The Dawn of Metaphor: From Protolanguage to Prehistoric Art: 5 Mythic Construal — The Narrative of the Symbolic

If language and image constitute parallel pathways of symbolic reflexivity, myth arises as their synthesis, the orchestration of symbolic potential into coherent narrative. Myths are not mere stories; they are structured construals of human experience, abstracted from immediate enactment yet grounded in it, allowing communities to inhabit, remember, and transmit relations across generations.

Through myth, the junctional principle of metaphor operates on a collective scale. A single narrative element can signify multiple layers simultaneously: literal, symbolic, cosmological, and moral. The congruent meaning is embedded in lived experience, while the metaphorical meaning reaches into shared values, relations, and potentials. Myth, in effect, projects the stratified content plane of language and the reflexivity of image onto communal life, creating a symbolic cosmos that can be navigated, rehearsed, and extended.

Consider a cave painting of a hunt, a Native American sand drawing, or an Aboriginal ceremonial design. These are not static representations; they are mythic gestures, symbolic enactments of relational truths. Each mark encodes both congruent and metaphorical meaning: the action and its significance, the immediate and the eternal, the particular and the universal. Through such symbolic acts, humans externalise narratives of existence itself, simultaneously instructive, evocative, and performative.

Mythic construal allows symbolic potential to exceed the capacities of individual cognition. By embedding junctional metaphors in shared narratives and durable forms, communities can coordinate perception, expectation, and imagination. Through repetition and ritual, myths sustain symbolic coherence, allowing new generations to enter a world already semiotically structured, to recognise relations and act upon them with understanding.

In this way, myth is both product and extension of the stratified content plane. It arises from the same reflexive architecture that made language and art possible, but amplifies it into collective temporal and spatial fields. Myth carries meanings beyond the immediate, folding experience into memory, ritual, and imagination, and creating the first enduring symbolic worlds.