Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
inherited by the individual, yet of a collective nature, therefore, as far as the single individual is concerned, like preposterous memories, traces of events that never happened. They both connect the individual to the collectivity in such an ambiguous way that the development of the persona, as autonomous individual differentiated from collectivity, can be achieved only if the collective memories are absorbed and acknowledged by the individual as his own imaginative resources, rather than simply rejected in the name of ‘personal’ creativity.
Yet, Jung's insistence on the universal nature of the archetypes led him also to state
that they were biologically determined, a position which opened the way to racialist
uses of the concept, in open conflict with the archetypes' own universalist ambition.
Such a biological conception does not sit too well with Warburg's more flexible and also
more ambiguous use of Semonian vocabulary. Neither does it meet with Warburg's idea
that ancient paganism survived the advent of Christianity, rather than simply having
been transmitted genetically, as we would say nowadays. Paganism could have gotten
lost, or it could have remained an inactive, forgotten memory, confined into the
underground of unconsciousness where it was buried for centuries.
Nonetheless, since Warburg, precisely by defining the deepest level where the
engrams are indelibly imprinted on the brain as an inorganic strata that sets a continuity
between man and inert matter, embraced a quasi-biological and Darwinian explanation
of the persistence of collective memories, his theory of social memory should not be
posited in rigid antagonism to Jung's[1].
3. Wotan and Dionysus. Genealogies for the Future
Differences and similarities withstanding, I believe that the real distance between
Warburg and Jung can be fully appreciated only by considering how divergent were their
readings of historical paganism, particularly in relation to the modern fate of
Christianity, which literally shaped Jung's understanding of paganism but remained
largely ignored by Warburg.
Jung's main concerns about the defeat of the psychological and historical function of
Christianity were not Warburg’s. Neither was the idea that the renewal of paganism had
to be regarded as a psychological symptom peculiar of an epoch that had become
thoroughly disengaged with its major religious system. As already mentioned, Warburg
© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
- ↑ This is Jan Assmann’s firm position. See his Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, in New German Critique, 65, Spring-Summer, 1995, 125-133.
