The Story That Learned to Think: IV. The Word That Heard Itself

The Speaker remained silent.

The river moved.

The tree grew.

The bird crossed the sky.

The names remained.

River.

Tree.

Bird.

They had become familiar to the world.

But the Speaker was listening.

For the first time, the Speaker heard the names not as names of things, but as sounds.

“River.”

The word hung in the air.

It was no longer only about the water.

It was something that could itself be heard.

The Speaker said it again.

“River.”

And then something unexpected happened.

The word seemed to answer.

Not with another sound.

With a meaning.

The Speaker heard the word and remembered the water, the valley, the movement, the banks, the things that lived beside it.

The word had returned carrying the world with it.

So the Speaker tried another.

“Tree.”

Again the word returned as more than a sound.

It carried branches.

Leaves.

Shade.

Growth.

The Speaker began to wonder.

If a word could carry the world,

could a word carry another word?

The Speaker said:

“Name.”

And listened.

There was no tree.

No river.

No bird.

Nothing outside the word to which it pointed.

There was only the saying itself.

The Speaker said it again.

“Name.”

And now the word had become something that could be named.

The Speaker had spoken a word about words.

The saying had turned back upon itself.

For the first time, the Word had heard itself.

And in that moment the world acquired a new depth.

Things could be named.

Relations could be named.

Names could be named.

And the saying no longer had to stop at the world.

It could begin again from what it had already said.

The Speaker smiled.

There was now no end to what could be said.

The Story That Learned to Think: III. The Naming

The Speaker continued to speak.

At first the sounds seemed to pass over the world and disappear.

Then the Speaker spoke a name.

“River.”

The water moving through the valley became something that could be found again.

“Tree.”

The thing growing beside the river became something that could be distinguished from all the other things that grew.

“Bird.”

The creature crossing the sky became something that could be recognised when it returned.

Nothing had been created.

The river had not become more water.

The tree had not grown taller.

The bird had not changed its wings.

Yet something had happened.

The things of the world had acquired boundaries in the saying.

The Speaker named the light.

The Speaker named the darkness.

The Speaker named the waters.

The Speaker named the land.

And the world began to fill with distinctions.

But then the Speaker did something stranger.

The Speaker named a relation.

The river was beside the tree.

The bird was above the river.

The light came after the darkness.

And now it was not only things that could be said.

Their relations could be said too.

The world began to gather itself into patterns.

The Speaker listened to the names.

Then the Speaker said:

“These things belong together.”

And the world discovered that a name could gather what was different.

It could make a many into a one.

For the first time, the world was not merely being spoken.

It was being understood.

And somewhere within the saying, another possibility appeared.

If things could be named,

then perhaps the names themselves could be named.

The Speaker fell silent.

For a moment, the world waited.

The Story That Learned to Think: II. The Speaker

After the first sound, there were more.

The world had not changed.

The river still moved through the valley.

The tree still grew beside it.

The bird still crossed the sky.

But now the things of the world could be distinguished.

And then the sounds began to return.

They came from somewhere.

At first no one noticed.

Then the world noticed that the sounds were not like the sounds of wind or water. They did not merely happen.

They were said.

And because they were said, someone must have been saying them.

So the world began to search for the one who spoke.

It searched among the trees.

It searched beside the river.

It searched beneath the open sky.

But the Speaker was nowhere to be found.

The Speaker had no place in the world, because the Speaker was not yet one of the things the world could name.

Still, the voice continued.

It spoke of the light.

It spoke of the darkness.

It spoke of the waters.

It spoke of the living things.

And as it spoke, the differences between them became clearer.

The world began to take shape in the saying.

Then the Speaker said something about the Speaker.

And for the first time, the world contained not only something that could be said, but someone who could say it.

The voice had become a presence.

But the Speaker remained unseen.

The Story That Learned to Think: I. The World Before Its Name

Before there were names, there was a world.

Nothing was missing from it.

The waters moved.

The winds crossed the land.

Light came and went.

Things grew, things moved, things died.

Everything was happening.

But nothing was distinguished from anything else by a name.

A river was water moving through a valley.

A tree was something that grew.

A bird was something that flew.

The river did not know it was a river.

The tree did not know it was a tree.

The bird did not know it was a bird.

Nor did the world know itself as a world.

There were differences everywhere, but no one had yet gathered them into distinctions.

There were relations everywhere, but nothing had yet made them visible.

There were patterns everywhere, but no one had yet said that there were patterns.

And so the world was full.

Yet it had not become intelligible.

Then, one day, something happened that had never happened before.

A sound arose.

It was not the cry of a bird, nor the roar of the wind, nor the breaking of water.

It was a sound that said something.

And for the first time, one thing became distinguishable from another.

The sound passed across the world.

The river remained a river.

The tree remained a tree.

The bird remained a bird.

But now they could be said.

And the world, without becoming anything other than it was, had begun to become a world.

VIII. Myth Thinks

The three academics were sitting in the common room when Miss Stray broke the silence.

“We began with a rather simple question.”

Blottisham looked up.

“Can mythology be philosophy?”

“Indeed,” said Quillibrace.

“And I believe,” said Miss Stray, “the question has changed.”

Blottisham looked wary.

“Has it?”

“We began by assuming that philosophy must tell us explicitly that something is the case.”

“A reasonable assumption,” said Blottisham.

“Is it?”

He considered this.

“I was hoping you wouldn't ask.”

Quillibrace leaned back.

“A philosophical proposition states a relation. A myth can do something different.”

“Such as?”

“It can construct a world in which a possibility of thought becomes visible.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Give me an example.”

“Genesis does not say, ‘Existence is differentiated through relation.’ It gives us a world in which differentiation occurs.”

“And it doesn't define possibility and actuality.”

“No.”

“It gives us a world in which what is said becomes what is.”

Blottisham paused.

“That one I remember.”

“And it doesn't formulate a theory of meaning. It gives us a world organised through naming, ordering, evaluation and significance.”

Miss Stray added, “And humanity itself appears within that world.”

“The meaning-making being becomes one of the meanings,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham looked at him.

“You really do insist on that one.”

“It is rather important.”

“I admit that.”

There was a brief silence.

“So the philosophy isn't in a sentence,” said Blottisham.

“No.”

“It's in the way the world has been put together.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“The thought is distributed through its symbolic organisation.”

Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“Distributed thought.”

“Yes.”

“I'm beginning to see why you like myths.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“The individual symbols matter. But so do the relations among them.”

“God speaks,” said Quillibrace. “The world appears. Differences emerge. Things acquire names. Order and value appear. Humanity enters the order. And the being capable of meaning is itself given a meaning within the world.”

Blottisham nodded slowly.

“So the story isn't merely communicating ideas.”

“It is performing a construal.”

“That's an important distinction,” said Miss Stray.

Blottisham looked at Quillibrace.

“But surely we must still ask what the authors intended.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise you risk finding meanings they never meant to put there.”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“And we need not decide what they intended in order to ask what the surviving text makes possible.”

Blottisham was silent.

Miss Stray said, “The question is not necessarily what the authors knew. It is what the organisation of the text allows us to think.”

Blottisham nodded.

“I can accept that.”

Quillibrace looked almost surprised.

“I wasn't aware you had become so accommodating.”

“I haven't. I'm choosing my battles.”

“A promising development.”

Blottisham ignored him.

“So we return to language.”

“Yes.”

“Language transforms experience into meaning, and meaning into wording.”

“Yes.”

“And metaphor allows meaning itself to become material for further meaning-making.”

“Yes.”

“And mythology can organise those meanings into symbolic worlds.”

“Exactly.”

Blottisham looked around the room.

“So the world can become something we think about before it becomes an abstract concept.”

Miss Stray nodded.

“We can imagine the world.”

“And through imagining it,” said Blottisham, “we can begin to think with it.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“Precisely.”

Blottisham sat back.

“That might also explain why myths survive even when people stop believing every detail literally.”

“It may,” said Miss Stray.

“The relations remain available.”

“Yes.”

“The world remains inhabitable.”

“Yes.”

“And questions can still emerge from it.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“What is existence? What makes a world a world? How does difference become relation? What is humanity's place within the whole?”

“And,” said Miss Stray, “what happens when the being that construes the world becomes capable of construing itself?”

Blottisham was quiet for a moment.

“You've made Genesis sound less like a collection of answers than a machine for producing questions.”

Quillibrace considered this.

“An unusually good formulation.”

Blottisham smiled.

“I'm having a productive afternoon.”

Miss Stray laughed.

“But then,” said Blottisham, “what is the difference between myth and philosophy?”

“Philosophy abstracts and argues.”

“And myth?”

“Symbolises and configures.”

“One states the relation.”

“The other gives us a world in which the relation can be imagined.”

Blottisham nodded.

“So philosophy tells us about the relation. Myth lets us live inside it.”

“Imaginatively,” said Quillibrace.

“I know. I was being careful.”

“I noticed.”

There was another silence.

Then Miss Stray said, “Perhaps philosophy does not begin when myth ends.”

Blottisham looked towards her.

“And myth need not be failed philosophy waiting to be replaced.”

“No.”

“They are different ways of making thought possible.”

“Different semiotic modes,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham sighed.

“I knew there had to be a technical term.”

Quillibrace continued.

“Once language makes meaning itself available as material for further meaning-making, there is no reason to expect thought to have only one form.”

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

“Then Genesis is doing something rather strange.”

“Go on.”

“It represents a world being made through speech.”

“Yes.”

“Then puts humanity inside that world.”

“Yes.”

“And humanity eventually becomes capable of turning the whole construction back upon itself.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“And what is Genesis itself?”

Blottisham stopped.

Miss Stray looked at him.

He looked at Quillibrace.

“A construction of meaning,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Made by the very kind of being it is representing.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham sat back.

“So the mythology is doing what it represents.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“Now you have it.”

“It is making a world through meaning.”

“Yes.”

“And then, inside that world, it makes meaning of the beings who make meanings.”

Miss Stray looked quietly pleased.

Blottisham stared into his tea.

“I don't think I like where this is going.”

Quillibrace waited.

Blottisham looked up.

“Because if the myth is itself an instance of the meaning-making capacity it represents…”

He stopped.

Miss Stray finished the thought.

“Then it doesn't merely tell us about meaning-making.”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“It performs it.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham looked at the two of them.

“And the myth is thinking.”

Quillibrace nodded.

For once, nobody said anything more.

VII. The World We Inhabit

The common room had acquired the particular stillness that suggested Quillibrace was about to make a distinction.

“I think,” said Miss Stray, “we have been talking about Genesis as though it were describing a world.”

“It is describing a world,” said Mr Blottisham.

“Of course,” said Quillibrace. “But what kind of world?”

Blottisham looked suspicious.

“A mythic one?”

“Precisely.”

“And what does that mean?”

Quillibrace paused.

“It does not mean a second world behind the ordinary one.”

Blottisham relaxed slightly.

“Good.”

“It means the ordinary world as differently construed.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That sounds suspiciously like a second world without the inconvenience of admitting it.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps the difference is between changing the things and changing the relations among their meanings.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“A tree remains a tree. But it can also become a symbol. A journey remains a journey, while becoming a way of construing life. Light remains light, while becoming available for construing knowledge, order or revelation.”

“So the original meaning remains?” asked Blottisham.

“Yes.”

“That seems important.”

“It is.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“I had assumed symbolism meant that the thing stopped being itself and stood for something else.”

“An understandable assumption,” said Quillibrace. “But metaphor does not necessarily replace one meaning with another. It makes an existing meaning available for further meaning-making.”

Miss Stray looked thoughtful.

“And mythology takes that possibility and organises it culturally.”

“Exactly.”

Blottisham considered this.

“So a myth is not a collection of symbols with definitions attached.”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“A semantic world.”

Blottisham sighed.

“You do enjoy making things sound larger than they are.”

“It is a world in which things acquire significance through their place within a larger configuration.”

Miss Stray added, “Which is why the same symbol can participate in different meanings without having one fixed interpretation.”

“Genesis,” said Quillibrace, “makes this particularly clear.”

“It tells us how the cosmos began,” said Blottisham.

“Yes. But notice what kind of cosmos it gives us.”

“Light, darkness, land, sea, plants, animals, humans.”

“An inventory?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“Well…”

“It is differentiated. Relational. Ordered. Productive. Evaluated. Meaningful.”

“And humanity has a place within it,” said Miss Stray.

“A rather important place,” said Blottisham.

“Indeed.”

He looked at Quillibrace.

“Are you saying Genesis is doing cosmology, sociology, theology and moral education simultaneously?”

“Something like that.”

“Campbell would have been pleased.”

“Possibly.”

Blottisham smiled.

“For once, I think I see the point.”

Quillibrace looked almost disappointed.

“The myth does not merely tell us about a universe. It gives us a world in which human beings can locate themselves.”

Blottisham nodded.

“That I understand.”

“And that distinction matters,” said Quillibrace. “If mythology were merely an alternative explanation of physical events, its philosophical interest would depend upon whether the explanations were scientifically correct.”

“Which,” said Blottisham, “would leave Genesis in considerable difficulty.”

“Quite.”

“But you are saying that is not the interesting question.”

“Not the only one. A myth can make relationships visible without stating them propositionally.”

Miss Stray looked across the room.

“It can embody a distinction rather than define it.”

“Or place concepts into relations rather than tell us what those relations are.”

Blottisham was quiet for a moment.

“So myth can think without saying, ‘I am thinking.’”

Quillibrace nodded.

“That is rather good.”

Blottisham straightened.

“I have my moments.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“And because the relations are embedded in a world, they can be imagined and inhabited, not merely understood.”

Quillibrace turned towards her.

“Exactly.”

There was a brief silence.

“So,” said Blottisham slowly, “myth is neither literal description nor arbitrary invention.”

“No.”

“It is a mode of construal.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham looked pleased with himself.

“That is also rather good.”

“I was agreeing with you.”

“I know.”

Miss Stray laughed.

Quillibrace continued.

“This is why mythology is so closely connected with metaphor. Metaphor allows meaning to become material for further meaning-making. Mythology allows those meanings to become culturally organised into worlds.”

“And Genesis,” said Blottisham, “organises a world in which creation, differentiation, order, value and humanity all belong together.”

“Yes.”

He thought for a moment.

“Then Genesis is interesting not merely because ancient people believed that the universe began this way.”

“No.”

“It is interesting because a language-using species turned its meaning-making capacity upon the question of the world itself.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“And what happened?”

Blottisham looked around the common room.

“We got a world we could speak about.”

“A world that could be symbolised.”

“A world in which we could find ourselves.”

“And eventually,” said Miss Stray, “a world in which we could ask what it means to be human.”

Blottisham was silent.

Then he said, “I think I prefer that to saying the myth is simply wrong.”

Quillibrace regarded him carefully.

“I thought you might.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Don't sound so surprised.”

“I wasn't.”

Miss Stray looked from one to the other.

“Perhaps that is the philosophical power of myth.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“It does not merely tell us what to think.”

Blottisham completed the thought.

“It gives us somewhere to think.”

Quillibrace looked at him.

“Yes.”

Blottisham smiled.

“Annoyingly, I think that one is worth keeping.”

VI. The Creature in the Story

 Mr Blottisham was standing by the window.

“I've been thinking about Adam.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“I mean the significance of his appearance.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“This could be promising.”

Blottisham ignored them.

“God creates everything else first. Then humanity appears.”

“Yes,” said Quillibrace.

“So humanity is part of the creation.”

“Obviously.”

“But not just another part.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Why not?”

“Because humanity can talk about the rest of it.”

“And?”

“And talk about itself.”

There was a brief silence.

Miss Stray said, “That is rather important.”

Blottisham looked pleased.

“I thought so.”

Quillibrace put down his paper.

“The language-user has become something language can construe.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That sounds less impressive when you say it.”

“It is more precise.”

“So we are creatures who can construe ourselves as creatures.”

“Yes.”

Blottisham smiled.

“That's rather clever.”

“It is also unavoidable.”

“Why?”

“Because you have just done it.”

Blottisham stopped smiling.

Miss Stray laughed.

Quillibrace continued.

“We don't step outside language to discover what we are. We construe ourselves through the same resources with which we construe everything else.”

“So when we say ‘humanity’—”

“We have already made ourselves meaningful.”

“And Adam?”

“A meaning within the world the myth has constructed.”

Blottisham looked at Genesis.

“So the story contains the people who tell the story.”

“Eventually.”

“That seems rather recursive.”

“It is.”

Miss Stray leaned forward.

“And there is another recursion.”

Blottisham waited.

“Each person enters a world of meanings that existed before them.”

“Words, stories, categories, values.”

“Yes.”

“But then they can make new meanings.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“The individual inherits the semantic world and extends it.”

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

“So the collective creates the individual…”

“And the individual can contribute to the collective.”

Blottisham turned towards Quillibrace.

“That sounds almost like a theology of society.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is a description of meaning-making.”

“Which sounds rather like theology when you say it.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps theology and semiotics occasionally find themselves sitting in the same chair.”

Blottisham glanced at the chair.

“I hope they aren't both sitting there now.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“They have been for several thousand years.”

Blottisham looked at Adam again.

“So humanity is not merely the author of the myth.”

“No.”

“It is also a meaning inside the myth.”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a moment.

“That's annoyingly elegant.”

Quillibrace looked up.

“Thank you.”

V. The Position of the Speaker

The Senior Common Room was occupied by three people and an increasingly problematic copy of Genesis.

Mr Blottisham closed the book.

“I think I see what you're doing now.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“Do you?”

“You're turning God into language.”

“No.”

“Into the language-user, then.”

“No.”

“A metaphor for humanity.”

“Also no.”

Blottisham looked irritated.

“You've rejected all my explanations.”

“They were all wrong.”

Miss Stray glanced at the book.

“Perhaps the difficulty is that we keep asking what God represents.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“The more interesting question is what position God occupies in the narrative.”

Blottisham waited.

“He speaks.”

“Yes.”

“And what does He speak?”

“The world.”

“Exactly.”

“So He is the source of the construal.”

Blottisham frowned.

“That's a very peculiar way of describing God.”

“It is a very peculiar narrative.”

Miss Stray said, “Notice that God is not introduced as one thing among other things.”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“No.”

“He speaks the things into differentiation.”

“Yes.”

“So perhaps the important distinction isn't between God and some other object.”

“But between the speaker and what is spoken.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“The position from which a world becomes available as meaning.”

Blottisham was silent for a moment.

“You really are trying to make God into a grammatical position.”

“No.”

“Then what is He?”

“A figure through which that position can be construed.”

Blottisham looked dissatisfied.

“That sounds suspiciously like the same thing.”

“It isn't.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“A myth needs figures. Philosophy can dispense with them.”

Blottisham considered this.

“So Genesis gives the source of linguistic construal a person.”

“Among other things.”

“And then creates human beings.”

“Yes.”

“Who can speak.”

“Yes.”

“So the people God creates eventually acquire the very capacity by which God has been creating.”

Quillibrace looked at him.

“Exactly.”

Blottisham stared at the book.

“That is rather clever.”

“It is.”

“And slightly unsettling.”

“Also.”

Miss Stray said, “The human being enters a world that has already been differentiated through saying.”

“And then proceeds to differentiate it further.”

“Exactly.”

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

“So God speaks first, and then humanity speaks.”

“Yes.”

“Which means that when humanity speaks, it is doing something God has already done.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“The distinction between creator and creature begins to look rather less absolute.”

Blottisham stiffened.

“Careful.”

Quillibrace smiled.

“I said begins to look.”

Blottisham pointed at him.

“That is how theological trouble begins.”

Miss Stray laughed.

“And perhaps how mythology thinks.”

There was a silence.

Blottisham slowly reopened Genesis.

“So the speaker becomes us.”

Quillibrace paused.

“Not quite.”

Blottisham looked relieved.

“Good.”

“The position becomes us.”

Blottisham closed the book again.

“I preferred it when you said ‘not quite.’”

IV. The Missing Listener

The Senior Common Room was quiet except for the ticking of the clock.

Mr Blottisham broke the silence.

“I have been thinking about the speaking.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“That sounds dangerous.”

“God speaks, and creation happens.”

“Yes.”

“But if speaking is a social process, there ought to be someone listening.”

Miss Stray looked interested.

“Indeed.”

Blottisham smiled.

“Ha.”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“Who?”

“That is precisely the problem.”

“God doesn't need an audience.”

“Then why speak?”

“To create.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it is true.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“If I say something to an empty room, I am still speaking. But I am not really communicating.”

“An excellent observation,” said Quillibrace.

“Thank you.”

“Though not quite relevant.”

Blottisham frowned.

“It is entirely relevant.”

“No. It tells us something about ordinary human speech. Genesis is doing something rather more interesting.”

Miss Stray intervened.

“Perhaps the absence of a listener is the interesting part.”

Blottisham looked at her.

“How can an absent listener be interesting?”

“Because the story gives us a Sayer without an interlocutor.”

“Exactly,” said Quillibrace.

“So?”

“So where is the other participant?”

Blottisham glanced around the room.

“There isn't one.”

“Precisely.”

“The world?”

“Not yet.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“You're suggesting the world is the listener.”

“Not literally.”

“Good.”

“But symbolically, perhaps the world represents what is being addressed by the saying.”

Miss Stray nodded.

“Experience before it has become differentiated as meaning.”

Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“So God says something to experience.”

“Not quite.”

“Then what?”

Quillibrace sighed.

“We are looking at the myth, not a transcript of divine conversation.”

“Thank goodness.”

“The point is that the story places saying at the boundary between an undifferentiated world and a differentiated one.”

“God says, ‘Let there be light.’”

“And there is light.”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“So the saying doesn't merely describe the light.”

“No.”

“It brings it into the story.”

“Exactly.”

Miss Stray said, “The thing that will eventually hear the saying has not yet appeared.”

Blottisham paused.

“You mean humanity.”

“Eventually.”

“But humanity is part of the creation.”

“Yes.”

“So the listener is created by the saying.”

Quillibrace looked at him.

“Now you're getting somewhere.”

Blottisham sat back, pleased.

“Then God is talking to someone who hasn't been created yet.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps.”

“And eventually that someone will understand what God has been saying.”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“Or spend several thousand years arguing about it.”

Blottisham looked offended.

“That cannot possibly be the theological point.”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

A pause.

“But it is an observable consequence.”

III. The World That Was Said

The Senior Common Room had reached the point in the afternoon at which nobody was supposed to be doing anything productive.

Mr Blottisham was reading Genesis.

“Here,” he said triumphantly. “This settles it.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“What does?”

“God creates the world.”

“Yes.”

“By speaking.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore the point is that God has the power to speak things into existence.”

Quillibrace regarded him.

“That is one way of putting it.”

“It is the obvious way.”

“Is it?”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ There was light. What more do you want?”

“I want to know why creation is represented as saying.”

“Because God speaks.”

“Why does God speak?”

“To create.”

“Why not simply create?”

Blottisham hesitated.

“Because—”

He looked at the text again.

“Because He wants us to know He created it.”

Miss Stray looked up.

“But the story doesn't say, ‘God created the light and then told us about it.’”

“No.”

“It says He said, and the light appeared.”

Blottisham frowned.

“Yes, but that's only a manner of telling the story.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Perhaps.”

“That sounded suspiciously like agreement.”

“I am agreeing that it is a manner of telling the story.”

“Good.”

“I am asking what that manner makes possible.”

Blottisham sighed.

“More linguistics.”

“Unavoidably.”

Quillibrace pointed to the page.

“The material world is repeatedly represented as the outcome of a verbal process.”

“God speaks, things happen.”

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“So the narrative gives us a world that is said.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“A world that is said.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds like you're claiming the world is language.”

“No.”

“Good.”

“The world is represented as emerging through language.”

Miss Stray added, “And that is rather different.”

Blottisham thought about this.

“But surely there was a world before anyone said anything about it.”

“Certainly.”

“Then language doesn't create the world.”

“No.”

Quillibrace paused.

“It creates a world for cognition.”

Blottisham looked unconvinced.

Miss Stray said, “Not an inventory of things. A differentiated, related, ordered, significant world.”

“A construed world,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham pointed at him.

“But you're smuggling human cognition into Genesis.”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

“We are reading it.”

Blottisham opened his mouth, then closed it.

Miss Stray smiled.

“The interesting question isn't what the authors secretly knew about language.”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “It is what the surviving text permits us to construe.”

Blottisham looked back at Genesis.

“So you think the story is really about us.”

“No.”

“God?”

“No.”

“Creation?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

Quillibrace returned to his newspaper.

“The possibility of a world becoming sayable.”

Blottisham stared at him.

Miss Stray looked at the page.

And for once, nobody spoke.

After a moment Blottisham said:

“I don't think that silence was accidental.”

Quillibrace turned a page.

“I'm relieved to hear it.”

II. When Meaning Means Again

The Senior Common Room was occupied by the usual three.

Mr Blottisham was explaining something to Miss Stray.

“Metaphor,” he said, “is simply a more colourful way of saying something.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up from his newspaper.

“No.”

Blottisham paused.

“It is.”

“No.”

“It is what metaphor is.”

“It is one thing metaphor can do.”

Blottisham looked irritated.

“What else can it do?”

“It can make a meaning the source of another meaning.”

Blottisham waited.

“That sounds unnecessarily complicated.”

“It is not complicated.”

“It sounds complicated.”

Miss Stray intervened.

“Suppose I say that life is a journey.”

“Yes.”

“The journey is already meaningful. So I use that meaning to construe something else.”

“My life.”

“Precisely.”

Blottisham nodded.

“So you are comparing your life to a journey.”

“Not quite. The journey provides a meaning through which the experience of life can be reconstrued.”

Blottisham frowned.

“What's the difference?”

Quillibrace folded his newspaper.

“The difference is that metaphor doesn't merely decorate an existing thought. It changes what can be meant.”

Blottisham considered this.

“But life isn't literally a journey.”

“Correct.”

“So it's not true.”

“Not literally.”

“Then what use is it?”

“An extraordinary one.”

Miss Stray said, “The point is that the journey meaning remains available. It isn't discarded. It is recruited.”

“A journey has destinations,” said Quillibrace. “Obstacles. Departures. Arrivals. Detours. Progress. Perhaps even getting lost.”

Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“My life has some of those.”

“Most lives do.”

“So metaphor allows us to talk about things that aren't literally journeys as though they had properties of journeys.”

“Now you're beginning to understand.”

Blottisham leaned back.

“But surely that means metaphor can also mislead us.”

Quillibrace paused.

“Yes.”

Miss Stray looked at him.

“That may be rather important.”

“Very.”

Blottisham brightened.

“Then metaphor isn't necessarily reliable.”

“No.”

“Excellent.”

“It is productive.”

Blottisham's expression fell.

“Productive?”

“It generates possibilities of meaning.”

“But some of those possibilities may be false.”

“Certainly.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps that is why metaphor becomes so important culturally. Once a metaphor is established, people can build further meanings upon it.”

Quillibrace nodded.

“Meaning becomes the source of meaning.”

Blottisham stared at them.

“Meaning meaning meaning.”

“Yes.”

“That's absurd.”

“No,” said Quillibrace. “It's civilisation.”

There was a silence.

Blottisham looked again at his book.

“So when Genesis calls God a rock—”

“Don't,” said Quillibrace.

“I was only going to ask.”

“That's how these things begin.”

Miss Stray laughed.

Blottisham closed the book.

“I suddenly feel that metaphor should have been regulated.”

I. When Myth Begins to Think

The Senior Common Room was unusually quiet.

Mr Blottisham was reading Genesis.

“Really,” he said, “I don't see the difficulty. God created the world, and Genesis tells us how.”

Professor Quillibrace looked up.

“How?”

“By creating it.”

“That wasn't my question.”

Blottisham frowned. “You asked how.”

“I asked how Genesis represents creation.”

Miss Stray put down her tea.

“That is slightly different.”

“Different?” said Blottisham. “Surely the world was created whether Genesis represented it or not.”

“Certainly,” said Quillibrace. “But Genesis repeatedly represents creation as something that happens through saying.”

Blottisham looked at the page.

“God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

“Precisely.”

“He spoke. The light appeared.”

“According to the narrative.”

Blottisham looked suspiciously at him.

“You're not suggesting God didn't actually speak?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I am suggesting that the interesting question is why creation is represented as speaking.”

Miss Stray smiled.

“Perhaps the text is doing more than describing an event.”

“Everything describes an event,” said Blottisham.

“Language does rather more than that,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham sighed. “Here we go.”

Quillibrace ignored him.

“We usually imagine language as something we use after we have thought. Experience comes first, thought follows, and language communicates the result.”

“Yes.”

“But language also provides the resources through which experience becomes construable as meaning.”

Blottisham stared at him.

“So language helps us think.”

“More than that. It participates in the organisation of thought.”

Miss Stray added, “And language can therefore construe the very activity by which we construe the world.”

Blottisham looked from one to the other.

“You mean Genesis is a theory of language?”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“Good.”

“It is a mythology in which the world is represented as emerging through language.”

Blottisham considered this.

“But God is speaking.”

“Yes.”

“So the point is that God created the world.”

“Perhaps. But notice what the narrative makes creation look like.”

Blottisham looked again at the page.

“Speaking.”

“Exactly.”

There was a pause.

Miss Stray said quietly, “Perhaps Genesis is mythologising something humans had already discovered without formulating it theoretically: that experience becomes a world for us through language.”

Blottisham looked appalled.

“You are saying that God is a metaphor for grammar.”

“No,” said Quillibrace.

“Good.”

“Although that is an impressively rapid misunderstanding.”

Miss Stray turned away to hide a smile.

Blottisham closed the book.

“I think I preferred it when God was simply creating things.”

“So did Genesis,” said Quillibrace.

Blottisham relaxed.

“For the moment.”

He reopened the book.

Miss Stray noticed that Quillibrace was smiling.

When Myth Thinks: VIII. When Myth Thinks

We began with a simple question:

Can mythology be philosophy?

The question becomes different once we stop assuming that philosophy must take the form of explicit propositions.

A philosophical proposition says that something is the case.

A myth can do something else.

It can construct a world in which a possibility of thought becomes visible.

Genesis does not tell us, in philosophical language, that existence is differentiated through relation. It gives us a world in which differentiation occurs.

It does not define the relation between possibility and actuality. It gives us a world in which what is said becomes what is.

It does not formulate a theory of meaning. It gives us a world organised through naming, ordering, evaluation and signification.

And it does not ask what happens when the meaning-making being becomes part of the world it construes.

It creates a humanity within that world.

This is why the myth can be philosophical without being philosophy in the modern disciplinary sense.

Its thought is distributed through its symbolic organisation.

The individual elements matter, but so do the relations among them. God speaks. The world appears. Differences emerge. Things acquire names. The world becomes ordered and valuable. Humanity enters the order. The being capable of meaning is itself given a meaning within the world.

The mythology therefore does not merely communicate a set of ideas.

It performs a construal.

And that construal can disclose possibilities of thought that need not have been explicitly formulated by whoever composed or transmitted the text. We need not decide what its authors intended or what they knew. The meanings available in the surviving text are sufficient to ask what kinds of thought its organisation makes possible.

This returns us to language.

Language gives human beings the extraordinary capacity to transform experience into meaning, and meaning into wording. Metaphor then allows meaning itself to become material for further meaning-making. Mythology can organise those meanings into symbolic worlds.

Once this happens, the world can become an object of reflection without first becoming an abstract concept.

The world can be imagined.

And through imagining it, we can begin to think with it.

This may be one reason mythology has been so persistent across human cultures. Its power does not depend upon every element being literally believed. A myth can continue to matter because the relations it constructs remain available for thought.

The myth thinks through its symbols.

The story thinks through its structure.

The world it constructs becomes a space in which questions can emerge.

What is existence?

What makes a world a world?

How does difference become relation?

What is the place of humanity within the whole?

What happens when the being that construes the world becomes capable of construing itself?

These questions do not have to be answered inside the myth for the myth to be philosophical.

Indeed, perhaps the opposite is true.

The myth's achievement is to make the questions inhabitable.

This also changes how we might understand the relation between mythology and philosophy. Philosophy need not begin when myth ends. Nor does myth have to be treated as failed philosophy awaiting replacement by rational argument.

They can be understood as different semiotic modes of making thought possible.

Philosophy abstracts and argues.

Myth symbolises and configures.

One can state a relation.

The other can give us a world in which the relation can be experienced imaginatively.

And once language has made meaning itself available as material for further meaning-making, there is no reason to expect thought to have only one form.

Genesis may therefore be read as something more interesting than an ancient cosmology.

It is a myth about a world brought into meaning through speech, a humanity brought into that world, and a language-using species that can eventually turn the whole construction back upon itself.

The myth does not stand outside the human capacity for meaning-making and describe it from a distance.

It is an instance of that capacity.

The mythology is doing what it represents.

It is making a world through meaning.

And then, within that world, it makes meaning of the beings who make meanings.

At that point myth does not merely contain thought.

Myth thinks.

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.

When Myth Thinks: VI. Humanity as a Meaning

The creation of humanity changes the perspective of Genesis.

Until this point, the world has been progressively differentiated, organised, named and evaluated. Then, within this already constituted world, humanity appears.

But humanity is not simply another item added to the inventory.

Humanity is itself a meaning.

This becomes especially clear in the creation of Adam and Eve. The human is not introduced outside the semantic world that Genesis has constructed. Humanity is given a place within it, a relation to the other creatures, a relation to the earth, and a particular mode of participation in the order already established.

The language-user has become one of the things that language can construe.

That is the remarkable recursion.

Language enables human beings to construe experience as meaning. But once that capacity exists, human beings can use language to construe themselves. They can become objects of their own meaning-making.

We do not merely speak about trees, animals, stars and rivers.

We speak about ourselves.

And in doing so, we do not step outside language in order to discover what we really are. We construe ourselves through the same semiotic resources with which we construe everything else.

Genesis makes this recursive condition mythically visible.

The God who speaks the world into being subsequently speaks humanity into the world. Humanity is therefore both the eventual user of the semiotic system and one of its products.

This need not mean that language literally caused the biological emergence of human beings. The claim is about construal. The human being who can use language is also a being that language can construe.

There is therefore no simple opposition between the human and the world.

The human is in the world, but the human is also a meaning within the world.

This helps illuminate the distinction between God and humanity that we considered in the previous post. God occupies the symbolic position of the source of the collective construal; humanity occupies the position of the individual participant within it. The distinction is perspectival rather than a division between two kinds of substance.

The individual inherits a world already meaningful.

But the individual can also add to it.

Every language-user enters a semantic world that precedes them. Words, categories, metaphors, stories and values are already there. Yet each speaker can recombine them, extend them and construe new meanings from them.

The collective and the individual therefore stand in a continual relation.

What the collective makes available, the individual can inhabit.

What the individual construes, the collective can inherit.

Genesis represents this relation through creation itself. Humanity emerges within a meaningful world, but becomes capable of participating in the further making of meaning.

The myth has therefore arrived at something remarkably close to a theory of its own condition.

A language-using species creates myths.

Those myths construe the species that creates them.

And the species then encounters itself through the meanings it has made.

Humanity is not merely the author of the myth.

Humanity is one of the meanings within it.

Perhaps this is why the creation of humanity belongs so naturally near the end of the Genesis sequence. The world has first been made available as a differentiated and meaningful order. Only then does the being appear that can recognise itself as part of that order.

The world has become meaningful.

And now meaning has acquired a human inhabitant.

When Myth Thinks: V. The God Who Speaks

In Genesis, God does not first appear as an object within the world.

God appears as the one who speaks.

The distinction matters.

The opening of Genesis repeatedly presents creation through a simple pattern: God says, and something comes to be. “Let there be light”: and there is light. The world is progressively differentiated through what is said. Before humanity appears, there is already a Sayer whose speech organises the world that humanity will eventually inhabit.

Read as theology, this is a claim about God.

Read as mythology, however, it can also be a symbolic construal of something else: the position from which a world becomes available as meaning.

God is the Sayer.

And the Sayer is not simply another thing in the world.

This makes the position of God in Genesis rather unusual. God speaks the world into being, but is not himself introduced as one of the things created. The distinction can therefore be read symbolically as a distinction between the source of linguistic construal and the world that is construed through it.

This does not mean that God simply “stands for humanity.” That would be too crude. The human being has not yet appeared. What is represented here is something more fundamental: the capacity through which experience can be organised as meaning.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully constituted for us. It provides the resources through which differences, relations, processes, identities, values and possibilities can become articulable. The language-user occupies the position from which such a world can be construed.

Genesis gives that position a name.

God.

There is also something strikingly recursive about what follows. The God who speaks eventually creates human beings, and those human beings are themselves capable of speaking. Humanity therefore appears within a world already constituted through the activity that humanity will itself participate in.

The creature who can construe the world is itself construed within that world.

This gives the creation of humanity a significance beyond the question of where humans came from. Humanity is not merely added to an already completed inventory of things. The human is introduced as part of the semantic order that the preceding creation narrative has established.

The distinction between God and human can therefore be read, cautiously, as a distinction of perspective rather than substance.

God occupies the position of the source of the collective construal.

The human occupies the position of an individual participant within that construal.

The distinction is not absolute. The human will itself speak, name, distinguish, evaluate and construe. What appears at first as a distinction between creator and creature can thus become a relation between the collective meaning-making capacity of a language community and the individual participant who inherits and extends it.

The mythology has produced a remarkable image.

The source of the world is a speaker.

And the human being, when finally created, is a being created within the world that speaking has made available.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that the speaker does not disappear when the human appears.

The speaker becomes us.

Not God as a theological doctrine.

Not humanity as a biological species.

But the position from which a world can become meaningful.

Genesis may therefore be doing something more subtle than telling us that God created the world.

It may be symbolising the discovery that a world becomes a world for a language-using species because it can be said.

When Myth Thinks: IV. The Absent Addressee

Genesis represents creation as speech.

God says, and the world comes to be.

But speech is inherently interpersonal. To say something is, in its nature, to say it to someone. Yet in the opening of Genesis there is no human interlocutor. There is a Sayer, but the addressee is absent.

This absence is curious.

It reminds us that language is not a solitary possession of an individual mind. Language is social through and through. Meaning is made within relations between people, and the linguistic construal of experience belongs to a shared meaning potential rather than to an isolated consciousness.

But the absent addressee can also invite another symbolic reading.

If God represents the language-user as the source of linguistic construal, then what is being addressed by the saying?

There is not yet a human listener. There is only the undifferentiated world that is to become a world of meaning.

The addressee can therefore be construed symbolically as experience itself: that which is not yet meaning, but which can become meaning through its linguistic construal.

This is not to say that experience is literally an addressee. The grammatical relation and the symbolic interpretation are different things. The point is that the myth gives us a dialogue in which the other participant has not yet appeared.

The world is there, but it has not yet been construed.

God says:

“Let there be light.”

And there is light.

The saying thus stands at the boundary between what is not yet meaningfully differentiated and what can become so.

This gives the creation scene a double significance.

On one side, it symbolises the social nature of language: meaning arises within an interpersonal semiotic system.

On the other, it symbolises the construal of experience: what is given becomes available as meaning.

The absent addressee therefore marks something that language always encounters but never simply becomes: the experience that is to be construed.

Genesis represents this relationship mythically.

A Sayer speaks before there is anyone to hear, and the world appears as the content of the saying.

The dialogue has begun before the interlocutor has arrived.

Perhaps that is because the human interlocutor is still being created.

And perhaps, in the deepest irony of the story, the one who will eventually hear the saying will also be a meaning created by it.

When Myth Thinks: III. The World That Is Said

Genesis begins with creation, but its most striking feature is not simply what is created. It is how creation is construed.

The natural way to represent the creation of a world is through material processes: something makes something else, something comes into existence, something changes.

Genesis could have done this.

Instead, its creation repeatedly takes the form of speech:

God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

The material order is presented as the projection of a verbal process. God says; what is said becomes actual.

This is more than a stylistic feature of the narrative. It gives creation a particular symbolic structure.

The world is represented as emerging from saying.

The distinction matters because saying is not itself a material process. It is a semiotic process. Something is first construed as meaning and expressed as wording; the material world then appears as the outcome of that projection.

Genesis therefore presents the order of the world as if it were the content of a linguistic act.

We need not suppose that its authors intended a theory of language, or that they understood cognition in anything like modern linguistic terms. The question is what the text makes possible for us to construe. Its cultural history is evidence of what has survived and continued to generate meaning, not evidence of what its authors consciously knew.

Read in this way, the creation narrative can symbolise something more fundamental than the origin of physical things.

It can symbolise the emergence of a linguistically construed world.

The world we experience is not simply an inventory of things. It is differentiated, related, ordered, named, evaluated and made significant. Language makes such construal possible.

Genesis gives this process a mythic form by placing the Sayer at the beginning.

God does not first construct the world and then describe it.

The world is said into being.

And this makes the creation story unexpectedly close to a theory of human cognition.

Halliday's claim is that language created the specifically human mode of cognition by establishing a relation between meaning and wording. Genesis can be read, symbolically, as representing the corresponding transformation in another direction: the world itself is presented as the projection of saying.

The myth does not tell us that language describes a world.

It gives us a world that is said.

Perhaps that is why its creation narrative begins not with a thing, but with a voice.

And perhaps the deeper question is not simply how the world came to exist, but:

How does experience become a world that can be said?

When Myth Thinks: II. When Meaning Becomes the Source of Meaning

If language transforms experience into meaning and meaning into wording, then something remarkable becomes possible.

Meaning itself can become the source of further meaning-making.

This is the significance of metaphor.

Metaphor is often understood as a decorative feature of language: a vivid way of saying one thing in terms of another. But in systemic functional linguistics it has a more fundamental significance. Metaphor is a reconstrual of meaning.

A meaning that has already been construed from experience becomes the source for another construal.

The distinction is subtle but profound.

In ordinary semantic construal, experience is the source:

experience → meaning

In metaphorical construal, meaning becomes the source:

meaning → reconstrual of meaning

Language can therefore operate not only upon experience, but upon its own meanings.

This is one of the great consequences of stratification. Because meaning and wording are differentiated strata, meanings can be reconstrued through different linguistic resources. Lexical metaphor makes this especially visible, while grammatical metaphor allows the resources of grammar itself to participate in the reconstrual.

The result is an enormous expansion of the semantic potential of language.

A process can be construed as a thing. A relation can become something that can itself be talked about. An experience can acquire a new meaning by being construed through another meaning. And that new meaning can in turn become the source of further construal.

Meaning can therefore become recursive.

This matters for human cognition because it means that we are not restricted to construing what is immediately before us. We can construe our previous construals. We can make meanings of meanings.

Eventually, whole networks of metaphorical meanings can become culturally established and transmitted. The human semantic environment becomes progressively richer than the immediate experience from which it originated.

This is the condition of possibility for symbolism.

A tree can remain a tree while becoming something through which another meaning is construed. A journey can remain a journey while becoming a way of construing a transformation. Light can remain light while becoming a way of construing knowledge, revelation or distinction.

The metaphor does not erase the original meaning. It recruits it.

And this is why metaphor is more than ornament. It is one of the mechanisms by which language continually expands what can be meant.

Once meaning itself can become the source of meaning-making, human beings can inhabit not only a world of experience, but a world of meanings generated from previous meanings.

Mythology will eventually become one of the most powerful cultural forms of this possibility.

But before we turn to myth, there is a more fundamental question:

What happens when a species whose cognition is constituted through language begins to use metaphor to construe the world itself?

When Myth Thinks: I. When Language Creates a World

We usually think of language as something human beings use. We have experiences, form thoughts about them, and then use language to communicate what we have already thought. From this perspective, language is an instrument of cognition.

Systemic Functional Linguistics reverses that perspective.

As Halliday puts it, language is used to make sense of experience and to enact our interactions with other people. Its grammar therefore has to interface with both experience and social processes. But it must also organise their construal as meaning and transform that meaning into wording. Human language does this through the stratification of its content plane: semantics and lexicogrammar are distinct strata, related so that meaning can be realised as wording.

This distinction is fundamental. Other semiotic systems have meaning, but language has wording: a lexicogrammatical stratum systematically related to a semantic stratum. The relation between the two enormously expands the possibilities of meaning-making.

Halliday goes so far as to say that this development was of immense significance in human evolution: it “created the modern human brain.”

The claim is not that other organisms lack cognition. It is that language created a specifically human mode of cognition: experience could become meaning, and meaning could become wording. Once meaning could be expressed in wording, it could also be preserved, shared, compared, elaborated and reconstrued.

This gives us a different way of thinking about human thought.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully available to cognition. It provides resources through which a world can become construable as meaning.

And this has a remarkable consequence.

If language creates a distinctive human capacity to construe experience as meaning, then language can also construe the conditions of that very capacity. Human beings can use language to construe themselves, their world, their relations with one another, and the activity of meaning-making itself.

Mythology becomes especially interesting at this point.

A myth is not simply an explanation of a world that exists independently of language. It is a linguistic construal of a world. Its figures, events and relations are meanings organised through language and transmitted through a culture.

Genesis offers an especially striking example. Its creation narrative does not simply represent a sequence of material events. Again and again, creation is represented as something spoken:

God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

The material world is thus represented as the projection of a verbal process.

We should not infer that the authors possessed a theory of language, cognition or semiotics resembling Halliday's. We are concerned here with what the surviving text makes possible as a construal, not with reconstructing the authors' intentions or knowledge.

The question, then, is not whether Genesis secretly contains modern linguistics.

It is more interesting than that:

What might it mean for a mythology to represent the world itself as emerging through saying?

Perhaps the answer begins with a simple possibility:

Genesis may be mythologising the human discovery that experience becomes a world for us through language.