Chapter VII explores the projection of myth into Neo-Assyrian palatial architecture and landscape. It argues for a choreographed appearance of the ruler which was governed by the architectural design intended to translate myth into royal epiphany.

Chapter VIII Based on the ancient conception of the royal body as a semantic web of associations, this chapter explores allusions to the creation epic Enuma elish and the Gilgamesh Epic in the royal statue and royal dress respectively.

Chapter III introduces insights from cognitive narratology and cognitive sciences to explain human proclivity for storytelling as a meaning-making strategy to cope with experience and to project future action.

This chapter explores ideas about the origins of the self. It focuses specifically on the various accounts of the origins of the self to be found in the works of Augustine, who is Charles Taylor’s second historical reference point (after Plato) as he builds his account of the sources of the modern self. However, the chapter diverges markedly from Taylor’s emphasis on radical reflexivity, the self discovered through introspection. It studies two aspects of the self for Augustine: first, the self’s formation in what Taylor himself calls “webs of interlocution”; second, and more innovatively, the chapter explores the scattered traces of Augustine’s thoughts on the pre-natal self, and on the mystery of the moment at which soul combines with body to become a human person. Augustine ponders this mystery but never makes a declarative statement on the topic, and the chapter suggests that we should listen to the Augustinian nescio (“I don’t know”) and its resultant embrace of indeterminacy, instead of the Cartesian cogito, as we think about the nature of the self.

Taking the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and the “penitential Psalms” as sites for late antique and early medieval investigations of the effect of sin on the self, this chapter proposes that exegetes saw the self as malleable and permeable.  Commentaries and sermons framed the self as sinful but salvageable.  Changing views of agency, responsibility, and remedies produced shifts in representations of communal interests and penitential interpretations of well-known scriptural texts.  Protections against the penetrations and deformations of sin were erected in liturgical rituals and communal prayer.  The universal stain of sin fostered a porous relation between the individual and the community, each bound to the other in a metaphysical, corporate entity encasing all selves.  Christian views of individual autonomy created as well a spatial expanse of the individual interior in which the soul could wander, even become lost.  Emerging from that grim void to salvation was to grasp a lifeline of the penitential words of others, sung in concert, in an activation of universal memory, to transform the self into a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Chapter I provides a road map for the book. It delineates the approach to conceive of myth as a system of knowledge (episteme) and as an expression of cognitive and cultural experience. With its explanatory and orientating functions myth constitutes reality myth and represents one way of worldmaking (Nelson Goodman). By drawing on insights from cognitive sciences and cognitive narratology the book argues for conceiving of myth as conceptual metaphor that was translated into text, image, and ritual performance with these media informing and complementing each other. Particular attention is given to political mythmaking which situates myth in the institutional context of the palace and temple with their scholarly circles.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

On Taylor’s account, Plato addresses the structures of goodness and the nature of the self by an extreme idealism, advocating the philosopher’s escape from the cave away from the banalities of ‘ordinary life’. Taylor draws the conclusion that this gives Plato a strictly externalist account, with no attention paid to the ‘interiority’ of the first-person standpoint. This chapter offers three brief considerations against this view. First, from metaphysics: the framing of the dialogues in the banalities of ordinary life corresponds to a running question about persons which is couched in terms of the persistence and development of selves, notably focused on personal pronouns. Second, from epistemology: Plato’s account of vision and the turning of the soul is much more complex than Taylor suggests, embedding the standpoint of the viewer into a response-dependent account of vision (and relying on the written context of the dialogues). Third, a consideration of virtue: Plato’s account of virtue is answerable both to ordinary life and to the self who leads it. The question ‘who will you become?’ (asked in the Protagoras and followed through in Republic and Euthydemus) is both more interesting and more challenging to Taylor’s conception of modernity than he can allow.