Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 5 Myth and the Symbolic Coordination of the Real

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

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell’s provocation is not without merit. History, as typically construed, operates within the coordinates of what was — a linear procession of facts, names, and events. Myth, by contrast, shapes the coordinates themselves. It does not recount what happened; it orients what can happen — and, more deeply, what counts as real.

Through the lens of relational ontology, myth emerges not as fiction or allegory, but as symbolic infrastructure for coordinating the real.

Myth as Symbolic Coordination

In a relational ontology, there is no reality independent of construal. What is “real” is not a pre-existing domain waiting to be discovered; it is a relational achievement — constituted through the symbolic alignment of perspectives, practices, and possibilities.

Myth participates in this achievement. It functions as a symbolic coordination mechanism, phasing collective experience into a shared topology of meaning. In this view:

• Myth is not a passive reflection of the world, but an active participant in its construal.

• It does not merely explain the real; it coordinates what reality means and how it can be lived.

• It scaffolds the symbolic architectures through which communities align, imagine, and transform.

Beyond Explanation: Myth as Phase-Alignment

Unlike theory, which seeks to explain, or ritual, which seeks to enact, myth phases construal. It allows a social formation to shift its alignment with reality by offering symbolic cuts that reconfigure the relationships between self, world, time, and possibility.

Myth does not simply tell a story. It realigns reflexivity:

• It displaces individual meaning into collective coordinates.

• It synchronises private experience with shared symbolic forms.

• It phases ontological transition — from crisis to coherence, from origin to destiny.

In this way, myth is not an “expression of belief.” It is a technology of symbolic coherence, a system for navigating the collective dimensions of becoming.

Myth and the Reality Function

Where Campbell sees myth as the pathway to personal transformation through archetypal integration, a relational lens reframes myth as the symbolic mediation of social alignment. It is not the hero who transforms reality. It is the system of construal — the symbolic infrastructure — that makes the hero legible in the first place.

Thus, myth functions as a reality system: a symbolic configuration through which experience is ordered, values are phased, and the possible is delimited.

This system:

• Selects and aligns construals of time (e.g., cyclical, linear, apocalyptic)

• Coordinates symbolic figures (e.g., ancestors, deities, tricksters, founders)

• Phases space and territory (e.g., sacred/profane, centre/periphery, exile/return)

• Aligns moral structure with ontological topology (e.g., cosmic justice, divine order)

These construals do not reflect reality. They constitute its terms of coherence.

Myth as Ontological Infrastructure

The power of myth lies not in its content but in its function. Myths endure because they stabilise ontological possibility — making collective alignment thinkable, feelable, liveable. They are infrastructures of reflexive resonance.

That is why myth cannot be replaced by data or supplanted by theory. It does something theory cannot: it phases symbolic matter into collective coherence.

Campbell’s genius was to glimpse the structuring role of myth. But in romanticising its content, he mistook its mechanism. A relational view shifts the focus from mythic narrative to symbolic system, from archetypal form to collective phasing, from psychological meaning to ontological coordination.

To study myth, then, is not to uncover hidden truths about human nature. It is to trace the symbolic architectures through which social formations make reality reflexively liveable.