Aby Warburg, Distance, and Meaning-Making in the American Southwest.

By Jake Erlewine

Above all, the defining aspect of the American Southwest is distance. Northwest of Santa Fe, the mesas and canyons stretch on for miles and miles, and the vistas even longer still. It takes hours to get anywhere from anywhere, but those who have lived there for millennia know this. Isolated by nature, the Pueblo people live an unrushed and unhurried life, their sense of time adapted and distorted by the endless tablelands. Aby Warburg (1866-1829) felt this profoundly during his travels in the Southwest, recounting how he “had to travel for two days in a small carriage…admirably adapted for getting over the desert, where gorse is the only plant to be seen.” Like Haeckel, Humboldt and other great Romantic naturalists before him, Warburg sought to immerse himself in an ecosystem whose physical isolation gave birth to his object of study, in this case the danced rituals of the Hopi and San Ildefonso pueblos. Because of his intention to step outside of the sphere of European influence and into nature, Warburg’s reflections on the Serpent Dance, and his further attempts to reconcile the world of Kulturwissenschaft with that of the natural sciences through symbolic means, cast him in a similar role as the dancers he sought to understand: product and performer of myth, symbol, and landscape. 

Figure 1: Aby Warburg wearing a kachina mask, 1895. Credit: Warburg-Haus. 

Our primary source for Warburg’s 1895-96 American expedition is his 1923 Kreuzlingen lecture on the Hopi Serpent Dance, which itself was born out of tragedy. Prior to this, Warburg was confined in the sanatorium of Ludwig Binswanger, having had manic depression and symptoms of schizophrenia. Alongside more macabre expressions of his insanity, such as believing that his family members were being martyred in the courtyard, an account from the Binswanger archives states that “he practiced a cult with the moths and butterflies that fly into his room…he calls them his ‘little soul animals’ (Seelentierchen) and sp[oke] to them for hours.” This reflects the undeniable fact that Warburg’s faith in the pagan and the atavistic is the belief upon which his scholarly and social persona was built. Here, his fusion of the biological with the magical is reminiscent of Darwinism in its argument that man is not the master of but instead intertwined in the natural world. As he remarks in Pagan-Antique Prophecy of Words and Images in the Age of Luther, published during his psychiatric hold, “the pagan augur who assumed the mantle of scientific learning was a hard adversary to contend with, let alone to defeat.”  

Figures 2 and 3: Diagrams within Warburg’s notebook, entitled “Symbolismus als Umfangsbestimmung,” 8 December 1899, Warburg Institute Archives, III.45.1 pp. 30-31. Credit: Sigrid Weigel.

Entries in his notebooks from the late 1890s, immediately after his trip to America, unmask Warburg’s long-term and ultimately failed goal to schematise the psychological process of symbol-making to uncover ‘natural laws’ of culture, among them cultural memory and the passing-down of tradition. His conception of symbolism as a corporeal process is striking. Metabolic processes are key in his description of the sign being incorporated into the “apperceiving mass,” with the sign being then “excreted” from the mind. However, perhaps more interesting, was his subjugation of his method within botanical forms. In a later 1899 diagram, Warburg constructed his synoptic table of meaning-making from plant-like fans and nesting funnels, an embodiment of his belief that the creation of symbol was dependent on man’s positionality towards nature (Fig. 1). This diagrammatic envelopment of human thought within nature mirrors the same process within the maps of Alexander von Humboldt, whose treatises Warburg held at his library. In his map of Chimborazo from the Essay on the Geography of Plants, the names and descriptions of plant species are enveloped within the mountain, cut off from the world of the textual by an Ecuadorean landscape (Fig. 2). Like Warburg, Humboldt placed the same emphasis on foreign travel, remarking after his own travels in America that the “new continent” opened his capacity for “the appreciation of the grand and the boundless” made possible “higher views” that would reinforce man’s interconnectivity with nature. In other words, in the scholarship of both thinkers, the physical distance of the American wilderness served as an incubator for the cognitive distancing inherent in the transformation of sign to symbol for Humboldt.  

Figure 4: Humboldt’s map of Chimborazo, published in the 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

With this context, it is easy to see how the Hopi Serpent Dance spoke to Warburg. In this ritual, snakes are caught from the desert over a period of sixteen days and kept in a kiva - a large underground room used for ceremonial purposes - where they are anointed with holy water and then thrown vigorously onto the floor. On the floor of the kiva is a sand drawing of four lightning bolts in the shape of serpents. By casting them onto the floor, the snakes are coated in the sand, an act which to Warburg leaves no doubt “that this magic throw is intended to provoke the lightning or bring rain.” The snakes, numbering in the hundreds, then are released in a ceremony into the desert as messengers to tell the spirits of the dead (which in Hopi mythology lay in the east and the west) to bring rain and lightning. The ritual therefore forms a profound use of the natural world as conduit for the wills of the symbolic one. 

Warburg’s analysis of the ritual as an expression of the ‘snake cult’ found worldwide in antique, pagan and Christian mythologies is structuralist and wide-ranging. The snake as a symbol of renewal and survival can also be found in the cult of Asclepius in antiquity, who littered the floors of their temples with snakes to channel the healing power of the deity. Warburg then compares the live snakes in the Greek and Hopi religions with Asclepius’ transfiguration into a constellation in mediaeval astrological manuscripts, through which it is symbolised that “Human culture evolves towards reason in the same measure as the tangible fullness of life fades toward a mathematical symbol.” Concurrently, the snake serves in Judeo-Christian tradition as Satan’s ultimate challenge to mankind. In the context of stories such as Acts 28:1-6, where Paul cast a viper that bit him into a fire, making the villagers who witnessed the event believe he was a God, it is the vanquishing of the physical snake, or more generally of the natural symbol, that is the only possible end of the story.  

Warburg therefore sees the exploitation and decline of the natural world as directly correlated not with the destruction of distance, but with that of the consciousness of distance from natural signifiers. Where this room for contemplation – Denkraum (lit. thinking space) – does not exist, humanity will forget its status as a member of an evolutionary network of species and seeks to dominate and subjugate nature to its own cultural will. While he notes global differences in the meaning and aims of the ‘snake cult,’ Warburg’s analysis is more notable for its assertion that humanity, whether situated in pre-Columbian America or contemporary Europe, is connected through a shared drive to derive meaning from nature. Despite Christopher Wood’s observation that “close historical studies will always disrupt and invalidate historical causal relationships,” it is not historiographic accuracy that marks Warburg’s work to art history as important, but rather its vehement belief in the structural and mysterious interconnectedness of humanity and nature. 

Herein lies the significance of Warburg’s travels. By going to the land of the Hopi and witnessing their ceremonies first-hand, he arguably accomplishes in scholarship what the Hopi seek to accomplish ritually, namely using landscape and nature as a conduit to embody a personal or cultural will. While for the Hopi, this manifests as the snake symbolising their will to survive, for Warburg the American Southwest became a physical manifestation of Denkraum, providing geographical and cultural space for him to examine the derivation – or divination – of meaning from nature.  

For the wider European audience, he in a sense played the same role as the Hopi, blurring the illusion of intellectual closeness with antiquity by illustrating how far humanity has abstracted from primitive conceptions of meaning-making. Instead of the snake, however, the vessel which he empowers with meaning is the landscape of Southwest. By exposing the cultural and physical distance of the high desert to a European academic audience, Warburg uses landscape as a tool to advocate against an overreliance on science in the same manner as the Hopi would use a snake to pray for rain. Neither of these practices would be possible without the poetic topography of Arizona and New Mexico, where one can find, in the words of Cormac McCarthy, “auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was.” 

Bibliography:

von Humboldt, Alexander. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, 2 vols [1858, 1850]; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.  

Loewenberg, Peter. “Aby Warburg, the Hopi Serpent Ritual and Ludwig Binswanger” in Psychoanalysis and History 19 no. 1 (2017), 77-98.  

Michaud, Philippe-Alain. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. 1st pbk. ed. New York, London: Zone Books ; MIT Press [distributor], 2007. 

Panofsky, Erwin, and Christopher S. Wood. Perspective as Symbolic Form. 1st ed. New York, Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 1991.  

Steinberg, Michael P, and Aby Warburg. “Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture: A Reading.” In Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, 59–114. Cornell University Press, 1995. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1g69xgc.6.  

Walls, Laura Dassow. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America University of Chicago Press, 2009. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2013. 

Warburg, Aby, and W. F. Mainland. “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual.” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, no. 4 (1939): 277–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/750040. 

Warburg, Aby. “Pagan-Antique Prophecy of Words and Images in the Age of Luther” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity : Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.