Symbolic Temporality — How Meaning Evolves Across Scales: 5 Planetary Symbolism — Deep-Time Narratives and Cosmogenesis

Symbolic systems do not only operate within human lifespans or cultural epochs; they resonate across planetary and deep-time scales. Human narratives, rituals, and technologies leave traces in the biosphere, sediments, and climate — shaping the very conditions in which future meaning can emerge. In this sense, planetary symbolism is a form of cosmogenesis: the co-creation of the symbolic and the material across vast temporal fields.

Deep-time narratives are relational. They connect individual action to cultural memory, ecological processes, and planetary dynamics. Symbols and practices act as anchors, translating short-term intentions into long-term effects. Conversely, planetary rhythms — geological cycles, evolutionary tempos, and climate dynamics — constrain and modulate the development of symbolic systems, creating feedback loops that stretch across millennia.

By attending to these scales, we see that human meaning-making is never isolated. Every story, ritual, and act of memory participates in a larger temporal ecology. Planetary symbolism reminds us that:

• Our narratives are legacies as well as guides, shaping possibilities for beings far beyond ourselves.

• Cultural and ecological systems co-evolve, creating nested layers of temporal resonance.

• Deep-time awareness fosters ethical sensibilities: action in the present reverberates through temporal scales, affecting what can become.

In effect, planetary symbolism transforms how we perceive time and agency. It situates human symbolic life within a broader network of relational emergence, where the symbolic and the material, the local and the planetary, continuously co-compose one another.

To inhabit planetary-symbolic time is to cultivate an awareness of our participation in the Earth’s own evolving memory and imagination. The cosmos itself becomes a stage of relational potential, where meaning is not merely reflected but actively co-created, resonating across scales and durations.

The series closes by emphasising that symbolic temporality is a polyphonic, layered, and deeply ethical phenomenon: memory, ritual, myth, and culture are not ends in themselves, but instruments for sustaining relational coherence and expanding the horizon of possibility across time.