise against a universal signal but the terrain of possibility itself.

From the relational vantage, Campbell’s monomyth is a model imposed upon the richness of plural construals. By universalising, it abstracts away the reflexive, contingent, and collective dimension of mythic action. The monomyth dissolves; what remains are heterogeneous mythic architectures — patterned potentials, staged alignments, and symbolic spaces in which collectives orient themselves toward what they can become.

The move from monomyth to plural architectures is thus more than critique: it is a reorientation. Myth is no longer a map of the psyche; it is the scaffolding of collective possibility.

4 Myth as Temporal and Phasing Process

Campbell’s monomyth presents myth as a sequence — the hero departs, faces trials, and returns transformed. Time, in his model, is linear and universal: myths follow a preordained itinerary, regardless of context or culture. In this framing, the narrative is a template, and the story’s phasing is derivative, secondary to the archetype.

Relational ontology cuts differently. Myth is not a static pattern traced over time; it is a process of phasing — an enactment of collective alignment, unfolding within the temporality of the telling. Each telling of a myth does more than recount events: it coordinates the present, anticipates potential futures, and aligns participants to shared symbolic horizons.

Key insights from this perspective include:

Temporal Relativity of Myth: Myths do not exist outside the moment of their telling. The same narrative can be enacted differently across occasions, emphasising different relational tensions, guiding different alignments, and opening distinct trajectories of collective possibility. The “sequence” of events is not fixed but flexible, contingent upon the horizon it phases.
Phasing Social Formation: Each telling structures a collective’s experience, scaling individual action against the whole, synchronising symbolic projection, and orienting what the group perceives as possible. Myth thus functions as a temporal scaffold: a way to order experience, not to illustrate an eternal pattern.
Iterative Reflexivity: Mythical phasing is reflexive. As the collective engages with a story, it adapts and realigns its symbolic horizon, which in turn reshapes subsequent tellings. Myths evolve through practice, not by appealing to a timeless monomyth.
Staging Possibility: Every act of storytelling is a construal of what could be. Myth does not describe what must occur; it maps potential, showing how the collective might navigate uncertainty, tension, and relational challenge.

From this vantage, Campbell’s linear monomyth becomes a shadow of myth’s real function. It abstracts sequence into universality, freezing temporal phasing into archetypal necessity. Relational ontology restores myth as a dynamic, iterative, and contingent process — a temporal choreography of symbolic alignment that unfolds differently each time it is enacted.

In short: myths are not maps of the psyche or the universe. They are temporal instruments, phasing collectives into alignment with their symbolic and relational possibilities.

5 Symbolic Reflexivity in Mythic Landscapes

Beyond sequence and timing, myths operate across relational landscapes. They are not only temporal phasings but also symbolic architectures that structure how collectives inhabit, navigate, and understand their worlds. From a relational ontology perspective, every myth functions as a lens through which a community construes its environment, its relations, and its possibilities.

Myths as Spatial and Social Scaffolds:
Myths map symbolic relationships across social and natural landscapes. A hero’s journey through a forest, across seas, or into the underworld is not merely narrative decoration; it stages relations between the collective and its environment, between individual roles and collective expectations. Myth constructs an experiential geography where actions, values, and relational tensions are meaningfully aligned.
Reflexive Projection:
Each myth projects the collective into symbolic form, allowing it to see itself from multiple vantage points simultaneously: the individual’s perspective, the collective’s stance, and the horizon of potential futures. This reflexivity is not introspection of a universal psyche but the enactment of collective self-construal.
Alignment Across Horizons:
Through repeated tellings, myths synchronise understanding across dispersed or heterogeneous participants. They create shared symbolic coordinates, so that disparate members of a collective can navigate tensions consistently, orient their actions coherently, and inhabit the same symbolic horizon. Myth, in this sense, is an instrument of social coordination, not a mere recounting of archetypal patterns.
Dynamic, Heterogeneous Landscapes:
The landscapes of myth are not fixed. They are shaped by cultural, ecological, and historical contingencies. A myth adapts to new circumstances, producing multiple, overlapping trajectories of meaning. Campbell’s universal model erases this heterogeneity; relational ontology foregrounds it, revealing myth as plural, adaptive, and contextually grounded.

In sum, myths are simultaneously temporal and spatial instruments. They phase collective alignment through time, scaffold understanding across relational space, and reflexively project the collective into the symbolic horizon it inhabits. They do not mirror a timeless archetype; they constitute the terrain of possibility, showing communities how to live, act, and align within the worlds they inhabit.

6 From Monomyth to Relational Richness — A Synthesis

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has captivated generations by offering a singular, universal path through the landscape of human imagination: the hero departs, undergoes trials, and returns transformed. Its appeal lies in simplicity, coherence, and the promise of timeless truth. Yet, from a relational ontology perspective, this very appeal masks a critical ontological distortion.

The Monomyth as Artefact
Campbell’s synthesis abstracts, universalises, and essentialises. It treats recurrence as law, similarity as essence, and pattern as proof of an underlying psychic reality. In doing so, it collapses the plural, situated, and contingent nature of mythic practice into a single, flattened narrative. The “hero’s journey” becomes less a reflection of lived symbolic activity than a projection of theoretical desire — a map imposed upon terrain that is, in reality, richly diverse and dynamic.

Relational Ontology Restores Plurality
In contrast, myth itself is heterogeneous, iterative, and phasing. Each telling:

Aligns collective and individual experience within a symbolic horizon.
Projects the collective into temporal, social, and ecological landscapes.
Scaffolds possibilities for being-together, coordinating action, meaning, and expectation.
Evolves reflexively with each retelling, producing layered, context-sensitive architectures of understanding.

From this vantage, myths are not templates for inner transformation but instruments of symbolic construction — shaping what a collective can imagine, orient toward, and enact. The “archetypes” and “monomyths” of Campbell are therefore second-order abstractions: reflective readings of recurring construals, elevated into universalist theory. They are artefacts of comparison, not inherent features of the data.

The Decisive Cut
Relational ontology draws the critical distinction: the ontology of Campbell’s model ≠ the ontology of the myths themselves. The former is singular, universalising, and psychic; the latter is plural, situated, and collective. By preserving this cut, we reclaim myth as an active, temporal, reflexive, and spatially rich phenomenon.

Concluding Insight
Myth is not a path laid out by the unconscious; it is the architecture of possibility. It stages collective alignment, phases experience across horizons, and opens trajectories for becoming. In short, myths are not timeless patterns to be discovered; they are the relational instruments by which collectives construct, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Campbell’s monomyth, while elegant, is a mirror of our desire for universals. Relational ontology invites us instead to inhabit the plural, contingent, and creative reality of myth as it actually functions — as construal, alignment, and possibility in action.

Coda: Dwelling in the Relational Horizon of Myth

As we conclude this series, it is worth pausing not to summarise, but to reflect on the implications of a relational reading of myth. If Campbell’s monomyth invites us to see a singular path — the hero’s journey of individuation — relational ontology invites us to inhabit plural horizons of possibility. Myths are not mirrors of a timeless psyche; they are instruments through which collectives enact, navigate, and expand their symbolic worlds.

Each telling is a temporary cut into the vast field of potential: it phases alignment, projects relational possibilities, and shapes the collective’s horizon. Across cultures and epochs, the diversity of mythic form is not deviation from a universal pattern, but the very texture of symbolic life. The hero departs, yes — but the paths, landscapes, tensions, and resolutions are as varied as the communities who tell them.

In dwelling with myths relationally, we recognise the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of symbolic activity. We see that alignment and reflexivity are not metaphors, but operative processes that structure possibility. Myths are not discoveries of hidden truth; they are enactments of what a collective can become.

This perspective does not diminish the power or beauty of myth; rather, it deepens it. By attending to plurality, contingency, and process, we honour the creative and collective work that myths perform. We are invited to read myth as an architecture, to inhabit it as a landscape, and to participate in it as a living field of relational possibility.

Campbell’s vision, compelling though it is, reflects our desire for universals. The relational lens reframes that desire, allowing us to dwell instead in the rich, contingent, and evolving horizon of myth itself — a horizon in which every telling is both a projection and a possibility, and in which the collective imagines, aligns, and becomes.

In the end, myth is not a path to truth; it is the space in which truth is construed, rehearsed, and renewed. To engage with myth relationally is to dwell in that space, attentive to the plurality, phasing, and reflexivity that make collective life meaningful.

"Step lightly into the tales.
Notice the paths, but do not follow them as lines of destiny.
Attend instead to the spaces they open,
the alignments they perform,
the possibilities they call into being.
Here, myth is not a map, but a horizon —
and you are invited to dwell within it."