Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America

Introduction

Warburg gave the lecture on 21 April 1923 to patients and doctors of Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium, partly to show his recovery. He drew on his notes and photographs of 1895–96, when he had seen a Hemis Katsina dance at Oraibi, and on others’ images and accounts of the Hopi snake ceremony, which he never witnessed. He read the ceremonies through a scheme of his time, as a stage between magic and logos, and compared the serpent, an image of lightning, with the Laocoön and the brazen serpent. He closed with the telegraph wire that “captures” lightning and the fear that technology destroys the space for reflection. Warburg did not want the text published; it appeared in English in 1939 and in German in 1988.

More works by Aby Warburg

• 1929Mnemosyne Atlas