Every collective life begins with a cosmos — not the cosmos as astronomers now describe it, but a cosmos symbolically construed. Myths of origin, descent, and destiny are not ornamental stories wrapped around a pre-given world; they are architectures of possibility. They provide the scaffolds through which life can be coordinated, meaning can be aligned, and futures can be staged.
The Problem with Reducing Myth
Modern thought often diminishes myth, treating it as primitive science or decorative fiction. Either it is dismissed as a failed attempt to explain natural phenomena (“thunder is Zeus’s anger”), or it is romanticised as pure imagination detached from reality. Both misreadings miss myth’s infrastructural role. Myth was not explanation in embryo, nor was it free-floating fancy. It was symbolic architecture: a way of cutting potential into order, of staging relations between gods, humans, and the cosmos.
When myth is reduced to explanation, we project our own epistemology backwards, assuming every symbolic system must aim to mirror reality. When it is reduced to fantasy, we erase its generative role in structuring social and cosmic possibility. Myths were neither mistaken theories nor mere entertainments—they were scaffolds of life.
Reframing: Myth as Architecture of Possibility
In relational terms, myth constructs symbolic cuts that make worlds livable. Creation myths do not describe how the universe actually began; they align collectives with symbolic orders of time, origin, and destiny. Myths of descent do not record genetic truth; they scaffold kinship, authority, and legitimacy. Myths of apocalypse do not predict the future; they stage the conditions under which futures can be collectively imagined.
To call these architectures is to stress their enabling role. They scaffold ritual, authority, and coordination. They provide frameworks within which collective practices can unfold. They do not mirror reality; they make realities possible.
Expansion: Examples of Mythic Scaffolding
Consider Mesopotamian cosmogonies, where the splitting of Tiamat’s body becomes the architecture of the world. This is not proto-astronomy; it is a symbolic cut aligning cosmic order with imperial sovereignty. Or the Hebrew Genesis, where creation by word stages the cosmos as linguistic and law-like, scaffolding an entire symbolic order of covenant, law, and promise. Or the Greek myths of succession, where the overthrow of Uranus, Kronos, and Zeus symbolises generational phasing and the legitimation of order through conflict and resolution.
Each of these myths does cultural labour. They invent symbolic conditions under which authority, kinship, and collective destiny can be coordinated. They scaffold not only ritual but also social structures and cultural horizons.
Closure: Myth as the First Architecture
Myths are not failed explanations but the first symbolic architectures of possibility. They are infrastructures of meaning, staging alignments between the human and the cosmic, the temporal and the eternal, the collective and the divine.
To see myth this way is to recognise its generative role. Myths were never about mirroring reality; they were about constructing architectures in which life could be coordinated and futures could be imagined.
Our series begins here because myth is the primal cut—the first symbolic architecture through which the cosmos construed itself reflexively. Later architectures—philosophy, science, politics—will displace and transform myth, but none will escape its generative logic: that every symbolic system invents possibilities and scaffolds collective life.
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