When Myth Thinks: VII. The Mythic World

We can now step back from Genesis.

What kind of world is a mythic world?

It is not simply a world described in stories.

A mythic world is a world in which meanings have become part of the structure of reality as experienced.

This is possible because language can construe more than immediate experience. Through metaphor, meanings can become the source of further meanings. A tree can remain a tree while also becoming a symbol. A journey can remain a journey while becoming a way of construing life. Light can remain a physical phenomenon while becoming a way of construing knowledge, order or revelation.

The original meaning is not necessarily displaced.

It becomes available for further meaning-making.

Mythology is a cultural elaboration of this capacity.

Its symbols do not merely stand for something else. They organise relations among meanings. A mythic world therefore does not consist of a collection of symbols with fixed interpretations attached to them. It is a semantic world in which things, events, beings and relations acquire significance through their place within a larger configuration.

This helps explain why myth can perform several functions at once.

Joseph Campbell famously distinguished mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical dimensions of myth. Whatever one makes of his broader comparative claims, the distinction points to something important: a myth can situate human beings simultaneously in relation to existence, the cosmos, society and their own lives.

Genesis illustrates this particularly clearly.

It gives an account of the cosmos, but the cosmos it gives us is not merely an inventory of things. It is differentiated, relational, productive, ordered, evaluated and meaningful.

It gives humanity a place within that order.

And it gives the human being a relation to the world that is neither simple separation from it nor simple identity with it.

The mythic world is therefore not a second world behind the ordinary one.

It is the ordinary world as differently construed.

This distinction matters.

If mythology were simply an alternative explanation of how the physical universe works, its significance would depend upon whether its explanations happened to be scientifically correct. But its philosophical interest can lie elsewhere. Myth can make visible relationships that are difficult to state propositionally because the relationships themselves are what organise the world being imagined.

Genesis does not give us a philosophical treatise on existence, differentiation, relation, meaning or value.

It gives us a world in which these things happen.

That is what makes myth philosophically interesting.

A myth can think without necessarily presenting itself as thought.

It can embody distinctions rather than define them.

It can place concepts into relations rather than state propositions about those relations.

And because those relations are embedded in a narrative world, they can be inhabited imaginatively rather than merely understood intellectually.

This also explains why mythology is so closely connected with metaphor.

Metaphor allows meaning to become the material for further meaning-making.

Mythology allows those meanings to become culturally organised into worlds.

The result is neither literal description nor arbitrary invention.

It is a mode of construal.

The mythic world is a world made intelligible through a network of meanings that can be entered, inhabited, remembered and transformed.

Genesis is therefore not interesting merely because it tells us what an ancient culture believed about the beginning of the universe.

It is interesting because it shows what happens when a language-using species turns its meaning-making capacity upon the question of the world itself.

The result is a world that can be spoken.

A world that can be symbolised.

A world in which humanity can find itself.

And, eventually, a world in which humanity can begin to think about what it means to be human.

Perhaps this is the distinctive philosophical power of myth.

It does not merely tell us what to think.

It gives us a world in which thinking can occur.