With the emergence of representational art, the human no longer dwelt within the image but before it. Yet this very separation created the conditions for a new synthesis — a rejoining of image and meaning on reflexive terms. This synthesis is myth: the alignment of the visual and the verbal within a symbolic field that could now stand for the world and construe its own standing-for.
When language developed the capacity for metaphor, meaning could turn back upon itself: a process could be construed as a thing, a relation as an entity, a happening as a story. The symbolic potential of language thus mirrored, and amplified, the symbolic potential of the image. Each medium could represent meanings beyond its immediate plane — and, crucially, they could now speak to each other.
In mythic art — from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the carvings at Newgrange, from the Dreaming designs of First Nations Australians to the sand drawings of Native Americans — image and word are not separate systems but interdependent modalities of world construal. The story lives in the picture, and the picture in the story.
Where the representational image made the world visible, the mythic image made it intelligible. Each figure, pattern, and gesture became a metaphor for a metaphor — an act of meaning standing for another act of meaning. The animal no longer represented only itself or its species but the power, fertility, danger, or wisdom with which it was aligned. A serpent coiled through the world not as an object but as a relational sign, embodying the pattern of death and renewal.
Through this metaphoric coupling of image and word, mythic art enacted the first symbolic cosmologies — worlds ordered not by direct participation but by reflexive alignment. To depict a creature was to invoke its place in a relational order; to narrate its story was to construe the world as a system of interdependent forces.
Joseph Campbell saw in these myths a kind of collective dream — humanity’s early attempt to render the invisible structures of existence perceptible. But through a relational lens, we can go further: mythic art was not just narrative representation but systemic actualisation. It made worlds by aligning meaning-potentials across semiotic planes.
In this sense, the mythic image marks the emergence of the semiotic cosmos — the world as patterned meaning, as relational totality reflexively known. The shaman, storyteller, and artist all occupy a new position in this cosmos: mediators not between life and death, but between construals of construal — between worlds of meaning and their symbolic instantiation.
The art of this period carries unmistakable traces of that complexity. The hybrid figures that populate caves and stones — part human, part animal, part spirit — are not errors of observation but signs of stratification: images of beings that exist across semiotic orders. They are metaphors for metaphor itself — expressions of a world in which meaning has become multi-levelled, recursive, and self-aware.
Through these hybrid beings, humanity confronted its own new condition: to live within a world that it could now symbolically make. In that sense, mythic composition is both revelation and burden — a recognition that reality and representation are now intertwined, that to construe is to create.
The consequence of this new power is profound. Worlds can now conflict, stories can diverge, meanings can multiply. Once construal becomes reflexive, plurality becomes the nature of the real.
In the next post, we explore how this multiplicity began to differentiate further — as the aesthetic, the technical, and the sacred diverged from their mythic unity. This is the beginning of art’s long demetaphorisation: when the world of symbolic relation gradually gave way to the world of representation once more.
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