The mythic synthesis — the interweaving of image, word, and world — did not endure as a stable form. Its very reflexivity contained the seed of differentiation. Once meanings could stand for meanings, and once worlds could be symbolically aligned, it became possible for the orders of construal themselves to drift apart. The sacred, the aesthetic, and the technical — once coextensive modes of symbolic participation — began to individuate.
The first separation was between symbol and world. Mythic art still presupposed that to depict a thing was to invoke its presence, that representation had efficacy. But as symbolic systems matured, the relation between image and referent became increasingly conventional, increasingly autonomous. The mark could now persist without invocation, the symbol without ritual, the picture without participation.
This shift was not abrupt but gradual — a centuries-long demetaphorisation of the symbolic order. In Hallidayan terms, the metaphorical token began to lose sight of its congruent value. The link between sign and world weakened, and art began to explore meaning not as sacred presence but as aesthetic form.
In early civilisations, this movement can be traced in the parallel evolution of writing and pictorial art. Cuneiform script, hieroglyphic relief, and decorative abstraction all derive from the same impulse to formalise the relational: to stabilise meaning across time. But as the functions of representation multiplied — administrative, ritual, commemorative — their symbolic unity fragmented. Writing became increasingly conventionalised; art, increasingly formalised.
In this process, art becomes language-like, and language becomes art-like, but in opposite directions. Writing refines its symbolic efficiency; art explores its expressive potential. Each discovers new powers through the other’s loss.
The sacred image, once a junctional node between world and word, becomes instead a site of aesthetic experimentation. Form, colour, and proportion begin to be valued for their own relational play — for how they organise experience rather than invoke power. Representation, which once mediated the sacred, now mediates perception itself.
This is the beginning of the aesthetic gaze: a mode of relation in which the world is construed as spectacle rather than participant. The viewer becomes an observer of form, not a co-actor in ritual. The image becomes autonomous, and with autonomy comes self-consciousness — art aware of itself as art.
Yet this separation is not merely a decline from sacred unity. It marks the birth of a new mode of worlding. Once art is freed from direct invocation, it can become a field for reflexive play — an exploration of how perception, pattern, and relation themselves generate meaning. The sacred becomes internalised as aesthetic intensity, the shimmer of potential where form and feeling coincide.
From this point onward, the history of art can be read as a tension between form as presence and form as representation — between the desire to return to the immediacy of participation and the fascination with the autonomy of the image.
In relational terms, we might say that mythic unity differentiated into coexisting semiotic planes: sacred (value alignment), aesthetic (pattern alignment), and technical (functional alignment). Each retains traces of the others, but none any longer stands for the totality of worlding.
The human, having learned to construe meaning across levels, now begins to live among those levels — navigating a multi-stratal semiotic ecology that both expands and fragments the real.
In the next post, we follow this tension into its next phase — the long historical movement through which representation sought to regain immediacy, and art oscillated between realism and abstraction, presence and form, in its search for the lost relational whole.
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