a sense of joy and then a panic

Well, yeah, a lot of the meaning of art is bound up with time and place. I'm really talking about semiotic principles. Maybe. But no, not just symmetry. A variety of things to do with likeness and proportion and other relations. But they don't really matter in and of themselves, until they're part of a tradition or have some historical context or whatever. But like, harmonics are universal. Tuning systems are not. That sort of thing.