If the Genesis narratives are mythologisations of instantiation and individuation—of how potential becomes actual, and how meaning becomes personal—then myth itself demands a new role in our cosmology. It is not merely the cultural debris of pre-scientific minds. It is not a primitive form of explanation waiting to be replaced. Myth is a system of semiotic memory—a way of remembering how meaning comes into being in the first place.
In a relational cosmos, there is no view from nowhere. There is only construal: the transformation of potential into actual by a meaner. Myth, then, becomes a cultural memory of this transformation—a kind of collective witness to the shape of meaning’s emergence.
Let’s unpack what this means.
Myth as the Remembering of Instantiation
In a cosmos where nothing is actual until it is construed, myth serves as a record of the ways we have construed. The story of Creation is not about the origin of matter, but the origin of pattern. The act of naming—“Let there be”—is remembered as foundational because it models the moment when meaning arises.
Myth does not tell us what is; it tells us how meaning has been brought into being. It is a map of past instantiations—not of events, but of construals. It teaches us the grammar of meaning by giving us a pattern of choices made from potential.
It does not fix the world in place. It shows us that the world is made, and can be remade.
Myth as the Tension of Individuation
But meaning is not just made—it is positioned. The Fall reminds us that with individuation comes partiality. Each construal is from somewhere. Myth does not hide this; it reveals the perspective. In the relational cosmos, every act of individuation draws on the collective system but configures it uniquely.
Myth, then, gives voice to these configurations. It shows how communities have oriented themselves within the field of potential, and how they have remembered the cost of doing so. Cain and Abel, Babel, the Flood—all become stories not of divine intervention but of social individuation: how a group defines itself, sets its boundaries, and confronts the consequences.
We do not read myth to find out what happened. We read it to understand how meaning was made.
Myth as Participatory Memory
In a relational cosmos, where there is no meaning without a meaner, myth is not a fossil—it is an act of participation. To retell a myth is to construe anew. It is to reinstantiate potential within a present context. The myth is not static; it is a site of ongoing semiosis—meaning in motion.
And this is what gives myth its staying power. Science explains how the universe behaves. Myth tells us what the universe means when seen from where we are. And when the cosmos is not something “out there,” but something instantiated in relation to us, meaning becomes fundamental.
Myth becomes a mirror—not of nature, but of our own process of construal.
Myth as the Form of a Relational Cosmology
So perhaps Campbell was right: myth must once again serve a cosmological function. But not by competing with science. Rather, by helping us understand what it means to inhabit a world where reality is relational, where the cosmos unfolds through meaning, and where every act of construal changes the whole.
Myth is not a remnant of old knowledge. It is the shape of knowing itself—a diagram of instantiation, a memory of individuation, and a tool for meaning-making in an ever-unfolding world.
In this sense, myth is not a way of describing the cosmos. It is the cosmos—as seen from within.
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