Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
did not link in any meaningful way the survival and the renewal of paganism to the vicissitudes of Christianity. Yet, since the Christian world of Europe gathered the waters where, from the depths of history, the aquatic flowers of the ancient gods re-surfaced like diurnal nymphae, Christianity did have a role to play in Warburg’s narratives - if anything, as the obvious opponent to paganism. The mere reference to paganism in the modern age in fact conjured, like in a preposterous and mirror-like image, in spaeculo et enigma, the shadowy reflex of Christianity[1]. Such an antithetical specularity was missing in Jung's view. His understanding of Christianity was of psychological unity with paganism, although he regarded traditional Christianity as a force inhibiting the vital role of mythopoeic imagination, which could be revived, though, by returning to the origins of such a tradition, to that syncretic fluidity into which ancient paganism and early Christianity were entwined, while facing each other competitively, mutually reshaping their own identities.
Jung and Warburg's ways of looking at historical paganism of the present and the
past were heavily conditioned by their different approaches to historical Christianity.
Thus, although they both shared concerns about the dangers of an all-too-secularized
modernity and looked with fascination at the pagan and primitive cultural and spiritual
dispositions, little family resemblance can be found between Wotan, Jung’s restless
wandering god, and the modern maenad, the modern follower of Dionysus, the running
maiden who Warburg saw moving swiftly like a light and graceful breeze among the stanze
and the gardens of the early Renaissance cities, or playing golf in a smart sporty dress.
Nonetheless, when we consider exclusively their psychological meaning, the
substantial identity of Wotan and Dionysus is quite striking. Both the pagan divinities
were chosen to embody the modern gods of memory, through which the collective
voice of the archaic strata of human kind speaks, long forgotten and deeply buried in the
depths of the unconscious, from which, like a siren's chant or a ghost's whisper, the
remnants of all the bygones lure and convene us. Whether undertaken in the analyst's
studio, before a white canvas, in front of Mnemosyne's black boards, the journey to such
a land of the past, which is truly the land of the dead[2], takes the individual beyond his
own personal memories and connects him to the pre-individual bedrock, where, long
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© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
- ↑ St Paul, First Epistle to the Corinthians,13:12, quoted by Aby Warburg, WIA, Grundbegriffe, 1929, II, folio 49. See R. Kany, Lo sguardo filologico e i dettagli, in Annali della Scuola Superiore di Pisa, III s., XV, 4, 1985, p. 1283.
- ↑ J. Hillmann, S. Shamdasani, Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book, New York: Norton, 2013.
