Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century

From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico

Manuela Pallotto Strickland

In June 1923, a few dozen professional and amateur astrologers met at the Theosophical Society lecture hall in Leipzig to clarify once and for all that astrology was not the embodiment of a mediaeval superstition but a proper science, and that a neat separation should be drawn between real astrologers and mere charlatans. At that time, nowhere else in Europe were astrologers showing such a strong level of guild self-awareness and organization as in Germany.

Their initiative came right at the time when astrology was quickly ascending to levels of mass popularity yet unheard of. So was astronomy.Planetaria and observatories were being opened in all the major cities of the country. Berlin’s in 1924, Munich’s in 1925. In April 1930, a planetarium was built in Hamburg’s old water tower. To launch the opening, an exhibition on the history of astronomy and the belief in stars. The exhibition realized a project of Aby Warburg who died, though, before seeing its completion.

The Planetarium project focused on the relation between religious Sternglaubeand scientific Sternkunde,whose simple oppositionwas turned by Warburg into a very complex figure, revealing the intimate relation between the mythical universe of the paganmonstraand ancient planetary deitieson one hand, and that of modern scienceon the other(Warburg [1993]).Yet, the German astrological revival was a rather new phenomenon. Until the end of WWI, in fact, astrology stayed underground in Germany, and gained mass popularity only during the Twenties.

Whereas in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in France, the appeal of astrological practices and knowledge had increased tremendously already 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, weare 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 astrologicalculture.

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 cometo life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheeps was shed in honorof his resurrection.

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