<p>This article explores how reading the twelfth-century text of Nikephoros Basilakes’ <i>Progymnasmata</i> in dialogue with the notion of worldmaking prompts a new, more capacious understanding of the transformative possibilities of personification, revealing the potential of this rhetorical exercise as an instrument to discover, explore, and experiment with alternative ways to perceive, relate to, and make sense of reality. I argue that personification works within and with the mediateness of one’s access to the world, inviting the rhetor performing the exercise to become aware of the cultural and symbolic forces that shape their ways of being in the world, work to put them aside, and try to imagine how the world could be otherwise. This searching of elsewheres of worldmaking is transformative, because it enables the practitioner of personification to discover new ways of seeing, feeling, being in, and making sense of the world.</p>