Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 1 Myth as Construal: From Archetype to Alignment

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell believed that myth disclosed the deep structures of the human psyche — timeless archetypes etched into the symbolic imagination of every culture. At the heart of his sweeping synthesis stood the monomyth, a single Hero’s Journey unfolding across traditions and epochs, revealing what he took to be universal truths about the human condition.

But what if myth is not the echo of a shared human essence, nor the outward form of an eternal inward truth? What if myth is something else entirely — not a reflection of the real, but a construal of possibility?

In this series, we re-read Campbell’s theory of mythology through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than reducing myth to an expression of fixed structures — biological, psychological, or metaphysical — we approach it as a symbolic act of worldmaking. Myth, we propose, is not timeless but reflexive. It is not universal but infrastructural. It does not mirror reality — it phases it.

Relational ontology rejects the idea that meaning is discovered in a pregiven world. Instead, it understands all meaning — including myth — as emerging through construal: the perspectival cut that brings a possibility into phase, rendering it as real within a collective horizon of alignment. This shift has profound implications for how we understand not only myth, but reality itself.

From Essential Pattern to Symbolic Possibility

Campbell’s project was an attempt at synthesis: to bring together the myths of disparate cultures under a single unifying logic. His comparative method worked by abstracting symbolic elements across narratives — the call to adventure, the crossing of the threshold, the return with the elixir — and rendering them as a recursive pattern. But the very act of abstraction cuts across difference, reconfiguring the symbolic terrain it seeks to map. The “hero’s journey” becomes not a neutral summary, but a reconstrual — one that centres certain modes of action, agency, and identity, while rendering others peripheral or invisible.

In this light, Campbell’s mythology is not a window into the human soul. It is a symbolic infrastructure aligned with a particular worldview — liberal individualism, masculine transcendence, modernist progress. It is less an uncovering than an organising, less a discovery than a design.

This is not a critique of mythology. It is a mythological critique of critique itself.

The Mythic Cut

Each myth, from a relational perspective, constitutes a cut in the field of symbolic possibility. It draws boundaries between what is real and unreal, possible and impossible, sacred and profane. These cuts are not reflections of the cosmos; they are enactments within it. And when such construals are collectively taken up — repeated, retold, institutionalised — they become symbolic architectures: the scaffolding of reality itself.

In this way, myth is not secondary to knowledge or subordinate to science. It is not a naive stage in human development to be outgrown by reason. Myth is one of the primary mechanisms by which societies phase their cosmos — aligning collective action, values, and perceptions through symbolic construal. Campbell intuited this, but framed it within a psychology of the universal. We instead place it within a reflexive ontology of the symbolic.

Re-reading Campbell

This series does not seek to dismiss Campbell’s work. Quite the opposite: it takes his mythic ambitions seriously, but repositions them within a more precise ontological frame. We do not fault Campbell for cutting reality into the pattern of the Hero — all myth is a cut. What matters is understanding what kind of cut it is, how it aligns possibility, and who it phases in or out of being.

Over the coming posts, we will explore:

• how myth functions as a construal of ontological possibility,

• how the Hero’s Journey operates as a symbolic alignment of the self and the collective,

• how modernity continues to generate its own mythic forms,

• and how new symbolic architectures might phase different worlds into being.

In doing so, we will not merely analyse myth — we will participate in its reflexive unfolding. For to engage myth is to engage the phasing of meaning itself. And in an age of planetary crisis and civilisational confusion, it may be that our most pressing task is not simply to understand the myths we have inherited, but to begin making new ones.