Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/2

 before the end of the 19th century, in connection with the rapid dissemination of Blavatsky’s Theosophism and the general acclaim of occultism. As for the reasons why in Germany, where the reawakening of ancient paganism was already underway (Mosse [1981]: 67-88), was it only after the end of the war that interest in astrology became so widely spread as to turn almost a whole country into a nation of stargazers, we are left to hazard hypotheses (Howe [1984]).

Fritz Saxl openly read the astrological revival of those days as a neo-pagan phenomenon, connected to the spiritual crisis of modernity, which showed striking similarities with the twelfth century A.D., during which Arab astrologers initiated the revival of the Hellenistic astrological culture. That was a time when «the Christian religion seemed no longer completely able to satisfy the spiritual side of man, and there was room for paganism to slip in, as we see it doing today» (Saxl [1970]: 28). Saxl was not at all alone in reading the return of paganism in contemporary Western Europe as the symptom of a spiritual and religious crisis. Much in the same terms, Carl Jung diagnosed both the surfacing of primitive and archaic features of the unconscious on a collective scale and the birth of psychoanalysis as manifest signs of the last stage of the «official deposition of Christianity», initiated by the French Revolution and by its god of reason, which had stirred the «unconscious pagan in us», who from then on «found no rest». The present age reminded Jung of «the first centuries of our era, when Rome began to find the old gods ridiculous and felt the need to import new ones on a large scale. As today, they imported pretty well everything that existed, from the lowest, most squalid superstition to the noblest flowerings of the human spirit. Our time is totally reminiscent of that epoch, when again everything was not in order, and again the unconscious burst forth and brought back things immemorially buried» (Jung [1970]:16). Like Wotan, «an ancient god of storm and frenzy» who, after a long sleep, woke up «like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. We have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheeps was shed in honor of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from the North Cape to Sicily, aithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journey. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-years-old to veterans, and produced