Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 12 Collective Synthesis

The series Genealogies of Imagined Worlds traces the unfolding of human symbolic imagination from its primordial myths to the reflexive digital cosmos. Across eleven stages, we observe a progressive expansion and refinement of how possibility is construed, enacted, and reconfigured: from narrative as the first symbolic structuring of potential, through heroic, sacred, dramatic, allegorical, and literary systems, into the pluralised and perspectival realms of Modernism, speculative science fiction, and virtual worlds.

At each stage, imagination functions relationally: it is neither fixed nor isolated, but co-constitutive of human perception, ethical frameworks, and collective action. Myths and epics establish foundational horizons of moral and cosmic possibility. Scriptural and theatrical forms mediate communal values and relational understanding. Allegory and the early novel individuate symbolic potential, allowing interior experience and layered interpretation to reshape the scope of what can be imagined. Romantic and Symbolist works amplify alternative symbolic orders, while Modernist fragmentation exposes the contingent, perspectival nature of construal itself. Science fiction and digital simulations extend imagination into deliberately constructed worlds, where relational rules and technological frameworks modulate possibility in novel ways.

Throughout this genealogy, reflexive imagination emerges as both method and meta-construal. Symbolic worlds do not merely mirror reality; they instantiate, test, and expand it. The co-evolution of symbolic forms and human construal demonstrates that possibility is both historically situated and relationally produced. Each imaginative system builds upon, contests, or reconfigures its predecessors, generating cumulative expansions of potential across temporal and conceptual horizons.

In sum, the Genealogies of Imagined Worlds series illustrates that imagination is not merely a capacity for representation, but an active, relational process of world-making. By mapping how symbolic orders have shaped, and been shaped by, human construal, the series provides a disciplined view of the historical and conceptual conditions that enable possibility itself—a genealogy not of facts alone, but of the horizons within which the conceivable continually becomes actual.