Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 1 Primordial Myths: The First Cosmologies – Narrative as the first symbolic structuring of possibility

Myth does not begin as ornament but as orientation. The earliest cosmologies are not descriptive accounts of what “was” but symbolic construals of what can be: relational horizons through which the collective first aligned itself with the possible.

What distinguishes primordial myth is not its factual status but its ontological role. These narratives do not operate as representations of a pre-given reality. Rather, they constitute a symbolic architecture that sets the parameters of relational alignment: a shared story of origin that simultaneously grounds and projects the world as a horizon of possibility. The cosmology is not a retrospective “explanation” but a prospective map, a construal of the relation between the collective and the cosmos that enables action, ritual, and coordination.

In this sense, the first cosmologies are also the first infrastructures of symbolic reflexivity. By narrating the origins of the world, they provide the collective with an account of its own possibility. The mythic horizon links collective continuity with cosmic order: life, death, fertility, harvest, warfare, kinship—all are scaled against a symbolic pattern that renders them not contingent but necessary within a larger relational alignment.

What emerges, then, is narrative as the first symbolic structuring of possibility. Myth constrains chaos not by explaining it but by phasing it into a form that can be inhabited. It stabilises horizons of action by embedding them in the cosmos itself. Here the symbolic is neither arbitrary nor secondary but constitutive: the cosmos exists, for the collective, only insofar as it is narratively cut, ordered, and actualised.

To trace the genealogies of imagined worlds, we must begin here: with myth as the primordial construal, in which story and cosmos coincide, and where the act of narration is indistinguishable from the constitution of world itself.