Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/4



But did Warburg really mean that modernity managed somehow to rid itself of the mythical root of thinking? It would have been hardly the case, considering that he, reasoning along with Cassirer, regarded the mythical imagination as one of the most fundamental faculties of the rational subject, thus nothing for the subject to rid itself of. To Warburg, creative imagination, whether scientifically or artistically oriented, was inherently mythical, spurred by the primitive frenzy of a Dionysian-like ecstasy. The figure of the exalted maenad, welcomed by him in her modern disguise as nympha, herald of the «return of the exiled gods» in the godless world of modernity, surely represented only half of the elliptical space where any rational thinking happens. Just half, but a half that could not be rid of. It remained like the shadow, the past, the memory of reason itself.

To Warburg, what modernity deliberately eliminated, without being able or willing to replace, was the critical acknowledgement of the 'rational' function of non logicmythical-religious-primitive forms of thinking, dismissed as thoroughly alien. The onesided understanding of what reason was and what was not, and ultimately of what man was and what was not, led to the radical estrangement from and disdain for the irrational as such, for the sake of a delusional and dangerous conception of the purity of the rational.

Such a reading of modernity was the late outcome of Warburg’s thought, and spurred his last two projects, the already mentioned Planetarium exhibition and the atlas of images Mnemosyne. Both offered a ticket with return for a guided journey through the dark underworld of the uncanny roots of the super-technological world of the present age, rather than passive, self-effacing and almost hypnotic immersions into the depths of history. The Schlangenritual’s plea, therefore, resonates with a call for the critical reintegration of the irrational within the phenomenology of modern reason, rather than with a call for a conscious, programmatic exercise of mythopoeic imagination and the creation of new myths to fill the void left by the «gods in exile».

If, as I believe, this is the case, the Warburgian plea for myth in the age of science and technology shows a fundamentally humanistic concern, which differentiates it greatly from other critical readings of modernity. If this is the case, we should say that,