Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/9

Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault of historical source material should come as no surprise. Fragments of ancient mythological texts crossing over cultures and centuries linked up with oneiric and delirious fantasies of more or less anonymous dreamers of the present age; extensive etymological surveys of archetypal words, and an impressive knowledge of the JudeoChristian traditions, all this varied material was worked through and gathered by Jung to demonstrate the uninterrupted psychological unity of humankind throughout history, the substantial identity of the collective unconscious in all it's multifarious archetypal expressions.

There are no pictures in Jung’s essay, yet if we wanted to imagine a visual transposition of Symbols and Transformation of Libido, Warburg’s atlas of images, Mnemosyne, could promptly come to mind as a model, with its newspaper clippings and photographic reproductions of artifacts belonging to different historical ages and contexts, collected and arranged in comparative fashion to show the survival of pagan antiquity in the Western world. The same kind of syncretic imagination that allowed Jung to see analogies, metaphors and tropes amongst hundreds of heterogeneous symbolic objects, and thus to recognize them as embodiments of the same archetypal schemes, led Warburg to gather and organize a vast collection of images as diverse variants of the same ancient imaginative forms inherited from the pagans, impressed in the collective memory like indelible traces of the ancient gestures of bodies seized by religious euphoria, and codified via the Dionysian mysteries into the formulaic pathetic language of rite, passed on to subsequent generations like a vocabulary of pre-coined (vorgeprägte) expressive forms. With its blackboards, where the pictures were pinned up only to be taken down and replaced by others, the atlas functions like a gate opening onto the dark depths of collective memory, from which the ancient primordial images emerge like spectral glimpses of sudden reminiscences flashing back into consciousness.

Although I believe a straight-forward identification between Jungian archetypes on one hand, and Warburg’s pathos formula and original images on the other would be misleading, there can be little doubt that they share meaningful qualities. They are both conceived like engrams à la Semon, indelible marks long ago imprinted and then pag. 49 © Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466