The Biology of Symbols

Dear children of sun and moon alike,

we are drowning in viral information that parasitically feeds on our attention. There are many reasons for this. Not least among them is that we are living in a digital age as a decadent culture surrounded by dying and dead symbols, while being deeply entangled in 5th generation narrative warfare.

But I don’t want to dive into the diagnosis of the problem, instead I want to investigate the biology of symbols. What kind of symbolic carriers are there and how do they invite a parasitic or symbiotic relationship?
This could lay the grammatical groundwork for how we can enter into symbiotic relationships with symbols as living beings. That in turn could help us address the meaning crisis by reclaiming existential agency through a proper relationship with meaning through symbols.

First, I’m going open up a vertical axis, where we will probe the depth/height of meaning which symbols can disclose. Here I’ll be trying to define myth, story and narrative.
Then we’re going to add a horizontal axis, by examining how symbols travel through time and space. What kind of different reproductive strategies do symbols have and what kind of implication does this have for a healthy relationship to them?
Lastly, we’ll end with a little beacon of hope in face of the cultural moment we find ourselves in.

The following definitions are overgeneralisations. Also, they are my definitions -of course inspired by others. I am aware that there are other definitions of symbols, myth, story, narrative, memes, information etc. I do not want to compete with them, but I do want to lay out a grammar, that suits my project.
The lines between story, myth and narratives are blurry in practise, but I think it is useful nonetheless to draw lines between them in theory. Definitions are maps and signposts useful to orient in the adventure of life, but they must not be mistaken for the territory.

That being said:

1. Verticality: Meaning Disclosure through Symbols

Myths, stories and narratives are fundamentally carriers of symbols.
A symbol is both a thing in itself and a thing pointing beyond itself, it therefore opens up a vertical space of meaning relations.
Symbols as wholes as parts, within wholes as parts, disclose a whole holarchy of symbols within symbols.
You can look at a cross for example and see the cross, but you can also see through it into an inexhaustible well of Christian symbolism.

Myths are the richest and deepest medium of symbols. They track the development of human consciousness over millennia. Joseph Campbell spoke to that, by describing myths as things that never happened but are always happening.
A myth therefore is a meta-pattern, a deep structure in which our lives are embedded and from which individual stories emanate.
I also like to think of collective myths as the substrate of culture. The word Culture comes from the Latin colere, “to till, to tend, to cultivate”. Engaging in mythmaking is to turn over, nourish and plant stories on the soil of our collective dream.

“Tending to the Soil” Illustration by Jia Sung

Campbell assigns the four following qualities onto myth:
They are mystical by waking a sense of awe and wonder at the mystery of being.
They are cosmological in that they provide an ongoing image of the universe’s order as a whole.
They are sociological by validating and maintaining a social order, and lastly, they are
pedagogical by guiding the individual through the stages of life.

When I speak of a personal myth, I mean the highest order expression of a symbolic ecosystem that fulfils these four functions on a personal level.
The sociological quality harmonising society would translate into an individuating quality, integrating the many parts within a person into a coherent whole.
Explicating that personal myth is a process of a lifetime and is also undergoing a constant reshaping.

A collective myth is truer in the sense that it dives into deeper structures of the psyche, but a personal myth and the stories that emanate from that, are more up to date, by taking into account the very frontier in the evolution of consciousness(you). The game of life is therefore drawing from collective myth and updating it through lived stories. In other words: both personal and collective myth can inform one another to help transform us.
The difference between a personal myth and a story is blurry. A personal myth can be viewed as the deepest expression of one’s stories, in which individual stories are symbols pointing to that myth.

I like to view story as an open-ended exploration, a seedling sprouting out of the mythic substrate, seeking for new ways to grow towards the light. A story is therefore emanating from a myth by particularizing itself into lived experience. If that experience is made in the imaginal or in “ordinary life” makes no difference to me, in the end stories can be lived, told and written.
When the fruits of the story are metabolised by being received, it returns its symbolic nutrients to the collective soil, which is getting reshaped through this process over long stretches of time.

Mapping myth, story and narrative onto a Jungian structure of the psyche would look something like that:
Myth is an expression of the collective unconscious, impressing itself onto the personal unconscious as image and pattern. From there the personal unconscious is speaking through a particular life where it surfaces as personal myth and story. When that story is impressed onto ego-consciousness, it grasps the story and makes a narrative out of it, by imposing a clear, communicable arc on it.
That step reduces the evocative symbolism of a story, to a sequence of propositions through which the world can be grasped and split into categories.

A key distinction here between narrative and stories&myths are, that the latter operate in what Suzanne Langer calls presentational symbolism: Stories and myths are conceived as a whole, helping us to comprehend our experience.
A narrative on the other hand, is engaging in what Langer calls discursive symbolism, where propositions unfold sequentially by which meaning is constructed piece by piece.
Through this “narration” it reconfigures the presentational symbolism of story and myth into a propositional understanding, reshaped by someone’s choices about sequence, causality, and moral weight. Under this light, a narrative is an interpretation that wants to impose a will onto reality.
The power in narrative lies in its reconfiguring act; it takes the story and orders it into linear time and space, through which it becomes a tool for orientation.
When myths and stories help us comprehend our being in the world, a narrative helps us apprehend ourselves and the world through willed meaning construction.
Together they can help us realise meaning, that is to become aware of whats real and make it real at the same time.

Engaging in mythmaking, storytelling and narrative creation carries a responsibility. They shape how people experience and act in the world, and that lived experience in turn, feeds back into the collective unconscious, reshaping the mythic substrate of our culture.
I think narratives are a powerful tool in making chaotic life events intelligible, but also that they should be carefully used in service to myth and story that are in turn in service to the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

We have been exploring how unconscious and conscious, Self and world, are reciprocally shaped through symbols mediated by myth, story and narrative.
That leads us to a realisation, dare I say; a revelation, that shook me to the core:

Symbols are autopoietic.

They are informed by self and world, and transform both self and world, which creates a self-making feedback loop. The notion of symbols as autopoietic and therefore living things with their own agency, carries deep mystical implications.
Isn’t it written: In the beginning was the Word...

In “Fateweaving -a practice to regain existential agency” I tried to articulate a way to consciously cultivate a symbiotic relationship with this Being animating life with meaning. (Towards mutually escalating beauty?)
I like to wonder about what the nature of that Being is. What is the God of Story? What makes relation possible?
That exploration shall take form in another essay that is already in the works (Arrows of Longing – The divine love story of Eros and Logos)


2. Horizontality: Reproductive Stategies of Symbols

By examining myth, story and narrative we examined the depth of symbols. The depth of a symbol has an effect on how easily it can be transmitted.

Now, I want to focus on the ways symbols are transmitted and self-reproduce across time and space.

What stands out so far is that narratives through their ease of propositional transmission especially have a greater tendency to be corrupted. By corruption I mean a loss of symbolic depth because the corrupted symbol does not longer point far beyond itself.
Through that process they retain the shell of the symbol but really, they become signs which equivocate things with other things. (Sign=this stands for that.)
The relationship between a corrupted/dead symbol and a healthy living symbol can be understood through the distinction of an icon and an idol:

An icon is transparent, directing worship to something higher than itself by elucidating meaning beyond itself. An icon is an alive symbol that invites participatory re-creation when shared. Every time meaning is shared through an icon, it develops and deepens. What kind of meaning is disclosed sits between the symbol and the imagination of the beholder, which creates new perspectives and relations across the symbolic ecosystem.
An idol in contrast is something that is worshiped for itself. In the process of replicating the shell of a dead symbol, its meaning flattens over time, while the shell of the symbol becomes ever crasser and stimulating in order to increase its virality.
This mechanism also dries out the imagination of the beholder because the relation to the symbol is incentivised to be of passive replication. An idol is therefore parasitic and has a greater tendency to go viral through easy of transmission.

To continue the biological analogy, I now want to further contrast the different reproductive strategies of biological organisms and symbolic organisms.
Just as genes engage in ecological niche construction, symbols as memes engage in cultural niche construction.
This assumes that symbols have fitness strategies through which they both fit themselves into their environment and shape the environment to their needs.

In biological organisms the reproductive strategy differs depending on the energy density of a given environment. In energy dense environments, species tend to go for R-selected reproductive strategies: they create maximal offspring with minimal investment per offspring. The maturation is very fast but the lifespan short. The fitness comes from sheer quantity and speed of reproduction.

In energy sparse environments K-selected species tend to maximize offspring quality and their subsequent survival. There are few offspring with heavy parental investment. Their maturation is slow while having a longer lifespan. Fitness comes from how well each offspring is equipped to survive in a competitive, resource-limited environment.

The same strategies can be mapped onto symbols. (I don’t know where I encountered that idea first, but to give credit where credit is due: Gryphos detailed the same idea here:)
In information dense environments, R-selected symbols (Idols) pursue a strategy of parasitic virality. To compete for attention, they opt to hijack the relevance realisation machinery of their host through a sense of urgency. They spread fast, but often without symbolic nourishment, in that they don’t disclose vertical layers of meaning beyond themselves.
Like an addiction this mechanism is degenerative over time; it erodes the very capacity for relevance-realization it exploits. Each contact with a flashy symbol demands a stronger hit than the last. Ultimately this leaves the host less able to find meaning outside the memetic possesion.
Internet memes and propaganda fall into that category, surviving between days and decades, feeding off the attention of their hosts and dying out with their subsequent dysfunction.

But then there are K-selected symbolic carriers (Icons) that survive millennia by improving the fitness of their hosts through inspiring symbiotic communion. Their fitness is oriented towards how well a symbol sustains a living relationship between the Self and the World. Religious symbolic systems can be an example of those.

The vertical axis of meaning disclosure and the horizontal axis of transmission/memetic reach, are seperate, but also related.
Symbolic depth encourages health and slow transmission but a deep symbolic system can still become parasitic.
For example, Satanism as a deep symbolic system, would be both deep and parasitic.
A parasitic symbol feeds on its own depth, it hollows its meaning out and replaces it with a parody of its healthy counterpart. Usually, the lure is a temptation of power through virality. Vertical meaning is sacreficed for horizontal spread.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Temptation (sacrefice of meaning) through power (memetic spread) is one of the oldest themes in mythology -do you feel the pull in your life?

When that happens, in the end there is just an easy replicable shell of the symbol left. Symbolic parasitism is therefore also a totalising force, because through the passive replication of a parasitic symbol, the whole symbolic ecosystem and its hosts will begin to form a monoculture.

I could see a Dionysian explanation for the function that a parasitic symbol fulfils. Dionysus is the god of ecstatic dissolution and holy frenzy, it is a god dying and giving birth to itself.
Like a forest fire; viral, parasitic symbols hollow out and trim whatever in the symbolic ecosystem has failed to adapt to evolutionary pressures.
It is a roaring festival of absurdity leading to atrocity, to see a symbolic system be hijacked by viral parasitism, like it has been for Germanic folktales by Nazism for example.
When psychic epidemics triggered by ideological propaganda explode into monstrosities of flesh and blood, the cultural field is cleared for new symbolic species to emerge.
I think strong and healthy containers are necessary in which this Dionysian principle can be ritualised, without leading into mass psychosis and their subsequent atrocities.

Symbiotic symbols on the other hand invite participatory re- or co-creation.
Through that a self-correcting ecosystem with a teleology of striving for the Good, the True and the Beautiful, can flourish. Participating in such a system feels like a voluntairy nessecity.
To explore a symbols depth, one needs to invest a lot of cognitive and existential effort in the form of attention, time and ritual. One really needs to tend to a good relationship to make it flourish.

3. A hopeful glance at the future:

What do you like to a-tend to? What feels like a voluntairy nessessity in your life?

We live in a materialist, decadent culture, saturated with a high-density informational environment that drowns us in signal.
But this saturation covers up a malnourishment of our imagination. We have been fed on dead symbols that no longer point beyond themselves. Our culture is obese while starving for nutrients like someone on a Mac Donald’s diet.
I think that paradoxically the very malnourishment may be what could give rise to a vitalist hunger for meaning, even, or because, of the meaning crisis in our decadent age.
We therefore might live at the precipice of a huge opportunity: That is to live like kings in material abundance (horizontality) while bridging to the kingdom of heaven (verticality) through entering symbiotic communion with a healthy holarchy of symbols.
From the highest point of view, every particular thing is a symbol; things in themselves, pointing beyond themselves. From there the world appears as a theatre well stocked with a wardrobe of material games to be played, in service to make the most beautiful stories blossom.

Now dress up and tend to your deepest symbols, because the Story is waiting to be lived.
We have a say in what the mythic soil of the future will be!