Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/13

 professors, was not simply the collateral effect of an anti-intellectual and anti-academic position. By referring to Wotan, Jung evoked a very specific archetypal genealogy, which excluded a much wider constellation of cultural references not primarily related with Nordic mythology, but rather closer to the 'other' Mediterranean heart of Europe.

Nordic mythology was never a subject matter of Warburg's work or thought. 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. As Gombrich pointed out, he focused primarily on Hellenism and the early Imperial Roman period, whose syncretic quality led him to the necessary inclusion of the East into his narratives. Although, as he put it, «Athens must always be conquered afresh from Alexandria», the perilous winged monstra that, flying over Asia Minor, ensured paganism's survival, belonged to the very same genealogy claiming the descent of modern science and Winckelmann's Apollo del Belvedere. It was precisely such a selective view of antiquity that allowed him to develop his conception of paganism as a psychologically and culturally dualist phenomenon. In fact, one cannot but wonder whether his theory of the energetic polarity of images, which like a neural charge had kept them alive through the centuries, would have germinated at all if instead of a nympha he had before his eyes the uncanny stillness of a kore, whose immobility lacked even the promise of the most elemental, yet already fully polarized, atom of movement: «instate of turning».

Both Warburg and Jung chose «their» archetypes and original images, and summoned them as the archaic forefathers of long-lasting genealogies, in much the same way linguists had been looking at the roots of the words as at original, almost