If Consciousness is:

The idea "Consciousness" is a way of communicating the experience of being aware, of participating in the development of one's own changing relationship with Image.

is it useful to play with epistemological hierarchies? I find myself experimenting with them frequently, mostly as a device to be able to communicate their limitations while at the same time deploying their descriptive and provocative qualities.

If epistemology has to do with ways of knowing what is known, and hierarchies allow experiments with what must be known as an exclusive or inclusive prerequisite in order for other things to be known, then the chicken-and-egg game of what comes first, what is the larger category into which other frames of reference fit, may be more fruitful than it seems at first. As long as this is an experiment in becoming clearer about one's own presuppositions, and not an establishment of The Truth, then it may be more fruitful than not.

This has disciplinary consequences, of course. For instance, what about the discussion of the place of Mythography?

1. Perhaps Consciousness/awareness of Image is the universal context and prerequisite for all other frames of reference.
   
2. Next might come the configuration of consciousness in terms of the impulse and act of Communications.
3. Then, perhaps, the configuration of Communications in terms of the development and deployment of Symbol, of spoken and unspoken language.
4. Then mythicity, the shaping of Consciousness through Communications of symbols in terms of Narrative (sequence that conveys particular meaning), plot (psychological motivation and meaning), and Context (Archetypal ideas made particular/situationally appropriate). The result/working of mythicity (mythic consciousness) is mythology or, in the contemporary understanding of "mythology", mytho-psychology.
5. Hermeneutics, Mythography, Linguistics, Semantics and similar interpretive strategies follow.
   

The above configuration of steps in the unfolding of consciousness is a thought experiment in progress.