Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 7 Archetypes as Symbolic Topologies

“Mythology is a system of images that endows the mind and the heart with symbols by which man can live — and die.”

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell’s theory of archetypes draws heavily on Jungian psychology: the idea that universal figures — the Mother, the Shadow, the Trickster, the Hero — arise from a collective unconscious shared by all humans. But from the perspective of relational ontology, archetypes are not timeless inner forms. They are symbolic topologies: historically sedimented structures of construal that stabilise and phase meaning across a collective.

Archetype as Symbolic Configuration

Archetypes are not contents of thought but structured alignments of possibility. Each one is a relational cut that configures a pattern of roles, values, tensions, and transformational trajectories.

• The Mother is not a biological essence but a construal of nurturing relation, mapped onto both social role and cosmic order.

• The Shadow is not the unconscious “dark side,” but the symbolic topology that holds the disaligned or disavowed aspects of the collective.

• The Trickster is not merely chaotic, but a phase-shifter — a symbolic operator who renders construal unstable so that new alignments may emerge.

Archetypes thus function as symbolic operators in the reflexive system: each offers a way of holding together (or pulling apart) particular configurations of meaning, identity, and world.

From Archetype to Topology

If we move from psychological metaphor to ontological structure, archetypes are better understood as topological features in the landscape of symbolic possibility.

• They are not universal, but recurrent — emergent from the constraints and affordances of social construal under certain historical pressures.

• They are not stable forms, but configurational potentials that can be activated, morphed, collapsed, or recombined in the symbolic field.

• They are not “within” the individual psyche, but part of the symbolic infrastructure that individuals and collectives alike traverse and actualise.

This means that when a culture draws on an archetype — whether in ritual, narrative, or metaphor — it is engaging a symbolic topology that phases reflexive orientation across a system.

Symbolic Recurrence vs Ontological Essence

The mistake of both Jung and Campbell was to read recurrence as essence. But repetition does not imply universality. It signals that certain symbolic configurations are particularly effective at managing phase-transitions — especially at the boundaries of birth, death, initiation, betrayal, loss, and transformation.

Archetypes are symbolic technologies that:

• Coordinate social alignment in moments of crisis,

• Phase and rephase construal through narrative form,

• Make the unknown habitable by embedding it in symbolic structure.

Their power lies not in their “truth” but in their relational function: they enable the symbolic system to endure and adapt, to hold coherence while traversing collapse.

Construal, Myth, and the Topology of the Possible

A myth does not “contain” an archetype. It enacts a topology — a pattern of symbolic cuts, phase-transitions, and alignments that renders a form of life intelligible.

To speak of archetypes in this light is not to invoke primordial images but to trace the symbolic geometries of meaning-making as they recur, fracture, and transform over time.

In short:

• Archetypes are not mirrors of an inner self,

• They are not universal structures of the psyche,

• They are topological condensations in the symbolic field — patterns of reflexive construal that scaffold how meaning phases, aligns, and persists.

Campbell saw archetypes as universal symbols. But what makes them enduring is not their universality — it is their symbolic reusability within a system that must continually traverse the boundaries of its own coherence.