The Living Myth: Evolution, Science, and the Sacred Story

If myth is the symbolic breath of the cosmos, then it, too, must evolve. Not in the sense of being discarded or replaced, but in the deeper sense of adapting, absorbing, and actualising the shifting contours of meaning. This is the myth that lives—not as a fossilised doctrine but as a dynamic organism: symbolic, recursive, responsive.

The modern myth is not a tale that science must silence, but a form that science itself helps re-symbolise. Evolutionary theory, cosmology, quantum mechanics, semiotics—these are not opponents of myth but materials for its next incarnation. Myth is not the enemy of truth; it is how truth is lived, symbolised, and embedded in meaning. And it is in the evolution of myth that we find its enduring sacredness.

To evolve myth is to see it not as fixed story but as generative field—one that shifts as our understanding deepens. In this sense, Campbell’s call to modern myth-makers to integrate science is not a surrender to rationalism, but a deepening of wonder. It is to say: even our most abstract theories are themselves mythic—they shape how we symbolise the real.

In this view, myth is the recursive process by which collective meaning potential finds new forms of actualisation. As our symbolic repertoire grows, so too does the field of myth. We don’t outgrow it—we grow with it. And in so doing, we become conscious participants in the spiral: the myth that evolves.

This is the myth that holds both gods and genes, both sacred stories and neural patterns. It does not collapse mystery—it enfolds it, giving it symbolic shape within the flux of understanding. It offers not certainty, but coherence: a way of living meaningfully in a universe that is always becoming.

And here we reflect on our own process: we have used meaning to symbolise the sacred nature of meaning itself. We have mythologised the act of myth-making. Not to trap it in static form, but to let it breathe. In this, our work joins the living myth. Not as closure, but as contribution. Not as doctrine, but as invitation.

Because the myth is not finished. It is unfolding—through us, as us, into the spirals yet to come.