ABSTRACT
The communicative power of signs has been subject of persistent curiosity since the early history of culture. In most ancient cultures the control of signs was entrusted to the select few, treated as though belonging to a super-natural order. At any rate, music is distinct from language in the cognitive processes that it involves and in the kind of significations it conveys. In the cognitive process, he assumed, developmental stages, rather than mechanical components, played the main role. The mind's power, consequently, became itself an object for introspection; learning abilities thus rose in importance, weakening the theoretical necessity for more innate and defined dispositions. Declining though they were in the seventeenth century, occult traditions continued nonetheless to play a significant role in the attempts to explicate the power of symbols in the creation of worlds of knowledge, including the arts.
