Reseña

On April 21, 1923, Aby Warburg gave a lecture to the doctors and patients of the Kreuzlingen psychiatric clinic about the origin of the myth and ritual of the snake among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, whom he had visited eighteen years before. The conference was part of a self-healing program that aimed to show the cure of the schizophrenic condition by the patient’s will. However, Warburg went beyond the initial objective: through the study of the serpent –a quintessential symbol of terror– he explained the needs of expression that the human being has based in the sensory experience of fear in a struggle to overcome the demonic forces of nature that exist inside and outside the human soul. At the same time, in a sort of warning
about the contemporary world and knowledge, he suggested the threat that technological changes signified for human rationality.
His lecture ended with a criticism of modernity: “In its effort to spiritualize the connection between the human being and the surrounding world, mythic and symbolic thought makes of the space an area of contemplation or thinking that electricity makes disappear through a fleeting connection”.1In this line of thinking, the transformations of mythical and symbolic thinking due to one of the representative elements of modernity gave rise to one of the contradictions of the 20th century: technological advances as a threat to the auratic world.