Cosmology is not simply a body of knowledge about the universe. It is a symbolic architecture through which collectives phase the relation between being and meaning.
Every cosmology—whether ancient or modern, scientific or mythic—is a construal of construal. It organises not just what exists, but how what exists is to be understood, positioned, and made sense of within a symbolic field.
This makes cosmology irreducibly reflexive. It does not merely describe a world; it symbolically positions that world in relation to those who construe it. It says not only what is, but also what it means that it is, and what it means that we mean it.
Cosmologies provide symbolic anchoring points—beginnings, ends, origins, forces, laws—not as empirical endpoints but as stabilising orientations. The ‘Big Bang’, the ‘Dreaming’, ‘Creation’, ‘Evolution’, ‘Deep Time’—these are not interchangeable accounts. They are distinct symbolic architectures that phase reality through different cuts.
Each such architecture aligns temporal, spatial, and social construals at scale. It configures what counts as matter, what counts as change, what counts as agency, and who is entitled to name these counts.
In this sense, cosmology is not a view from nowhere. It is a collective construal of everything from somewhere. It reflects the symbolic system that produces it—its affordances, its limits, its reflexive capacity.
Modern cosmology, for instance, positions itself as neutral and universal. But this very posture is itself a symbolic act: a construal that privileges abstraction, objectivity, and scale over other possible symbolic cuts—those grounded in land, kinship, or spirit.
Relational ontology invites us to see all cosmologies—not just traditional or mythic ones—as symbolic systems situated within meaning. They are architectures of reflexivity, structuring how collectives make sense of themselves through the cosmos, and the cosmos through themselves.
This does not relativise cosmology—it deepens it. By recognising the symbolic work cosmologies do, we can better understand how they shape what is thinkable, livable, and possible.
A symbolic cosmos is not the object of cosmology. It is its outcome.
And so, to inquire into cosmology is to inquire into how symbolic reflexivity phases the real.
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