Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/12

Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault ago, the indelible traces of primeval collective experiences carved the ruts for the foundations of culture to be laid and preserved.

The two gods remind us that the eternal archaic still haunts and hunts us - us: the new Aktaeons turned into prey and thus requited with the knowledge of the past buried within, the highest knowledge of all. Wotan and Dionysus transform us into seismographs receiving the cresting waves of ancient seismic activities, long ceased yet still rumbling in the void left by all that is no more. They make us speak the voices of the dead as if they were our own, our mouths resonating chambers for their tales of love, fear, confusion and injustice.

Wotan and Dionysus were summoned by Jung and Warburg to show the haunting and imperative force of archetypes and ancient images, which eternally oblige us to recall, to dream over and over the same dreams, to imagine over and over the same images. Thus, they made us become the dreams, become the images; they made us dream dreams that dream us, imagine images that imagine us. 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. Nonetheless, he could not really bring himself to state their full identity. The reserve he expressed makes us think that, although from a psychological point of view the two pagan gods were kindred products of archetypal imagination, historically and culturally they were not akin. Or, to put it differently, although archetypes were defined theoretically as universal and timeless, springing up from the depth of the unconscious part of the brain that had evolved through millennia, effectively they were invested with a very wide range of connotations and semantic subtleties pointing to the limit and the differences between their alleged psychological and cultural meaning. Jung's choice of a northern god as the archetype of the unconscious of the present age, instead of the Greek divinity dear to philologers and pag. 52 © Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466