The First Distinction: Creation and Fall as the Myth of Meaning Made Actual

At the root of every myth is a movement—from what is not yet, to what is. From chaos to cosmos, from silence to speech, from potential to instance. The Genesis narratives of Creation and the Fall are not historical accounts of divine engineering or moral failing. They are deeper than that. They are mythic maps of meaning—tales that give shape to the emergence of actuality from potential, and identity from the undifferentiated.

In short, they are the mythologisation of instantiation and individuation.

Let There Be Instantiation

Creation begins not with a bang, but with a word. “Let there be...” The divine speech does not summon matter ex nihilo, but distinguishes. Light from darkness. Sea from sky. The formless deep is not nothingness, but unconstrued potential—a sea of meaning not yet made actual.

To name is to instantiate. It is to bring a configuration of potential into being by making a distinction. This is the first creative act—not the formation of objects, but the construal of difference. Meaning is not placed into the world; it is the world, once actualised by construal.

Genesis becomes, then, not the myth of how stuff appeared, but of how meaning took shape through patterned construal—through the divine meaner as model of all meaners. The cosmos is not a container, but a relational unfolding of meaning across systems of difference.

The Fall into Individuation

If Creation is the myth of instantiation, then the Fall is the myth of individuation. In the garden, meaning remains open. No category has yet been closed. The man and woman are unnamed individuals—archetypes of a humanity not yet individuated, still at one with the web of potential meaning.

The moment they eat, they become conscious as subjects. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not a moral binary but a semiotic threshold. To eat is to enter into the world of categorical construal—where each meaning made entails a meaning not chosen. Their eyes are opened: not to sin, but to difference, to selfhood, to limitation.

This is individuation: the shift from shared meaning potential to personal meaning system. From Edenic totality to the burden of choosing. They are expelled not from a garden of delights, but from a space of infinite potential into a space where every act of construal excludes as much as it includes.

This is the world we inhabit. Not fallen, but fractured—by necessity. Not because of disobedience, but because the moment meaning is made actual, it is made partial. The Fall is not a fall from truth but a fall into perspective.

A Meaner Is Born

Seen this way, Genesis is the mythic emergence of the meaner—the one who construes, who instantiates, who individuates. In Eden, there is no subjectivity, only potential. But with the Fall, there is perspective. With perspective, meaning becomes both possible and contested.

In systemic-functional terms: Creation is the instantiation of semantic potential into meaning; the Fall is the individuation of that meaning into the distinct system of a self.

This is not a tale of failure—it is a tale of formation. Of what it means to mean.