Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move» (Jung [1970]: 180).
This was Jung in 1935.
The convergence of Saxl's remark with Jung's is self-evident, although Saxl did not
qualify the reawakening of ancient paganism and the spiritual crisis that brought it upon
the European world either as negative or positive historical outcomes. Whereas to Jung,
the crisis undergone by Christianity was a serious, epochal problem. At any rate, the
relation between the emergence of paganism and the crisis of Christianity pictured by
both was of causality. We are left wondering whether Warburg too agreed or would
have agreed with Saxl and Jung's readings, because, as far his writings go, he never
stated explicitly that neither in the past nor in the present had a religious crisis,
specifically Christianity's, been the catalyst of the renewal of ancient paganism.
Nonetheless, ultimately, he too, like Jung and many others, regarded the increasing
disenchantment and the unilateral understanding of human rationality brought forth by
the thorough secularization of Western society, as very dangerous phenomena.
Telegraphs and telephone, the «instantaneous electric contact» running through them
like a beguiling snake, destroyed the cosmos and rid the space for devotion and thought
opened by mythical imagination and primitive symbolism a long time before.
Electricity enslaved, the lightning held captive in the wire, has produced a civilization which has no use for heathen poetry. But what does it put in its place? The forces of nature are no longer seen in anthropomorphic shapes; they are conceived as an endless succession of waves, obedient to the touch of a man’s hand. With these waves the civilization of mechanical age is destroying what natural science, itself emerging out of myth, had won with such vast effort – the sanctuary of devotion, the remoteness needed for contemplation[1].
In some respects, the ‘anti-modernist’ plea of the Snake Ritual occurred as a major
breaking point in Warburg’s thought. And an unexpected one too. Prepared during the
final year of his therapeutic sojourn in Bellevue, the lecture that was supposed to prove
that he had overcome his mental illness and thus was ready to go back to his family,
ended with the enigmatic appeal to the reasons and the means of mythopeic, irrational
thought. Until then, Warburg’s idea of the fundamental dualism of human rationality, of
the elliptical nature of the space of thinking which arranges itself around the two foci of
«reason» and «un-reason» (Unvernunft), had never endorsed a plea for mythopoesis.
© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
- ↑ A. Warburg, A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, in Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Apr., 1939), pp. 277-292.
