Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/1

 1. A Nation of Stargazers

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. So was astronomy.

Planetaria and observatories were being opened in all the major cities of the country. Berlin’s in 1924, Munich’s in 1925. In April 1930, a planetarium was built in Hamburg’s old water tower. To launch the opening, an exhibition on the history of astronomy and the belief in stars. The exhibition realized a project of Aby Warburg who died, though, before seeing its completion. The Planetarium project focused on the relation between religious Sternglaube and scientific Sternkunde, whose simple opposition was turned by Warburg into a very complex figure, revealing the intimate relation between the mythical universe of the pagan monstra and ancient planetary deities on one hand, and that of modern science on the other (Warburg [1993]).

Yet, the German astrological revival was a rather new phenomenon. Until the end of WWI, in fact, astrology stayed underground in Germany, and gained mass popularity only during the Twenties. Whereas in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in France, the appeal of astrological practices and knowledge had increased tremendously already