The Pedagogical Function: Instantiating Meaning Through the Phases of Living
The pedagogical function is where myth meets the everyday becoming of a meaner. It’s where the cosmos whispers not about stars and gods, but about you—how to be, how to become, how to make meaning through the seasons of life. In Campbell's terms, it’s the myth showing you how to live in the world. But in our relational model, that becomes: how to instantiate meaning at each stage of individuation.
Let’s unpack that.
Each phase of life brings new potential, and myth provides patterned construals—mythic grammars—for selecting from that potential.
1. Birth and Emergence: The Call to Construe
From a relational view, birth is not just biological emergence—it is the beginning of meaning-making. The pedagogical function here is to scaffold that first act of instantiation: a child entering a world that construes them before they construe themselves.
Think of myths of miraculous birth—Moses, Krishna, Horus, Jesus. These aren’t just about divinely chosen figures. They represent the initial social construal of the child’s place in meaning-space. The community assigns significance to this arrival—it marks the potential before individuation begins. Myth teaches that you were already meaningful before you knew what meaning was.
The pedagogy here is:
You begin already situated in meaning. Now, grow into it.
2. Childhood and Initiation: Learning to Construe
Here myth functions as a training in semiotic navigation. The world of the child is full of latent systems—language, custom, kinship, ritual. Myth is the toolkit for learning how to make choices from those systems.
The initiation myths—of rites, trials, and tests—are symbolic maps of entering a meaning system. They dramatise the movement from receiving meaning to actively construing it. This is where individuation begins: where the child starts to select and pattern meaning for themselves.
The myth says:
You are no longer only made by meaning—you are a maker of meaning.
3. Adulthood and Responsibility: Meaning as Action
This phase marks the full entry into the field of social potential—work, relationships, creativity, consequence. Here the pedagogical function is about orienting individuation within the collective. It teaches how to instantiate meaning while navigating competing systems of value.
Myths of kingship, marriage, betrayal, sacrifice—they don’t just dramatise power and passion. They show the complexities of construal when meanings conflict. The adult meaner must construe responsibly: instantiate meaning without collapsing the system.
Think of the Mahabharata or the tragedies of Greek myth: individuation becomes dangerous when untethered from the collective grammar. Myth teaches:
You must construe meaning within limits, or meaning itself will fracture.
4. Crisis and Transformation: The Collapse and Reboot of Systems
This is the midlife underworld, the shaman’s dismemberment, the hero in the belly of the whale. The meaning systems that once held seem to dissolve. The cosmos seems mute. This is not regression—it is a liminal unmaking.
In our terms, it is a point where the existing instantiations no longer serve—and the meaning potential must be reconfigured. Myth guides the painful letting go of one construal in order to open to another. It's a symbolic death of the old semiotic self.
The pedagogical message is:
When your construal fails, don’t fix it—descend. New meaning must come from deeper potential.
5. Eldership and Integration: Living as Myth
Later life is not a withdrawal from meaning-making—it is the shift from instantiating meaning to embodying the system. Elders no longer merely construe—they serve as living memory of how meaning can be construed. They become semiotic archetypes themselves.
The pedagogical myths here are of sages, tricksters, wise fools—those who carry the whole system lightly. They’ve moved beyond identification with particular instantiations and instead model the field of potential itself.
The myth says:
Be less the hero, more the grammar. Become a source of potential for others.
6. Death: The Final Construal
Death, in this framework, is not disappearance—it is the final instantiation from a particular perspective. Myth doesn't answer what happens next; it remembers how others have construed the crossing. Death is the end of individuation, but not of meaning.
Pedagogically, death myths teach us how to release construal. How to prepare for meaning to continue without us. They shape how a culture instantiates loss, legacy, and continuity.
The myth says:
You will not construe again—but your construal becomes part of the potential for others.
The Mythic Curriculum of a Life
So in a relational cosmos, the pedagogical function of myth is not to tell us how to live, but to offer patterned construals that help us:
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instantiate meaning from potential,
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navigate individuation within a social field,
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and reconfigure that navigation at each threshold.
It is a lifelong grammar lesson in being.
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