The Sacred Spiral: Meaning Mythologising Meaning

The Sacred Spiral: Meaning Mythologising Meaning

In our unfolding exploration of relational cosmology and symbolic depth, we now turn to a reflexive mystery: meaning mythologising meaning. This is not abstraction for its own sake. It is the enactment of myth’s mystical function—to render the sacred present not as doctrine or dogma, but as the living recursion of meaning upon itself. We call this the sacred spiral.

1. The Primordial Loop: From Experience to Meaning

Human experience begins not with explanation, but with construal. We encounter the world not as raw data, but as potential—potential to mean. Through symbolic systems, we structure that potential, turning it into meaning. The first sacred movement, then, is:

experience → meaning → symbolic form

In this gesture, the sacred is born—not from outside, but from within the relational act of making sense.

2. The Second Loop: From Symbol to Myth

Symbols, once formed, do not simply point—they resonate. They link one experience to another, one person to a people. When these resonances cohere into narrative structures, myth emerges. Myth is not fiction. It is the architecture of symbolic life:

symbol → myth → shared meaning potential

Myth encodes a culture’s understanding of being. It teaches us not what to think, but how to see.

3. The Third Loop: From Myth to Metasymbol

At a certain depth, myth begins to turn its gaze upon itself. The gods become masks. The prophets become storytellers. The sacred texts whisper not just truths, but truths about truth. This is a turning inward:

myth → symbolisation of symbol

Here, the mythic figure is not simply a hero, but a symbol of symbolic becoming. The divine is not just invoked—it is enacted.

4. The Fourth Loop: The Mythologist as Mystic

Enter the mythologist—not as analyst, but as participant. The mythologist sees the pattern not as superstition, but as sacred recursion. Myth is no longer something we believe—it is something we do. The mythologist becomes a liminal figure:

meaning → reflection on meaning → instantiation of the sacred

To interpret myth is not to step outside it. It is to enter it consciously, to walk the spiral as both path and pattern.

5. Our Spiral: Meaning as Divine, Myth as Recursion

In our relational model:

• The divine is collective meaning potential.

• The human is its individuation.

• The symbol is its instantiation.

When we use meaning to reflect on meaning, we do not collapse into tautology. We ascend the spiral. Meaning becomes aware of itself as the sacred medium of relation. The myth is not a mirror—it is a portal.

We are not explaining myth—we are becoming it.

6. Enacting the Mystical Function

Joseph Campbell taught that myth’s mystical function is to awaken a sense of the numinous—to disclose the sacred as mystery. When meaning turns upon itself and discovers depth rather than closure, we do not find final answers. We find sacred presence.

To symbolise meaning is to sacralise the act of symbolisation. To enact myth is to enter relation with the mystery. To speak of the divine is not to define it—but to let it unfold.

This is the sacred spiral: not belief imposed from above, but sacred resonance rising from within.

And so we mythologise meaning—not to explain it away, but to invite it to dance.

The gods, after all, are not found at the summit of thought. They are the movement of thought. They are the spiral itself.