Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/10

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.

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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 pag. 50 © Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466