Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 3 Scriptural Worlds: Codification, Authority, and the Binding of Collective Horizon

With scriptural traditions, symbolic construal shifts again: from narrative enactment to codified authority. Where myth oriented the cosmos and epic dramatised agency, scripture binds the collective horizon into a durable architecture of law, memory, and divine command.

Scripture is not merely a text but a form of symbolic binding. It fixes the flux of oral tradition into written permanence, authorising certain voices while constraining others. What emerges is a horizon of possibility that is not only imagined but regulated: ritualised, canonical, and transmittable across generations. The text becomes a repository of collective potential, simultaneously stabilising and delimiting the worlds that may be construed.

This codification reconfigures the relation between individual and collective. The hero’s singular trial gives way to the believer’s disciplined participation. Authority is not performed through deeds but mediated through interpretation, commentary, and ritual adherence. The scriptural world actualises a collective order by binding imagination to the authority of the text.

Yet scripture does not merely constrain. By consolidating symbolic fields into enduring structures, it opens vast new horizons of relation: trans-local communities knit by common recitation; interpretive traditions that proliferate within the framework of a canon; the possibility of scale that transcends tribal or civic boundaries. The binding of possibility enables its amplification.

Thus scriptural worlds mark the consolidation of symbolic imagination into institutional form. The cosmos is no longer only narrated or enacted but inscribed—anchored in authority and transmitted through the reflexive interplay of text, ritual, and community. Here, the horizon of possibility is not abandoned but bound, becoming the foundation for new, expansive construals of the human and the divine.