Humanity in the Becoming of Worlds: 2 Mythic Placements

Myth is often dismissed as primitive cosmology — stories told before science “got it right.” But from a relational perspective, myth is not failed explanation. It is world-construal: a symbolic architecture that situates the human within a cosmos of possibility.

In myth, the cosmos is never indifferent. It breathes, speaks, acts. Mountains may be ancestors, rivers may be deities, stars may be guides. These are not “superstitions” layered onto a mute nature; they are placements that embed the human in a living web of relation. To exist is to be entangled in a cosmos already saturated with meaning.

Human possibility, here, is not autonomous. It is co-ordinated with cycles of fertility, ancestral obligations, and cosmic renewal. A person’s becoming is aligned with ritual action, seasonal rhythms, and symbolic centres — hearth, shrine, mountain, sky. Myth construes the cosmos as a patterned order of relation, and the human as one participant in its unfolding.

From this view, the “mythic cosmos” is not a failed precursor to science but a mode of construal in which human possibility is inseparable from the vitality of the world. The human is never alone, never detached, but always already aligned with gods, spirits, ancestors, and forces that shape becoming.

The challenge for us is not to translate myth into literal fact or discard it as error. It is to see myth as a placement of possibility: a way of cutting human potential into a cosmos that is alive with relation.