Manuela Pallotto Strickland

“ In a way, precisely because modern spirituality was already orbiting without the sphere of religious belief, Jung could ease religion towards the all too human sphere of the psyche. As he himself acknowledged, belief had already lost any relevance to modern man. Insofar as religious experience could still be considered as an experience of the numinous capable of bridging the gap between consciousness and the unconscious, it had to be moved from the realm of belief to the realm of knowledge, of gnosis – the knowledge of the Godhead being the knowledge of the self as a whole. ”

“ From a psychological point of view, it only showed the need for man to reach out to his unconscious, yet without being able to repair the divide. In the same way, the resurgence of paganism, along with the mythical universe it fed on, played a similar symptomatic role, yet did not, in itself, heal the split. The main task for modern man, was to bridge the gap between ego and unconscious. Jung's vision was optimistic. Neither the failure of religion nor the modern defiance of myth, in fact, were bound to have the last word. ”

“ According to Jung, since the Enlightenment disposed of the gods as obsolete, Christianity had become unable to accomplish through symbols and rites the psychological and cultural sublimation of the unconscious animal libido, which can be regarded as the very foundation of science, technology and language – of anything distinctively human, really. In fact, the bond between the imaginary world of symbols and language and the libido, as Jung described it, is so deep that they basically sustain each other. ”

“ The moderns are left to question whether there is anything, and, if so, what, which can truly be called 'ours', or 'yours', or 'mine', if even dreams and the most secret images are oneiric, imaginal echoes of images and dreams already dreamed and imagined for thousands of years.
Jung, almost with reticence, acknowledged the fundamental similarity between Wotan and Dionysus. ”

“ Rather, it heavily relies on those unconscious imaginative structures that he called archetypes or «primordial images» (Urbilde) [8] , functioning as fundamental symbolic frames, exclusively within which the sublimation of libido and any symbolic creation at all can occur. Jung considered the archetypes as ancestral forms carrying the memories of life itself. They are the «precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line; the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated and condensed into types». ”

“ If, as I believe, this is the case, the Warburgian plea for myth in the age of science and technology shows a fundamentally humanistic concern, which differentiates it greatly from other critical readings of modernity. If this is the case, we should say that, at least on principle, Warburg did not stand on a thoroughly different ground from Jung. The Swiss psychologist, in fact, always declared that the focus of his work and concerns was the psychological development of the individual, the process of «individuation» [5] being the ultimate scope of analytical psychology. ”

“ With similar words, Jung described the psychological condition that secularization introduced into the modern world by ridding the languages of the divine of any meaning, without then finding alternative symbolic and mythical forms for libidinal sublimination and transference. Modern rationalism, rid of God, also rid itself of the active link to the unconscious, leaving it unguided and unhindered and at the mercy of its own frantic outbreak. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To Warburg, what modernity deliberately eliminated, without being able or willing to replace, was the critical acknowledgement of the 'rational' function of non logicmythical-religious-primitive forms of thinking, dismissed as thoroughly alien. ”

“ In June 1923, a few dozen professional and amateur astrologers met at the Theosophical Society lecture hall in Leipzig to clarify once and for all that astrology was not the embodiment of a mediaeval superstition but a proper science, and that a neat separation should be drawn between real astrologers and mere charlatans. At that time, nowhere else in Europe were astrologers showing such a strong level of guild selfawareness and organization as in Germany. Their initiative came right at the time when astrology was quickly ascending to levels of mass popularity yet unheard of. ”

“ Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journey. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-years-old to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. ”

“ Fritz Saxl openly read the astrological revival of those days as a neo-pagan phenomenon, connected to the spiritual crisis of modernity, which showed striking similarities with the twelfth century A.D., during which Arab astrologers initiated the revival of the Hellenistic astrological culture. That was a time when «the Christian religion seemed no longer completely able to satisfy the spiritual side of man, and there was room for paganism to slip in, as we see it doing today» (Saxl [1970] : 28) . ”

“ The cultural geography evoked by his genealogies mapped a very different lay of the land, firmly traced between four cardinal points, arranged along two opposing axes (NorthSouth, East-West) , yet dynamically engaged in continuous exchanges, which have been kept alive by sudden re-emergences of the subterranean circulation of paganism.
Yet, Warburg too made bold choices in articulating his lineages of the archaic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On Medea and the energetic inversion of homicidal fury see A. Warburg, Mnemosyne, cit., table 73. ↑ C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, New York: Dover, 2002. ↑ C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, Part 1: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. by Gerhard Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. ↑ Id., Psychological Types, cit., pp. 443-444. ↑ C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, Part 2: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, ed. by Gerhard Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. ”