aby warburg's schlangenritual- reading culture and reading written texts

Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual: Reading Culture and Reading Written TextsAuthor(s): Sigrid Weigel, Jeremy Gaines and Rebecca WallachSource: New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer,1995), pp. 135-153Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488539 .

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Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual: Reading Culture and Reading Written Texts*

Sigrid Weigel

In reading Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual [Serpent Ritual],1 the many philological questions on the legibility of his text coincide with ethnological perspectives that concern the legibility of the signs of a foreign culture. Warburg's attempt to understand the symbolic system of the Pueblo Indians, in other words to read foreign culture as a cultural text, is presented in a form that points in an extreme and therefore much clearer manner to the textuality of such images of other cultures as we have made for ourselves on the basis of ethnological or literary travel accounts. To my mind, Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual is therefore particularly suitable as a starting point for a discussion of the concept of reading in terms of cultural anthropology. The intention is to highlight the possibilities and the methodical perspectives afforded by the paradigm of

* I first presented this article as my inaugural lecture at the University of Zurich on 1 November 1993. Switching to the Department of German at the University of Zurich - after a three-year detour resulting from my being a member of the founding directory board of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut in North Rhine-Westphalia - was like returning to my original field: literary criticism. However, because this sort of return always leads back to another place, my inaugural lecture was an occasion for me to reflect upon this step as an inversion: i.e., to look back from the viewpoint of literary studies on how the perspectives of cultural studies could be tested. In the words of Walter Benjamin, "method is detour." Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhaiuser, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Main: Surkamp, 1980) 208.

1. I refer here to the German publication in 1988, which is (1) a translation of the English edition in 1938, itself a translation of a reconstruction of the lecture based on War- burg's notes, and (2) a renewed reconstruction of Warburg's notes. See Aby M. Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988).

135



136 Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual

cultural anthropology at the points where the legibility of the book first published in German in 1988 as Schlangenritual intersects with the questions posed by Warburg as to the legibility of a foreign culture, in other words, in terms of the correspondences between the legibility of a literary and that of a cultural text. Therefore, in the Schlangenritual I will trace the paradigms of cultural studies in the reading of a text, or, to put it the other way round, I will discuss the possibilities and difficulties of an anthropological approach from the viewpoint of literary criticism, a discipline which originated in and grew out of philology.

The Position of a Hybrid Book in the Humanities Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual suggests itself as the object of such a

discussion because the text published with that title in 1988 confronts us with considerable difficulties which cannot be overcome and perhaps not even described within the scope of just one discipline. The author's name evokes the authority of art historians among the ranks of whom Warburg had previously achieved importance above all as the founder of an iconographic school. Yet this authority is immediately called into question by the subtitle "A Travel Account,". calling literary scholars and perhaps historians as well to action, as both of these groups have dealt with, after all, documents from the history of travel literature. However, when they open the book and encounter a com- pletely different title on the second title page, namely "Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians in North America," many of them will perhaps hand the book over to the ethnologists, who will be hardly thrilled - especially after a second glance, when they turn over yet another page and again find a different subtitle on the third title page, which identifies the publication as a text written in a mental hospital: "Lecture given at the Bellevue Hospital in Kreuzlingen on April 21, 1923." It is anyone's guess whether, after the turns the text has already taken, the psychologists will still be prepared to accept responsibility for assessing and interpreting it. However, should a dispute over which discipline should be responsible for the text thus arise, leafing further through the book will not lead to anything conclusive because it will show that the text is accompanied by pictures that could partly stem from an ethnographic archive, and yet are partly illustrations of medi- eval manuscripts and sculptures from classical antiquity.

In passing, I should mention that to the extent that Schlangenritual is based on a lecture that took place during Warburg's stay in Dr. Ludwig



Sigrid Weigel 137

Binswanger's sanatorium, links between Switzerland and Hamburg, where Warburg founded his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in 1909, are also of consequence. It was in Hamburg that he fell ill; in fact - so the story goes - this was the result of the culture surround- ing him and its inherent violence, which had become virulent during World War I. It was in Switzerland that he recovered. However, in his own mind he had resided in a third place: both among the memory images [Erinnerungsbilder] of a trip to the Indian territories of New Mexico and Arizona taken during a stay in North America in 1895, 27 years prior to holding the lecture; and in the archives of his own visual memory, which were filled with Italian Renaissance art, the iconographic formulas of classical antiquity they drew on as well as with rep- resentations from the history of astrology.

In turning to the hybrid book that was published as Schlangenritual, it is not my intention to bring together various isolated insights yielded by the different disciplines' viewpoints of it mentioned above. Such an approach, adding up individual scholarly aspects, may be customary today. This approach likes to go by the name of "interdisciplinary research," particularly when addressing financial sponsors. Instead we should direct our attention toward those points where the diverging perspectives intersect, possibly conflict with one another, or open up another methodical paradigm. In reference to current theoretical developments, particularly in the English-speaking world and in France, for the time being I would like to call this cultural anthropology. This is a field of research that above all involves questions of legibility in written as well as in so-called cultural texts, be they narratives, gestures, modes of behavior, objects, topographies, or those traces and remains that all interpreters of bygone cultures have to try to decipher.

The issue is thus also whether present efforts in this field can pick up where Aby Warburg left off. He, after all, kept on changing the termino- logical field to which he allocated his studies: he referred to them as the historical psychology of human expression, for example, or the ur-formulas of gesture language; considered them part of the psychology of art, cultural history, religious history, folklore [Volkskunde]; or understood them as a contribution to social memory. His most prominent concept, the "pathos formula," pinpoints the expressive gestures depicted in paintings and other visual media, which he considered to be memory symbols of fears and excitements that purportedly had been overcome. This concept brings together aspects of art history, body language (or




even incorporated knowledge), and cultural memory (or the collective imaginary). If Warburg investigates "pathos formulas" from the angle of symbol formation and conceives of them from an anthropological perspective as a function of civilized action, his studies nevertheless also contain dimensions of what we might term cultural semiotics today. The leitmotif of his investigations, the revival of antiquity, concentrated on the question of how elements of the classical world - specifically its demonic, wild, or (as Warburg put it) "heathen side" - were carried over into Renaissance culture. Because of this angle, his work relates to contemporary interests in a cultural history of Europe which sheds light on certain strands of the Enlightenment inscribed in that history, particularly on their darker side. It is exactly the "wild origins," as Burkert terms them, of that history which becomes a focal point for the contemporary anthropology of antiquity.2 The publication of Schlangenritual in 1988 has in fact to do with a sort of rediscovery of Warburg, which is attested to by numerous publications and symposia, as well as by the 1993 Vienna Exhibition. In this exhibition, his Collection of Images from the History of Astrology and Astronomy of 1930 (the exhibits of which had long been presumed lost), was reconstructed following their rediscovery; for the first time the plates of his picture-atlas, Mnemo- syne, were displayed on a full exhibition scale.3 In particular the atlas, which portrays his collection of expressive gestures in art and other visual media from the viewpoint of social memory, has contributed to the fact that Warburg's name has attained an importance today that goes beyond the confines of art history. At least in the German-speaking scholarly world, it is precisely by exploring the history and theory of memory that interdisciplinary cooperation ensues and methods of cultural studies develop. However, Schlangenritual has also added to War- burg's appeal at the international level. The reason for this may well be that in the book, the issue of the revival of antiquity [Nachleben der Antike] during the Renaissance, an issue otherwise addressed in a more conventional paradigm, is shifted in an ethnological sense toward an inquiry into the relationship between wild thought and modernity. Since

2. Walter Burkert, Wilder Ursprung. Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1990).

3. See Aby Warburg, Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium, eds. Uwe Fleckner et al. (Hamburg: Dlling and Garlitz, 1993); and Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne-Atlas, text accompanying the Vienna Art Academy Exhibit (Vienna: Daedalus, 1993).



Sigrid Weigel 139

current debates in cultural anthropology can be seen to stem from the fact that other disciplines have adopted an ethnological point of view, in other words, that they have begun to contemplate bygone cultures as well as their own cultures as foreign, those disciplines have also started to take Warburg's work into account.

Warburg as Cultural Anthropologist - Aporias and Caesuras In his article entitled "Warburg as Historical Anthropologist," Peter

Burke treated Warburg's approximately three-month trip4 to various Pueblo settlements as field research and compared Warburg's method to current developments such as the history of mentalities and micro-history:

What I should like to argue at this point is that Warburg's interest in other cultures helped him not only to understand classical antiquity, but the Renaissance as well.5

Burke, if only in the final paragraph of his essay, is one of the few commentators to have pointed out the degree to which Warburg's decidedly problematic conceptual structure is a product of his time: the evolutionis- tic assumptions on which Warburg's concepts rest lead to his misunder- standing of other cultures. Yet Burke's attempt to bring everything up to date nonetheless bridges considerable differences between Warburg's thought and current debates. However, in respect to a specific viewpoint that accentuates the alienness of the past, it is precisely such a viewpoint we should adopt when tackling Warburg himself. We should take the fact that his texts strike us as strange and cause irritation as the point of departure for addressing his way of thinking, and reflect upon the differences and caesuras that separate our academic practice from a work in "Warburg's Cultural Studies Library" [Kulturwissenschaftliche Biblio- thek]. In fact, however, the reception of Warburg's ideas today often exhibits aspects of a reterritorialization by re-erecting boundaries he had abandoned, be it in the form of a re-migration to an academic discipline or of the endeavor to undo the multiple exiles of the Warburg library.

First of all, Warburg was notorious among his contemporaries for

4. Jan./Feb. 1896 New Mexico; Apr./May 1896 Arizona. For an exact description of the trip, see Claudia Naber, "Pompeij in Neu-Mexiko. Aby Warburgs amerikanische Reise," Freibeuter 38 (1988): 88-97.

5. Peter Burke, "Aby Warburg as Historical Anthropologist," Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposiums Hamburg 1990, eds. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: VCH, 1991) 44.




disregarding the order of knowledge structured in terms of academic disciplines and epochs, and his famous turn of phrase about a "border police bias" is frequently cited.6 Benjamin, in his Bachofen essay, accordingly placed Warburg alongside Goethe and Bachofen in his "disdain for the established boundaries between the sciences."7 How- ever, in contrast to Benjamin, who did not voluntarily choose to work outside the university, Warburg never aspired to an academic post, even after 1918, when unbaptized Jews were no longer barred access to the academy. With the support of his own independent research institute behind him, Warburg instead worked toward establishing a university, which Hamburg still lacked at the beginning of the century and the founding of which was further postponed until 1919. Initially in 1907, the Hanseatic city had opted for a colonial institute instead of a university. Intensive cooperation between some of the scholars at the new university, in particular with Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, rapidly evolved; but it was not long before the library had to be moved to London in order to save it from the Nazis.

Against this background, the concept of "homecoming," which Salva- tore Settis recently used as the title for his plea for reestablishing the "Warburg's Cultural Studies Library" in Hamburg, is doubly misguided. The intention to "fill the gap" that has existed since 1933, and to "heal the wounds," instead of reflecting upon them as a symptom, that is, as a mnemic symbol of the history of German scholarship, fails to recognize that a return from exile can never be a homecoming.8 Moreover, the concept of homecoming presumes a home existed before the exile.

National Socialism and the persecution of the Jews wrested the Kultur- wissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg once and for all from its natural surroundings, the German culture, out of the womb of which it emerged.9

6. In Warburg's 1912 essay on the frescoes in the Palazzo Shifanoya (near Ferrara). Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Leipzig-Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932) 478.

7. Benjamin, "Johann Jacob Bachofen," Walter Benjamin: Text + Kritik 31-32 (1979): 32. See also Benjamin's assessment of Warburg in Benjamin, "Strenge Kunstwis- senschaft," Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, 374; as well as the reference to Warburg and the Warburg school in Benjamin's work on the German Baroque Tragedy, Benjamin, Gesam- melte Schriften, vol. 1, 328, 395.

8. Salvatore Settis, "Empfehlungen fiir eine Heimkehr," Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposiums Hamburg 1990 122.

9. Settis, 122.



Sigrid Weigel 141

As this image once again evokes the myth of a German-Jewish symbio- sis that was merely interrupted or perverted into something unnatural by the Nazis, it is hardly a coincidence that the metaphors and conceptual structure of the image, that is, the description of a national culture as natural and as a womb, takes up an outmoded anthropological way of thinking that has its roots in biology and for which Nazism was a kind of litmus test in terms of racial policy.

1933 constitutes a caesura in the scholarly history of anthropology, which had started to emerge at the turn of the century with the discovery of the "primitive" origins of classical antiquity and was fueled by impulses from archaeology, folklore [Volkerkunde], comparative religious history, and philology. With this caesura what had been partially latent racial or apologetic Christian trends became manifestly anti- Semitic. In her study of the extremely ambivalent field of anthropology in the wake of Hermann Usener, who was also Aby Warburg's teacher, Renate Schlesier has discussed the heterogeneous spectrum of "workers in Usener's vineyard," and in doing so reminded us, among other things, that the thought of "many German ethnologists of antiquity" rested on popular nationalist [volkisch] worldviews.l0

With Usener himself - and in this regard his student Warburg fol- lows in his footsteps - there tends to be a proclivity for universal explanations involving creation myths that elides the differences between classical and ethnological evidence while taking the form of a comparative discussion of them. By referring, for instance, to the cate- gory of humanity and to the "major universal processes of development" in his texts,1l or by describing a comprehensive system of symbolic forms12 in terms of typological stages of developments, War- burg's oeuvre tends toward a universalization which has the additional effect of buttressing his position, a move necessary in the face of his transgression of disciplinary boundaries and epochal orders. However, with this trend, cultural history threatens to dissolve once again into a natural history of the human race.

For whenever the emphasis on the humanness of humanity is taken to

10. Renate Schlesier, Arbeiter in Useners Weinberg: Anthropologie und antike Reli- gionsgeschichte in Deutschland nach dem 1. Weltkrieg, unpublished manuscript (1993) 13.

11. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 479. 12. As Warburg explained in his "Notes to the Lecture" in Kreuzlingen. See also

Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Hamburg: Europaiische Verlagsanstalt, 1992) 295ff.




be the substance of cultural history, specifically in the shape of a juxtaposi- tion of nature and culture, the universalist focus on the essence of humanity does indeed turn human history into natural history again. In order to break away from this aporia latent in all anthropological approaches, present-day theoretical debates take as their starting point a reformulation of cultural history through a theory of difference and of cultural semiotics - precisely as cultural anthropology. It is no longer a question of comprehensive explanations or universal development, but rather the problem of the legibility, or rather of reading, that now is foregrounded.

The most prominent reference point for all this is probably Clifford Geertz's notion of thick description.13 His concept of legibility is based on the perceptual situation of the ethnographer, who lacks not only the translation key, but also the knowledge of whether a gesture is to be deciphered as an involuntary utterance, as a symbol, or as a parody. This requires an analytical stance that is informed by experience in deal- ing with symbolic languages and texts. Given that Geertz compares this stance with the attempt "to read a manuscript (in the philological sense of 'developing a reading') that is strange, faded, fragmentary, and full of contradictions, dubious improvements and tendentious commentary," in his view the situation of the philologists, the specialists in reading and textuality, is the central paradigm for cultural anthropology.14

Geertz's description reads like a commentary on Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual, or, alternatively, the latter appears to be an allegory of the constellation Geertz outlines. For the attempt to read Schlangenritual places us in a reading situation in more than one respect. Where War- burg takes an interest in the process of symbol formation among the Pueblos he visits on his above-mentioned trip, studies their dances as a specific "stage of symbolic thinking and behavior,"15 and describes the symbols on their clay vessels, for example, as hieroglyphics,16 we as the readers of his recollections and theoretical reflections are confronted first of all with the problem of the legibility of his text. Out of the correspondences between his reading of the Pueblo images and our reading of his writings, in other words between the problem of the legibility of cultural and that of written texts an altered concept of reading can emerge.

13. With reference to Gilbert Ryle, see Clifford Geertz, Dichte Beschreibung. Beitrdge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983) 10.

14. Geertz 15. 15. Warburg, Schlangenritual 25. 16. Warburg, Schlangenritual 15.



Sigrid Weigel 143

On the Legibility of Warburg's Schlangenritual Starting with the multiple titles of the book, an archaeological perspec-

tive gives us a view of its various layers and the multiple translations stored therein. Whereas the title Schlangenritual can be traced back to the translation of one of the first publications of the text in 1938, called "A Lecture on Serpent Ritual," this English translation was in turn based on the transcript and notes of Warburg's 1923 Kreuzlinger lecture. Fol- lowing his sketches and drafts, Warburg's colleagues Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing produced a version of the text, which was recently published for the first time in the German language under the name Schlan- genritual. Thus, the book was a translation of Warburg's notes into a coherent text. This is a decidedly paradigmatic constellation for the reception of Warburg's work, as the latter has been passed down prima- rily in fragmentary form, in sketches, notebooks, boxes of index cards, and incomplete projects. His "theory" has thus been transmitted above all by his colleagues, successors, and current heirs: in other words, in the form of translations.

When speaking here of Warburg's Schlangenritual, I thus do not des- ignate the name of an author and a title, but rather the name of a book with a contaminated text - contaminated not only in the sense of tex- tual criticism, but also in exactly the same way as was the cultural text of the Pueblo Indian, with which the traveler was confronted in 1896:

However, greatest circumspection is necessary when assessing the Pueblo Indians in terms of a psychology of religion: the material is contaminated, i.e. is covered by two layers of sediment. Since the end of the sixteenth century, the original American ground has been covered by a layer of Spanish Catholic Church education, which was vio- lently interrupted at the end of the seventeenth century; it later returned, but never again officially penetrated the Moki villages. On top of it is a third layer, namely North American education.17

Following this reference to the problem of legibility, the question at hand should not be the historiography of the above-mentioned layers of North American culture, but rather the layers in the text of Schlangenri- tual itself. In this context, the multiple titles can be read as traces lead- ing from a genealogical perspective to the prehistory of the book. Designating the book as belonging to the genre of "travel accounts," for

17. Own translation from the German version of 1988. Cf. the English edition: War- burg, "A Lecture on Serpent Ritual," Journal of the Warburg Institute II (1938/39): 277-78.




example, suggests an immediacy to the journey and to that mixture of motifs which is expressed in Warburg's sketches and letters of the time, and in his recollection of them in his notes for the Kreuzlinger lecture: a romantic reminiscence of his reading of novels about Indians during his youth,18 the path to a "more natural" civilization19 compared to that of modem North America, as well as the study of the art and life of "a 'primitive' people as a valuable corrective to the study of all art."20 Yet, the figure of the travel account soon receded into the background.

While Warburg entitled his first lecture addressed to the Berlin Photo- graphic Society in Hamburg eight months after his return, "A Journey Through the Pueblo Indian Region in New Mexico and Arizona," he chose shortly thereafter to call his lecture to the Berlin Photographic Soci- ety, "Images from the Life of the Pueblo Indians."21 As the focus of the description shifts from the journey itself to the images, so the images take center stage. This already intimates that recollection with which War- burg was to introduce his Kreuzlinger lecture so much later: there, he speaks of "images accompanied by words," which are supported by "old" or "distant memories" of the journey that had taken place twenty- seven years earlier. In other words, the lecture of 1923 involved mnemic images that were supplemented with slides, pictures that had been captured photographically, and which here connoted the "immediacy of the shot." The two together were intended to convey an image of Indian culture, from the vantage point of the memory traces of bygone North Amer- ican cultures. Warburg's indecision in giving his work a title indicates the super-imposition of these two different memory scenes. While in the title of the Kreuzlinger lecture he no longer speaks of the "life" but rather of the "region" of the Pueblo Indians, in his notes he crosses out the recollections of the journey and replaces them with images in order to finally arrive at the formulation, "Images from the Pueblo Indian Region in North America."22 Images from the region ...: this designates a cultural

18. Gombrich 36-37. 19. Gombrich 117. 20. Letter from 1895 cited in Naber 95. 21. See Naber 96. 22. See Friederike Janshen, "Spurenlesen. Um Aby Warburgs 'Schlangenritual',"

Denkrdume zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft: 5. Kunsthistoriker Erinnern Tagung in Hamburg (Berlin: Reimer, 1993) 104. Janshen was also the first to address the problem of textuality and of the scenario in which the "Serpent Ritual" was written as a theme, especially from the point of view of the author, work, and quotation, but not with regard to the problem of legibility and its ethnographic context.



Sigrid Weigel 145

topography behind which his own memory scene, which he sketched in the introduction for his lecture, recedes into the background.

A trip through the region.... Images from the life.... Images from the region . . . : displacements occur with these thematic variations, and through these shifts the element of movement wanders from the traveling subject to that which is observed - the life of the Pueblos - to be finally brought to a standstill and captured in a structure of the imaginary: the images from the region. The dominance of images is suitable simultaneously to conceal and to safeguard Warburg's fascination with an image from the archives of Indian romances, which he rec- ollects as the primal scene of his trip:

One particular book and one particular picture provided the scientific basis and the visions of the objective of my trip. The book, which I found in the Smithsonian Institute, was the volume by Nordenskjold on the 'Mesa Verde,' i.e. that region of North West Colorado where the remains of the enigmatic cliff dwellings are to be found, a sterling work borne of true scholarly spirit and which alone gave me staunch support in my own endeavors. The Romantic, visionary goal which kindled my lust for adventures, was a very poor large-size color print representing an Indian standing in front of a crevice with such a vil- lage built into it. This was the first impression I had and formed the basis for the questions I asked the gentlemen at the Smithsonian Insti- tute, who then referred me to the book by Nordenskj61ld.23

While at the beginning of his journey, the book took on the function of the "scientific basis" and of "support" for the "lust for adventure" which the picture had unleashed, Warburg's own investigation consti- tuted the attempt to give his occupation with the images a dignified character. For he now approached them in a "scientific spirit" and has this lead him to a comprehensive theory of the evolution of symbolic forms. However, this only seems possible if the figurations of travel memories and life images [Lebens-Bilder] of the Pueblos are elided from his discussion of the theme.

Using the images from the region of Pueblos, Warburg wishes to give his listeners at Kreuzlingen "an impression of a world that is dying out, at least where its culture is concerned," especially with respect to elabo- rating an issue "that is so decisive for the entire writings of our cultural history.... What of all this should we regard as the essential character

23. Naber 89-90.




traits of primitive heathen Man?"24 He intends the images of the Pueb- los to become the medium with which to generate a concept of the heathen, or primitive, origins of European culture - which he views above all as the history of overcoming fears by means of symbol formation, or rather as "the development away from instinctual-magic approximation toward intellectual distancing."2 After all, his formulation of the theme, the "images from the region," and the scholarly leitmotif structuring his lecture - namely the issue of the evolution of symbolic forms - only superficially conceal tensions that arise between the imaginary of the European traveler and the images of the Pueblos which he examines.

Concept of Symbol and Reading We recurrently find in Warburg's Schlangenritual that the problem of

reading intrudes upon his drafting of a comprehensive theory of symbolism - and it literally intrudes, in that the leitmotif, namely the reflections on the stages of symbol formation, are constantly interrupted by narratives, descriptions of pictures, and mnemic images that are by no means always compatible with the interpretations of the symbolic concepts. In this way, Schlangenritual describes a figure which is exactly the reverse of the journey. After having seen the cliff dwellings and visited the Pueb- los in New Mexico, Warburg interrupted his trip in order to stay longer at the universities of California, and it was only subsequently that he visited the Pueblos in Arizona. During this research period, he had made notes on a comprehensive system of symbolic forms which thereafter assumed for him the function of resource and scholarly basis for the contemplation of further images: "I believe that I have at long last found the expression for the psychological axiom I have searched for since 1888."26

1888 marked the beginning of his dissertation on Botticelli, and the origin of his quest for the meaning of the accessories in motion [bewegtes Beiwerk] and of the excited gestures in the paintings as well as his shift of interest away from art history to psychology. In this way, the theme of the revival of antiquity in Renaissance art already points to "the as yet unwritten 'historical psychology of human expression'" of which he would later speak.27 The entry quoted here and made during the interruption of his journey, referring to the "psychological

24. Warburg, Schlangenritual 9. 25. Warburg, Schlangenritual 57. 26. Gombrich 121. 27. Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 478.



Sigrid Weigel 147

axiom" that he had at long last come across while observing the "religious activities of the Pueblo Indian," gives Warburg's visit to the Pueb- los its place within the coordinates of his own discovery's history and topography and ascribes to it the character of a rite of passage. The interruption of the journey and the discovered axiom spawn the link between ethnological experience and studies of Renaissance art, at the same time giving his trip the sense of a rite de passage. At the end of the journey, the traveler has at his disposal the system which will serve as a point of orientation in the discovery of other regions, regions that will, however, again be located on European territory.

The name of the axiom he discovered was to change a number of times in Warburg's subsequent studies, and the concept underwent a reversal from "expression for my psychological axiom" to "the psychology of expression." It comes to function as a structuring principle and supporting factor in the enormous expansion of the areas Warburg later explored in European cultural history, and can be observed above all in the proliferation of his library. Warburg's fascination with the material and with the variations in detail, not to mention the way in which his studies lose themselves in the most divergent archives and in his own growing collection of books, notes, and reproductions of pictures, con- trasts in a peculiar way with the conceptual and theoretical effort he put into formulating the laws of human symbol formation, relying heavily on stereotypical turns of phrase.

For precisely at those junctures where Warburg's understanding of the symbols gains a conceptual form, the entire ballast of nineteenth- century biological and evolutionist thinking makes itself felt: be it in the description of a development away from instinct, or the body, to intellect, from magic to reason, from darkness to light, or in the understanding of the work of civilization as a process of de-demonization and detoxification. It is his belief that at the origin of history there lies a phobic stimulus, the mastering of which moves upwards though the stages of magic, mythical, symbolic, and logical form. Warburg locates this evolution in the recurrent creation of a distance between man and nature as threat, and qualifies the increase in distance as the emergence of room for thought [Denkraum]. This paradigm of evolutionary theory is also inscribed in the Schlangenritual:

Human culture evolves towards reason in the same measure as the tan- gible fullness of life fades into a mathematical symbol. In their struggle




for a spiritualized link between man and his environment, mythical and symbolic thought create space as a space for reverence and for thought, a space murdered by the electric creation of instantaneous links.28

Warburg's theoretical reflections on social memory take up the models of memory as an organism as devised by Richard Semon and Ewald Her- ing. They are partly biologically based and have not yet reached the threshold of the semiotic reformulation of the unconscious achieved by Freudian psychoanalysis. It is specifically in Warburg's talk of imprint- ing work [Prdigwerk], of the incorporation of pre-imprinted expressive values into the soul [Einverseelung vorgepraigter Ausdruckswerte], and of what he terms the "engrams of passionate experience," that the body appears to be a cast made from the mold of psychological processes of excitement. An example would be his 1929 introduction to the Mnemo- syne atlas.29 In the wake of this, the pathos formulas easily become a repertoire of established pictorial formulas, and the symbols turn into meanings which can be encoded and decoded and then also be smoothly integrated into the traditional model of iconography. Indeed, this is to a large extent what happened in parts of the reception of Warburg's oeuvre. However, the traces of curiosity which characterize Warburg's work-

ing methods and which reveal signs of a subversive way of reading symbols, disappear in such a repertoire. For example, in reading individual images, the expressive gestures are understood as symbolic forms that are not open to translation into language, but which can instead only be deciphered as symptoms, in other words as mnemic symbols of previous excitations. And particularly in the Mnemosyne atlas, in the tables that Warburg assembled with the intention of arranging the formulas for images and pathos in groups, series of images are to be seen that are to be understood as permanent traces of a pictorial memory, in other words as memory traces in which every repetition describes a deviation and every image in a series is thus presented as another return.

Therefore, I believe that it is far more productive to focus on the

28. The second quotation is our own translation of the German version. Cf. the English version: "But myths and symbols, in attempting to establish spiritual bonds between man and the outside world, create space for devotion and scope for reason which are destroyed by the instantaneous electrical contact." (Warburg, "A Lecture on the Ser- pent" 289 and 292).

29. Warburg, "Einleitung zum Mnemosyne-Atlas," Die Beredsamkeit des Liedes: Zur Kbrpersprache in der Kunst, eds. Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl and Christoph Geissmann (Salzburg: Residenz, 1992) 171.



Sigrid Weigel 149

traces of Warburg's curiosity and on this trajectory of reading, instead of translating his legacy into a coherent intellectual edifice. As Kurt W. Forster has shown, Warburg's library, for instance, seen as a material- ization of his thought edifice, reveals links to the cultic practice that he studied. The library contradicts the established order of archival knowledge and has already seduced his erstwhile colleague Saxl into trying to "normalize," or rather, "simplify" it.30 Ernst Cassirer's reaction to this library - he purportedly felt he had to keep his distance from it or imprison himself in it for years31 - indicates that the figure which Warburg had made the object of his study is exactly that which recurs in the material sediment of his studies. For whereas the discovered axiom describes how the wild origins are overcome, signs of the wild become visible again in Warburg's fascination with the subject.

Commentators have liked to point to the proximity between Warburg's interpretation of history and of himself, in which context his illness provided the occasion to establish, in the words of his doctor Ludwig Binswanger, an "overlapping between his scholarly opinions and his delu- sions."32 An objection to such an interpretation would be that it conceals the correspondences between the object of study and the method of study through an explanation in which everything is explained in terms of a pathology. In describing his situation in Kreuzlinger as "hell" and defin- ing his lecture as being a proof of his health, Warburg is applying the same patterns which he used to locate the Pueblo images within a history of symbolization. Warburg's methods of working and thinking, which contain counter-phobic elements as well as patterns of passion and which seek a kind of redemption in discovered principles, correspond exactly to the symbol theory which he designed. An important difference, however, lies in the fact that these methods allow the tensions that have been petri- fied in the conceptual form given them to become discernable.

On the Figure of Reversion in Warburg's Schlangenritual The same is also true of Warburg's Schlangenritual, and in this respect

the concept of symbol developed there does not seem to me to be so inter- esting in a contemporary context. Moreover, Warburg's concept of the

30. Fritz Saxl, "Warburgs Besuch in Neu-Mexiko," Warburg: Ausgewahlte Schriften und Wiirdigen, eds. Dieter Wuttke and Carl Georg Heise, 2nd ext. ed. with bibliographical supplement (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koemer, 1980) 341.

31. Saxl 340. 32. For a critical opinion, see Michael Diers, "Kreuzlinger Passion," Kritische Ber-

ichte 7.4-5 (1979): 5-14.




symbol takes up the most disparate of references, such as Vignoli and Durkheim, as well as Cassirer's theory of the conceptual form of mythic thought.33 It also makes use of the definition of ritual as one of the cultural forms that precedes myths which was stressed by the school of "Cambridge Ritualists" led by J. G. Frazer; it also makes recourse to residual elements of a biological model of heredity34 and to the ontological figure of ascent, which can presumably be traced back to conversations with Binswanger.35

By contrast, far more is revealed by a reading in which the problem of the legibility of images from the Pueblo Indian region intersects with the legibility of Warburg's text. Even the motto that precedes the lecture, while posing some riddles, nonetheless provides numerous clues as well:

It is an old book to browse in Athen-Oraibi, all cousins

This motto contains a two-fold quotation. As a concealed but also slightly amended quote of himself, it links the Kreuzlinger lecture back to the last work Warburg had completed before his illness, namely the study of "Heathen-Ancient Prophecy in Words and Images of Luther's Day"; and in this way it links the Pueblo images with the theme of the contempora- neity of logic and magic in the Reformation. There, the motto reads:

It is an old book to browse in From the Harz up to Hellas always cousins36

Thus, the motto refers to a constellation in which the lecture on the Pueblo images is linked to the images from Luther's time, just as the journey of 1896 was linked to the Botticelli study of 1888. The Kreuzlinger lecture can therefore also be understood as a repetition of a rite of passage. The metaphor of the places as cousins that are always closely related corresponds to the generalizing approach taken in Schlangenritual:

To what extent does this heathen world view, such as persists among

33. See Ernst Cassirer, Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs, 7th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983) 1-70.

34. Warburg's formulation "ascent of the humors" ["Sdftesteigen"] can, for example, be traced back to Hering. See Warburg, Schlangenritual 49.

35. See Ludwig Binswanger, Traum und Existenz, intro. Michel Foucault (Bern: Grachnang and Springer, 1992 [1954]) 109ff.

36. Goethe's Faust II quoted in Warburg, Ausgewdhlte Schriften und Wiirdigen 201.



Sigrid Weigel 151

the Pueblo Indians, give us a yardstick for measuring the development from primitive heathens via Classical heathens to modem Man?37

This phrase also corresponds exactly to an entry in the Kreuzlinger lecture notes, in which Warburg speaks of a "comparative search for the eternally similar Indianhood in the helpless human soul."38

However, this familial relation becomes more complicated if we look at the concrete topography of the locations. While, on the one hand, the names Hellas and Athens still form a constant element even after the motto has been modified, on the other, the Harz mountains have been replaced with Oraibi. In this way, the journey to the Pueb- los is seen as a sort of Indian journey that has been tied in with the Harz journey in Goethe's Faust. Clearly, however, the direction has been reversed in the course of the substitution: "from the Harz to Hel- las" becomes "Athens-Oraibi."

In the original, Goethe's Faust II, the words of Mephistopheles quoted here are preceded by the following lines: "Here I thought all unknown/and unfortunately I find close relatives." The issue at hand is therefore the relationship between the familiar and the strange. The "Classic Valpurgis night," which is peopled by the figures of an ancient world of gods that appear as demons, is the mythical and cosmic scenario in which this relationship presents itself to Mephisto in such a way that the familiar witches from the Blocksberg seem to him to be harmless acquaintances:

With northern witches I had quite a knack, But with these foreign ones it's what I lack. The Blocksberg is a cozy place to roam, Go where you may, it's always like home ...

I would not have believed one night Could raise a hill of such height! Now that I call some witch's ride: They carry Blocksbergs at their side.39

If, then, the ancient spirits of the classic Walpurgis night represent the unfamiliar in Warburg's study of Luther, which for Warburg is expressed

37. Own translation from the German. 38. Gombrich 304. 39. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, trans. and intro. Charles E. Passage

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) 266, 270.




in the form of "heathen-ancient" elements during the Reformation, then the reversal of direction in the motto of the Schlangenritual, namely "Athens-Oraibi," indicates a reversal of the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar inscribed into the Pueblo images, and by vir- tue of which the yardstick also changes. In the framework of the generalizing approach of the Schlangenritual, the persistence of the "heathen world view" among the Pueblos was introduced as the yardstick for measuring the development in question. Yet this very yardstick seems to disappear in direct proportion to the degree to which the problem of legibility of the Pueblo images increases. If we now don't read "Athens- Oraibi" - analogous to "from the Harz to Hellas" - as a statement of which direction a journey took, but rather as the name of a place, then this indicates a kind of turning point in the text of Schlangenritual.

Following the description of the Pueblo settlements, the paintings on their pottery, their cosmological view of the world, and the "Antelope dance," a form of animal mimesis which is interpreted as "social pro- curement of groceries by means of magic practices," Oraibi appears as the "most remote western place."40 In Oraibi, the last destination of his journey, Warburg was able to witness the so-called "Humiskatcina dance" - a mask dance which he considered to be a magic cult form, the meaning of which, however, obviously remained obscure to him in many respects. The fact that the description of this ritual is concealed behind the figure of the play may have been triggered by the irritation over the relationship between imitation and original: "Here in the living original I saw the masked dancers which I had seen before as dolls in a room precisely here in Oraibi."41 However, if the dolls are imitations of the mask, of what are the masks in turn imitations?

So as to introduce a bit of order into this "amazing spectacle,"42 the text now resorts to common knowledge of classical tragedy: "Anyone who knows something about classical tragedy, here sees ..."43 and following a passage on the "dance with living serpents" finally goes on to leave the images from the Pueblo Indian region and to replace them with images from classical antiquity. Whereas the motto, Athens-Oraibi

40. Warburg, Schlangenritual 24, 28. 41. Warburg, Schlangenritual 28. 42. Warburg, Schlangenritual 39. 43. Warburg, Schlangenritual 40. This phrase implies that anyone who does not

know anything about classical tragedy here sees something totally different from what the traveler sees.



Sigrid Weigel 153

pinpoints exactly that transition where the archive of images in Schlan- genritual changes, the direction is nonetheless reversed, going as it does from Oraibi to Athens. However, it does not lead - as "from the Harz to Hellas" does - from the familiar to the unfamiliar, but rather in the opposite direction, from the strange to the well-known, to classical antiquity, which has a stable place in European pictorial memory. Thus, the perceptions of the foreign culture are represented in the images of a bygone but nevertheless seemingly familiar culture.

It is noteworthy at this point that the transition is organized around a blank space in the images which is related precisely to the ritual that has given the book its name:

The most extreme form of this magical attempt to approximate nature through the animal world is to be observed among the Moki Indians in their dance with live snakes in Oraibi and Walpi. I have not myself observed this dance but some photographs at least give an idea of this: the most heathen of all the ceremonies in Walpi.44

At the point where the name Oraibi indicates the termination of War- burg's journey through the foreign culture, the journey into his own imag- ination also begins. This point bears the name of Athens. At the point at which his own images of the foreign culture vanish, they are replaced by images from the pictorial memory of European cultural history.

It is therefore not true, as Peter Burke assumes, that Warburg's detour through other cultures enabled him to understand classical antiquity and the Renaissance. The traces of reading in Schlangenritual highlight a path in the opposite direction, or perhaps a path of multiple reversals. Thus, the motto, which indicates a reversal of direction from that in which the text moves and which simultaneously brings into play an inverted version of the relationship of the familiar and unfamiliar expressed in the reversal of Goethe's figure, this motto can be deciphered as a sign which points to this twofold reversal in the reading of the images from the Pueblo Indian region. In line with this figuration, the history described in the Schlangen- ritual can perhaps be understood as something other than an evolutionary history of symbolism. However, that is a question of reading.

Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Rebecca Wallach

44. Warburg, Schlangenritual 40-41.



aby warburg's schlangenritual- reading culture and reading written texts

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