If myth is a practice of orientation, the question now becomes more precise:
What exactly is being stabilised?
The answer is not belief, doctrine, or explanation.
It is possibility.
Possibility before choice
Possibility is often misunderstood as a set of options awaiting selection.
But before choice, before deliberation, there is already a structured sense of:
what could happen,
what would make sense if it did,
and what would be unrecognisable or impossible.
This structure is rarely explicit.
It is felt as the shape of a situation.
Stories as stabilising devices
Stories are not merely representations of events.
They are devices for holding patterns of relevance and consequence steady across time.
A myth does not just recount what happened.
It preserves a configuration: agents, forces, thresholds, dangers, and affordances arranged in a recognisable relation.
To enter the story is to enter that configuration.
Holding, not fixing
To say that myth holds possibility steady is not to say it freezes it.
Stability here is not rigidity.
A myth can be retold, adapted, localised, even contradicted in detail — and still perform its orienting work.
What persists is not content but structure.
The space of what counts as a meaningful action remains intelligible.
The work of figures
Mythic figures are not characters in the modern sense.
They are anchors of possibility.
A trickster does not explain deception; it stabilises a way deception can appear, function, and matter.
A creator does not explain origin; it stabilises a sense of emergence, dependence, and limit.
Through figures, possibility acquires contours.
Time held open
Mythic time is often described as cyclical or eternal.
What matters is not the chronology, but the fact that myth suspends linear finality.
The story can always be re-entered.
This re-enterability keeps possibility from collapsing into mere history.
The past remains active as orientation.
When myths fail
Myths fail not when they are disproven, but when they no longer hold possibility together.
When actions lose their sense, when responses feel arbitrary, when futures cannot be imagined — orientation collapses.
At that point, new stories are required.
Not to explain more accurately, but to re-stabilise the field.
Toward transformation
If myths hold possibility steady, they also delimit it.
The next post confronts this directly, asking how myths both enable and constrain — and what it takes for a mythic orientation to change without disintegrating entirely.
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