In this 2006 essay a link is forged between the death of Pan and how the modern condition has rejected the instinctive and subconscious, under the rubrik that such things are dangerous and uncivilised. This has left us attributing causes to a world far more sophisticated than our own mentation. There is a loss of personal meaning and a social vacuity in terms of a creative good.

The shift away from what Pan symbolized can be seen as a movement away from a type of mentation in which the mind is part of Nature, rather than an abstract observer. This essay is wrapped up with early forms of my own thinking which came to manifest most clearly in my 2011 book, Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness: How Stories Create the World. I wished to see how story telling and the numerical sciences could be of direct effect through restoring a sense of a political relevence, rarely given to them, rather than these being merely interesting. It seems these ancient mysteries could only be practiced within a present reality and this differentiates them from ideas in which one can become a theoretical expert. This 2006 essay (slightly edited) ends with,

Number appears to form an interface with meaning, something not created in our heads but rather connected with the world as a whole, and its transformations. Our modern culture denies its foundations in the numeric sciences of prehistoric civilizations, just as the modern intellect is usually blind to its creative intelligence, as emanating from an instinctive mode of problem solving.

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