Contemporary Ontologies on Immanence and the Sacred in Motion
The Mythic Universe Through a New Lens
What does it mean to exist within a world that is always shifting, always rewriting itself? In many mythic traditions, the cosmos is imagined as a structured order where divine hierarchies govern the laws of existence and where reality unfolds according to a predetermined design. These realms, however, offer an alternative world in which gods, landscapes, and memory are both entangled and subject to change. Here, rather than merely recounting what has already happened, myths make up the very fabric of reality, determined by sacred acts of divine power that shape what comes next.
Our previous exploration of The Realms ("Myth, Memory, and the Evolution of Consciousness") examined how myth and memory functioned as evolving forces, drawing on thinkers such as Julian Jaynes, Hegel, and Joseph Campbell to consider how consciousness itself is shaped by the stories we tell. We explored how deities negotiate between collective memory and individual will, how myths are vehicles of transformation, and how time progresses not as a linear sequence but as a continual act of reinterpretation.
Now, we turn toward contemporary ontologies, relational Indigenous philosophies, and posthumanist thought, engaging with thinkers like Moten, Mbembe, Viveiros de Castro, Glissant, Braidotti, and Anzaldúa. Their work challenges rigid structures of myth and suggests that divinity means embodying and moving through a world where memory, myth, and materiality are in perpetual transformation. Through these perspectives, we will examine how the gods of The Realms embody a non-hierarchical cosmology that is entangled, relational, and unfinished—a world in which the sacred is not imposed from above but emerges from itself, shaped by acts of creation, destruction, and negotiation.
Rhizomatic Realms
Traditional mythic cosmologies often impose a rigid structure: divinity reigns from above, governing the world below through fixed hierarchies. The divine, in this framing, is distant, separate from the material world, dispensing wisdom and order from on high through an unbroken chain of command. In Western cosmologies in particular, the sacred is defined by how it remains removed from the profane. Power flows downward, reinforcing an unquestionable dualism between creator and creation.
But The Realms does not unfold according to such an order. Here, the gods are embedded within their worlds, woven into the very fabric of existence rather than presiding from some unreachable plane. The divine is a presence emerging from within, and power is derived from entanglement.
The Realms mirrors what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a rhizomatic network: a system without a single point of origin or a singular hierarchy of control. There is no singular axis of power, no central trunk from which all meaning grows. Instead, divinity spreads laterally, branching in unexpected directions, manifesting as the very matter that composes the cosmos.
Divinity is a force emerging from the relationships, memories, and shifting landscapes that sustain it. Gods negotiate their own existence within the myths that shape them, shifting in response to the forces around them, retaining echoes of what they once were while continuously transforming themselves and the realities they govern.
The Materiality of Divinity
Divinity, in many traditions, is imagined as something intangible, ineffable, beyond touch, beyond flesh. Even where gods are imagined as embodied, their materiality is often secondary, a mere vessel for their immaterial power. The realmic concept of the cosmos, however, leans in the direction of many Indigenous relational ontologies where the world itself has qualities that make it seem alive. In these frameworks, a river is a being with will, history, and eminence. A mountain is an ancestor with past battles lost and won.
Achille Mbembe’s “The Thing and Its Doubles” suggests that objects themselves are haunted by echoes of their past and possible futures. Mbembe implies there is no such thing as inert matter and that every substance holds memory, agency, and potential. This framework supports the idea that a god made of porcelain carries the memory of every grain of sand that endured fire in its becoming and that every imperfection haunts its elegant yet fragile facade.
But what if the goddess of growth is herself the substrate for the living vines and mosses that adorn her jungle, and the gods of ancestry and rain carry the rich grain of deep-rooted trees imprinted on their skin? What if the gods are the world, one in the same with both the materials and cycles that form the landscapes and creatures they give life to?
This material existence of the gods as personified essences of the physical world raises deeper questions. If a god is bound to the stone of the mountain, if it is part of him, can he ever forget the moment when it formed? What does it take to carry the weight of this memory? If he forgets, if the world forgets, what remains of the mountain? What remains of him?
Conversely, if the land is left to its own devices and erodes and blooms again, do the gods of it lose parts of their identity in the process? What does it take to lose power or gain it when energy cannot be created nor destroyed? What are the implications of transmutation, trust, and becoming something new? What does it take to remain divine when one's existence is subject to a litany of forces outside of one's control?
Immanence and the Sacred in Motion
The realmic cosmology rejects the idea of divinity as a separate, distant, transcendent force. It also inherently contradicts the idea that for something to be sacred it must be static. This is in line with Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence wherein the divine is emergent, alive and shifting, always in process. The sacred is motion, not monument. It is revealed in moments where reality ripples under the weight of divine action or consequence.
These moments are thresholds in time where the world itself shifts, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. Glissant’s concept of the sacred as fluid and relational speaks to this: the sacred is an ongoing process, an encounter, a rupture in time where something new becomes possible.
If the sacred is something fluid, something happening rather than something fixed, then what causes these moments of rupture? Do they occur at the will of the gods, or are they emergent forces, unpredictable even to divinity?
The answer is unclear because the answer is both.
There are times when the gods act intentionally, and their choices ripple outward, causing transformations beyond their own expectations. A moment of grief, rage, or love might set something into motion that cannot be undone. And then there are moments where the gods are merely caught in the current of something larger than themselves, something that even they do not fully understand let alone control.
These thresholds, these moments where the fabric of reality bends, are unpredictable. Sometimes they are deliberate; sometimes they are accidents of fate. A god might open a door expecting one outcome, only to find that something else entirely has entered through it. The interplay of memory, will, and mysterious unintended consequences informs the very texture of the myth.
This ambiguity raises a question: does the cosmos itself have intent, or is it simply a web of shifting resonances? Are these moments of rupture part of a larger design, or are they simply the inevitable consequences of divine actions colliding with the weight of the past?
These questions can never be answered definitively because that is part of the nature of the sacred itself. It is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be experienced. The gods, despite their power, do not have perfect knowledge. They, too, must wrestle with uncertainty. They, too, must face the unintended effects of their own choices. They, too, are shaped by the very forces they set into motion.
There is no divine script. There is only the ongoing act of creation, the continuous negotiation between past and future, between memory and will, between what is given and what is taken away. The sacred, in is not something that exists in isolation. Its transcendence emerges from how it is entangled with both the tangible and the ineffable.
The Work of Creation
When gods are not set apart from their worlds, but are their worlds, to change the world is to change the self, and to change the self is to change the world. Every act of creation carries a loss of something else.
Divinity is a state of becoming. Divinity is work. Gods sustain their own myths through their ability to persist within them while being constantly reshaped by the forces they embody.
To be a god in The Realms is not to rule. It is to remain. It is to take part in the endless unfolding of myth, the ceaseless rewriting of meaning, the constant negotiation between memory and change. It is to be shaped as much as one shapes. It is to stand at the crossroads of past and future and know that the path between them is ever-changing.
Thus, the act of creation is not the conjuring of something from the void, but an offering of oneself willingly to enact embodied cosmic forces. The delicate balance of this living world can only be maintained through this divine work. This is a process both sacred and dangerous—a negotiation of what it means to persist in a complex system of forces where energy is a finite resource. The gods may impose themselves into the world, forming rivers, mountains, even new divine beings to enact their will, but if they disrupt the delicate scaffolding that maintains their myth, they risk fading into the very reality they have shaped, overtaken by the other forces around them.
The work of divinity, then, is not a matter of commanding reality from above, nor is it about preserving an unchanging state of being. It is about negotiation, endurance, and the willingness to be shaped as much as one shapes. It is about memory and potential inscribed into the very substance of being. To be divine is to be of something, and to know that this connection can never be severed, only transformed.
The Crisis of Divine Agency and Identity
In many mythic traditions, gods are fixed in place, defined by singular roles: the war god, the mother goddess, the trickster, the judge. Their identities are essentialized, bound to their domains and archetypes in ways that make them timeless but also static.
But in The Realms, gods are not fixed. They are not permanent monoliths of singular meaning. They change their minds, split apart, come back together, unravel again, and even cease to exist, leaving a space for something new to become.
This challenges the essentialist notion of godhood. Instead of being eternal, unchanging figures, the gods of The Realms exist in a state of flux, shaped as much by the forces acting upon them as by their own wills.
Gods as Process, Not Essence
In Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity, identity is not something static but a process, an unfolding that never quite resolves. To be a subject is not to be something, but to be becoming.
The gods, then, are not symbols of fixed archetypes. Rather, they are sites of negotiation and even contradiction. The meaning of their existence is both inherited and free to be rewritten.
There is no single axis of good and evil, no clear division between creator and creation, between the forces of nature and the forces of free will. Each realm is shaped by both internal and external conflicts, and each god is a story that is constantly rewriting itself.
The Work of Remaining Divine
So, rather than attempting to answer the question, "What does it mean to be a god?" it may be more astute to ponder, "What does it take to remain one?"
Divinity is not a state of being but a labor, a practice, a ceaseless negotiation with selfhood. It is not clear what bestows the gods their power, but it seems they must continually enact it, justify it and embody it because their very identities sustain the world. Their existence is neither effortless nor guaranteed. It is something they must commit to, over and over again.
This is why the gods struggle. They are not only battling against external forces, but they are also fighting an internal battle between their legacy and their agency. They are not invulnerable. They must balance between remaining and becoming, between honoring what they have been and surrendering to what they are destined to be. To remain divine is to persist in motion.
Cosmic Intersections and the Multiplicity of Worlds
To take it one step further, when the gods grapple with one another, their realms could very well collide, merge, pull apart, and ripple through each other, creating new landscapes and rewriting history through mythmaking.
Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism provides a compelling lens. In many Indigenous traditions, different beings do not simply interpret reality differently—they experience fundamentally different realities. There is no singular, universal world—only overlapping ontologies, different ways of being that exist simultaneously.
Each realm and its embodiment may very well have a different relationship to reality itself. What is true in one realm may not be true in another, and these different cosmological assumptions can easily turn moments of cultural exchange into existential negotiations.
If different realms operate on different ontological rules, then what happens when they intersect? These collisions are not just metaphors. They are literal mythic events, moments when the gods themselves must grapple with what it means to live in a universe that does not have a single, stable truth.
In some cosmologies, myths serve to stabilize the world, providing fixed reference points. In The Realms, however, myths are not stabilizing forces at all. They are in competition. The more they are told, the more the balance shifts. Every retelling is an act of reinterpretation, every iteration introduces new possibilities. Over time, the world becomes more fluid, more uncertain, more alive.
The realms exist in a state of constant mythic recomposition, where no version of history is ever final, and no truth is ever absolute. Reality is shaped by which story is believed, which version takes hold and spreads.This is not a flaw—it is the very mechanism through which reality continues to unfold.
The realmic cosmology challenges the assumption that myth belongs to the past, that mythic structures are only useful as relics of a bygone world. Instead, it presents mythology as something alive, as a force still at work in shaping consciousness, identity, and the structure of the universe itself.
Decolonizing Myth
Rather than reinforcing the idea of myth as a universal, timeless template, The Realms embraces multiplicity. It draws from traditions that do not fit neatly into the Western mythic canon—decentralized, relational, often unresolved narratives that invite ongoing participation rather than passive consumption.
Myth has never been neutral. It has always been tied to power—who gets to tell stories, whose version of the past is preserved, whose reality is legitimized. The dominant myths of the modern world have been shaped by colonialism, by the imposition of singular, totalizing narratives that erase or overwrite competing cosmologies.
But The Realms resists this. It does not enforce a singular worldview. It does not reduce its mythology to a neat, consumable framework. Instead, it insists on plurality—on conflicting accounts, on ruptures and collisions, on the impossibility of a final, absolute version of history.
This approach aligns with contemporary decolonial thought, particularly the work of scholars like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, who argue for storytelling practices that embrace opacity rather than insisting on legibility, that reject totalizing frameworks in favor of relational, evolving, and context-dependent ways of knowing.
To tell new myths is to create new ways of being, new structures of meaning, new possibilities for what reality itself can become. The myths of The Realms are not final statements. They are invitations—to imagine, to participate, to recognize that reality itself is still being written.
A World of Living Myth
This is a cosmology without a fixed center, a mythology that resists closure. The realms do not adhere to rigid hierarchies or singular truths. Instead, they form a rhizomatic network where divine agency, materiality, and memory continuously interact, destabilizing any attempt to impose a singular narrative on the world. Myths in The Realms do not explain reality so much as they generate it, their multiplicity allowing for infinite reinterpretation, endless negotiation between what has been and what might be.
The gods, like the myths they inhabit, are in a state of becoming. They do not simply exist—they persist. They break apart, scatter, and reshape themselves, their identities fragmenting and reforming across time. They do not transcend—they remain. They do not rule from on high—they move within, carrying the weight of history in their very bodies, their divine materials infused with the memory of past ages.
To engage with The Realms is to recognize that myth is not something that happened before but something happening now. It is an ongoing process of meaning-making, a means of navigating the instability of the world without retreating into rigid, predetermined frameworks. It does not offer resolution but invites participation.
In the end, The Realms is not a story with an ending. It is a living world, a mythology still being written, a cosmos that continues to evolve. And in that unfinished nature, in that refusal to settle into a singular, final form, lies its deepest truth; the act of myth-making is never complete, reality itself is always being shaped, and that process is what is truly sacred.
References
- Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
- Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
- Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1990.
- Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Duke University Press, 2001.
- Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Duke University Press, 2017.
- Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley, Penguin Classics, 1996.
- Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Univocal Publishing, 2014.