Myth as Cosmogenesis

Myth as Cosmogenesis: Joseph Campbell in a Relational Universe

In a relational cosmology, meaning is not discovered but actualised — not lying dormant in a pre-existent world, but emerging in the construals of meaners. The universe is not a thing we witness, but a pattern we participate in. And in this light, myth is no longer a set of symbolic stories about a world out there — it is an active mode of world-making. Joseph Campbell saw myth as the song of the universe sung through the human imagination. A relational cosmology lets us hear that song anew — not as echo but as creation.

Campbell's famous four functions of mythology lend themselves naturally to a relational reading:

Campbell’s Function	Relational Cosmology Perspective
Mystical	The awe that arises not from what exists, but from the very act of construal — that anything can emerge from potential at all.
Cosmological	A shared system for instantiating the cosmos as meaning — not a model of the universe, but a pattern of construal.
Sociological	The coordination of meaning potentials within a community — shaping what can be meant, done, and become.
Pedagogical	A narrative guide to self-instantiation — myth as a script for becoming a meaner in time.

Where Campbell speaks of myth as a map, relational cosmology sees it as a means of navigation — one that doesn't trace a fixed landscape, but instead helps bring the landscape into being through shared construal.

Campbell’s observation that myths are public dreams and dreams private myths also gains new clarity here. In dreaming, the meaner conjures meaning from within, loosely constrained by the shared field. In myth, a community condenses centuries of dreaming into potent narrative form — enacting a world together, again and again.

Crucially, this reframing removes the need for any eternal metaphysical substance behind myth. It is not grounded in a realm of Forms or a divine mind but in the ongoing participation of meaning-makers. Campbell often invoked the metaphor of the mask: the god behind the mask is not a being but a function — a way of meaning. In relational terms, the mask is not a disguise but an interface, enabling the construal of potential through culturally inherited forms.

Myth, then, is neither true nor false in any propositional sense. It is meaningful — or not — according to how it functions as a mode of construal. When myths cease to resonate, it is not because they are incorrect, but because they are no longer co-instantiating the world we are living in. Campbell called for new myths informed by contemporary science. In relational cosmology, we see why: new constraints give rise to new potentials, and new worlds demand new meanings.

Ultimately, myth is cosmogenesis in symbolic form. The universe does not begin once and for all at a Big Bang, but again and again, in every act of meaning-making. When we tell stories that orient us to mystery, to order, to others, and to ourselves, we are not remembering the world — we are bringing it forth.

And so Campbell’s great insight is affirmed in a new key: the mythic imagination is not a relic of the past, but a faculty of the cosmos itself — wearing the mask of the human.