specified condition is met) function theory, a branch of mathematics known also as computabilitytheory and as the theory of algorithms, there exists the so-called creativity theorem, which statesthat if there is a computable function f such that when ever w sub1 C K, f(i) equals K, but f(i) doesnot equal w sub1. Roughly translated, this means that if there exists a recursively enumerablebut not recursive set K that embodies an object that is forever unknowable but of such a naturethat we can continue to know it to be unknowable, then any recursively enumerable set havingthe property asserted of K is called a creative set.The creativity theorem is a link to understanding the ancient concept of fate and the propulsion of fate's core of unknowableness into manifestation while that core continues to be protected frombeing known. Fate, therefore, equals language, and the description of fate's protection finds itsequivalent in the various systems that have been outlined above.I believe that inspiration embodies the idea of being possessed by an entity that is unknowablebut whose unknowability passes through oneself in a manner that produces action as a by-product of the passage. Such an interpretation of inspiration has never been part of, on the onehand, the easy agnosticism of the aristocratic notion of creativity, which does not question theorigin and hierarchy of ability, or, on the other hand, the constant democratic attack on the sourceof ability in an effort to produce an equitable distribution of it. Rather, the traditional association of creativity and language has been an attempt to understand how what we call religious symbolismand mythology work and why they have the power that they do.The history of this attempt to uncover the nature of symbolism and mythology, primarily asaspects of religious rites and mystical experience, is as old as humankind. Here the archaic issought for its own sake. Yet Rudolf Arnheim neglected to take this into account in an observationhe made in the mid-1960s:
Today in both psychology and the arts there is a danger of confusing the elementary with the profound. Cultures in their late, refined stages seem to develop a weakness for primitism, and one of the forms this inclination takes in our own case is the temptation to believe that the areasof the mind farthest away from consciousness harbor the deepest wisdom. This belief strikes meas a romantic superstition. The elementary or, to use a fashionable term, the archetypal statement has the simplest strength of a primitive icon, but in its raw state it is acceptable to thedeveloped mind only as an escape from the confusion of complexity or as a spice for the tired palate. It is a mediation rather than a revelation because, in order to meet the requirements of our intricate civilization, the fundamental image of human experience must be modulated by theconditions, traditions, memories, and thoughts that make us what we are.
It would be intellectually obtuse, however, to apply Arnheim's remarks to work of the last of thepre-Socrates like Pythagoras or to Plato, who lived at the end of the Periclean age. Weltschmerz,or ennui, could not be properly attributed to Zosimos of Papopolis, the third-century alchemistwho brought Gnosticism to a close. Would one say of Goethe, who suddenly became the first"modern man" after the Renaissance cycle faded with the Rococo, that he became immediatelyafflicted with Post-Modern malaise?In the twentieth century alone there have been many people both well known and not so wellknown who have dedicated their working lives to the examination of aspects of the archaic for clues to keeping the process of symbolism and mythology alive in the present. To name a few, Iwould mention the philosopher R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who discovered the content of thesymbols of ancient Egypt; the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, who developed a semioticsof mysticism; Mircea Eliade, who by his studies in comparative religion revealed patterns of symbols and myths that we constantly reenact; George J Gurdjieff, a modern alchemist and neo-Pythagorean, who revived the initiation into the esoteric; R Buckminster Fuller, the engineer whose vision of a dynamic geometry has become a universal dimensional language; and JohnMicheil, who has rediscovered the ancient science of the cosmic canon of proportions andsymbolic numbers. And there are many, many more, all contributing to this effort whether or not it
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