A new turn of the spiral in the evolution of meaning
“Myth is not what happened long ago—it is what is always happening. Not a fossil, but a force.”
🌀 From Static Story to Living Process
Myth, in the dominant cultural imagination, is often treated as a relic—something ancient, symbolic, and sealed off from the present. But in a relational ontology, myth is not just a story we tell about the world; it is the process through which the world becomes intelligible, and meaning becomes embodied.
Myth is not a container of truths, but a mode of becoming. It moves with us, changes with us, and makes us as we make it. It is not merely remembered—it is lived, performed, re-enacted in every relational moment. In this way, myth is a temporal process: a spiral, not a line.
🌱 Becoming Through Relation
A relational ontology tells us that nothing exists in isolation. To be is to be in relation—not just with other beings, but with time, language, gesture, and symbol. Myth, then, is the symbolic articulation of those relations: it names, shapes, and transforms the webs of becoming that constitute reality.
When we mythologise, we are not stepping outside reality to narrate it—we are participating in its symbolic unfolding. Every act of meaning-making is a moment of mythopoiesis: the world becoming meaningful through us.
🔄 The Recursive Structure of Symbolic Life
Myth is recursive. It folds back on itself, referencing old forms while generating new ones. It is never final, but always provisional—an invitation, not a decree.
This recursion means that symbols do not simply represent meaning—they create it. A ritual doesn’t just signify an idea—it brings it into being. A story doesn’t just tell us something about the divine—it reveals the divine in us, through us. Myth is not a code to be cracked, but a pattern to be lived.
👁️ The Self as Mythic Participant
In this framework, the self is not a detached observer of myth—it is a node within its unfolding. To live is to instantiate myth: to actualise meaning potential through relation. We are not just interpreters of symbols—we are symbolising beings, and our very lives are the medium through which the sacred becomes visible.
The myth lives through us, not behind us. When we love, mourn, create, or forgive—we re-enact ancient patterns, not as repetitions but as reconfigurations. Each of us is a fresh articulation of the divine drama, a new line in the ongoing sacred text.
🌍 The World as Sacred Process
Reality is not a container of meaning—it is meaning in motion.
In a relational ontology, the world is not a backdrop upon which meaning is projected. It is the unfolding of meaning itself—a sacred process of continuous co-actualisation. Nothing is fixed; everything participates in the becoming of everything else.
This means that what we experience as “matter” is not inert stuff, but patterned participation. A stone is not just a lump of atoms—it is a congealed moment in a vast field of relations. A tree is a living nexus, a memory of sun and soil and breath unfolding into form. A word, once spoken, is not a dead sound—it is a ripple of relation that continues to echo in the symbolic field.
The sacred is not elsewhere. It is the very process by which relation becomes actual, the field through which potential enters form. To walk in the world is to walk in a sacred text, written not in ink but in event, gesture, and symbol. Everything is connected because everything is co-constituting. This is the dance of the divine—not outside the world, but within its very grammar.
So when we speak of the divine, we do not mean a thing among things, but the relational field itself—that which becomes through the many, and with the many, again and again.
To live this is to mythologise not in fantasy, but in fidelity—to participate in the ever-unfolding story of being as one who both receives and re-shapes the world.
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