Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/14

Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault Adamic, nuclei of heterogeneous cultural realities. The question of their genealogies, though, did not concern only the past. It was also the question of the futures that, under their name, were prepared ahead. If Jung had chosen Dionysus instead of Wotan to name the «divine» force that seized those «hundreds of thousands» and put them on the move like a modern bacchanalian parade - the rhythm of the marching heels echoing the distant blows of the thyrsus -, he could not have claimed, as in fact he did, that the character of this pagan renaissance was authentically German. Had he made a different choice, the whole project of his analytical psychology would not have been of any use to the national socialistic rhetoric, which, instead, capitalized heavily on the idea of a peculiarly Germanic collective unconscious. To be fair, the early mythical constellation sketched by Jung in his Symbols and Transformations of Libido was so wide and ecumenical in ambitions that it could not certainly be blamed for too narrow and selective a view of the archetypal roots and routes of human imagination. Yet, some twenty years later, when it was a matter of understanding a phenomenon of his own age, Jung did not hesitate in choosing a mythical figure highly characterized and surrounded by a multi-layered halo of nationalist overtones that could not possibly go unnoticed by his contemporaries. More importantly, even if he explicitly warned his readers of the dangers inherent in the unconscious left unhindered, his psychological portrait of Hitler did not resolve the fundamental ambiguity of whether, by embodying the medicine-man shaman type, the Führer's persona was the most intoxicated of all, or, instead, the one who could lead his tribe soberly, on a straight path, with the aid of a secret knowledge.

On the other hand, we are left with no doubt as to whether Warburg would have followed Nietzsche, the exalted shaman, the delirious prophet, or, instead, withdrawn into the safety of the observatory tower where Burckhardt and his kind would have already taken shelter from the frenzied storm. Which, almost literally, was to be Jung's later choice. pag. 54 © Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466