Myth, at its core, is the symbolic interface between human consciousness and the cosmos. It's the vehicle through which cultures process existential questions, express fundamental values, and adapt to the ever-changing nature of life. What if myth were not just a relic of past meaning systems but an active, conscious tool for re-making culture, adapting to the challenges and crises of the present?
This is where Systemic Functional Mythology comes into play. A systemic functional approach offers a framework not just for interpreting myth but for participating in its evolution. Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), myth is a system of meaning-making with its own stratification, metafunctions, and potential for instantiation. This approach does not seek to return to some pre-modern golden age or escape into fantasy, but rather to recognise the fall into symbol as the beginning of a long ascent, one in which meaning is made, not found.
Stratification: Meaning and Expression in Myth
In SFL, the idea of stratification refers to the organisation of semiotic systems into hierarchies of symbolic abstraction. The same principle applies to mythic systems. In language, we have meaning (semantics), wording (lexicogrammar), and sounding (phonology). Myths operate similarly:
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Content plane: The realm of mythic meaning—archetypes, symbolic patterns, cosmological visions. This is where myths do their ideational work, construing a symbolic representation of reality.
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Expression plane: The forms myths take—rituals, stories, visual symbols, masks, chants, architecture. These are the channels through which myths make meaning available to experience, and how they enact transformation.
A myth is not simply a collection of stories; it is a dynamic, evolving system of meaning, in which what a myth means (its symbolic charge) and how that meaning is expressed (in cultural forms) are distinct but functionally related.
Metafunctions in Myth
SFL identifies three key metafunctions that guide how meaning is made across any semiotic system. These can be applied to myth as well:
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Ideational metafunction: Myth construes a symbolic representation of reality, whether it's cosmic structure, moral order, or life phases. It answers the question: What is reality?
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Interpersonal metafunction: Myth places the subject within the social world, connecting them to power, community, the divine, and the self. It answers the question: How do we relate to each other, to the divine, and to our own identity?
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Textual metafunction: Myth organises these symbolic elements into coherent, communicable forms, such as narratives, rituals, and visual schemas. It answers the question: How do we tell the story of our lives and the cosmos?
The myth of the hero’s journey is a clear example of this: It is ideational (depicting transformation), interpersonal (calling the individual to self-overcoming), and textual (following a structured narrative of departure, initiation, and return).
Instantiating Myth: From Mythic Potential to Mythic Instance
Just as language has a meaning potential that is instantiated through speech and writing, myths also have a reservoir of possible meanings—symbols and archetypes that take on specific meanings depending on the cultural and personal contexts in which they are enacted. A single mythic symbol—say, the serpent—has a range of potential meanings. In one mythic context, it may symbolise chaos; in another, it may symbolise renewal. The instance of the serpent in a particular ritual, narrative, or painting determines its specific meaning in that moment.
This process of instantiation allows a culture or individual to actualise mythic potential into particular symbolic acts. This is how myth lives and evolves: through its re-enactment, reinterpretation, and reintegration into new cultural contexts.
Myth as a Response to Semiotic Crisis
When a culture's symbolic resources fail to integrate experience across the three metafunctions—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—it enters a semiotic crisis. This breakdown may happen when rationalist systems prioritise the ideational at the expense of interpersonal connection, or when postmodern fragmentation leaves behind an incoherent symbolic system. In these moments of crisis, myth is not merely a comfort—it restructures meaning itself. Myths respond to these breakdowns:
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Ideational anchoring: offering a cosmology in a fragmented world.
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Interpersonal recalibration: reimagining new roles, ethics, and identities.
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Textual reorganisation: creating new forms of narrative, ritual, and symbolic pattern.
In this way, myth doesn’t just reflect the world—it reorganises the symbolic ecosystem, offering new structures for understanding and integration. It actively remakes cultural meaning in response to crisis.
Mythopoesis as Metasemiotic Work
The myth-maker, much like the poet in Campbell’s view, is not simply a storyteller but a designer of symbolic systems. Mythopoesis is metasemiotic work: the process of reshaping the very conditions of meaning-making.
To engage in mythopoesis today is to:
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Identify points of metafunctional breakdown in society.
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Draw from the deep well of symbolic resources available in the cultural psyche.
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Actualise new patterns that harmonise experience across functions.
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Ensure these patterns are textualised in accessible, transformative forms.
This becomes a tool for conscious cultural evolution. It recognises that we are not merely the inheritors of myths; we are their future authors. In myth, we find not a return to innocence, but an ascent toward conscious integration, where meaning is constructed and continually reconstructed at ever higher levels.
Why It Matters
Systemic Functional Mythology does more than offer a framework for interpreting myths—it challenges us to engage with them as evolving systems of meaning. By avoiding the literalism of symbolic interpretation and foregrounding the symbolic function, we can see myth as a living, evolving semiotic system.
Through SFL, we understand myth as:
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Stratified: Meaning is organised hierarchically, from the symbolic core to its outer forms.
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Multifunctional: Myths operate across ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions.
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Instantiable: Myths live and evolve through reinvention and reinterpretation.
By recognising these aspects of myth, we reclaim its value not as primitive superstition but as one of the most sophisticated systems for mediating human meaning in all its complexity.