In later years, Warburg pondered what lay behind this decision, and came to incisive conclusions, which he set out, in a private sketch note, in words of striking violence. Outwardly, his reasoning was clear enough: he was repelled by the emptiness of the civilisation of eastern America. He attempted to flee towards natural objects and science, and it was this impulse that led him to the bureau in the Smithsonian Institution, the ‘brain and conscience’ of the new world in which he found himself. There he encountered pioneers in research on indigenous peoples: they were men of encyclopaedic learning; they opened his eyes to the universal significance of prehistoric and ‘savage’ America. ‘So much so,’ remembered Warburg, with his customary self-capturing precision, ‘that I resolved to visit Western America—both as a modern creation and in its Hispano-Indian substrata.’ This desire for romantic, indistinct horizons fused in him with a longing for ordeals and ‘manly’ tests—for shame was already with Warburg, and it would attend him all his life: shame at his own delicacy and frailty, a dark shame whose shadows he countered in his every sentence with the sinuous probe and thrust of unfolding, illuminating words. But words were precisely the problem: they were the limits; they were the chains—one had to see through them; one had to bend and break them and recast them to escape their mesh—they constrained thoughts; they fell far short of the realm of form. And it was this awareness that drove him forward, with a wild, urgent energy—it provoked him to his constant stabs at revolution in the world of ideas: for he had developed, by this stage in his researches, a ‘downright disgust’ with the established system of art history: the tranquil, formal contemplation of images was nothing any more to him; he wanted action, life, the blood of life.
Indeed, his chosen subject now seemed in his eyes so vapid, such a ‘sterile trafficking in words’, that on his return to Berlin the following year he tried briefly to go back to his first field of study, medicine—and life would, in its bitter, twisting fashion, in due course, satisfy this longing for deeper acquaintance with the domain of treatment and the healing arts. Why were things so? Why was he so? He would cast his thoughts back constantly through the record of his experiences, as though peering into the lines of some blurred manuscript. How much he knew of himself, and his mind’s workings, and how little that knowledge helped or saved him! He felt himself in those days urgently pulled westwards, west—to where the Indians were, to where the world’s well-buried symbols would come to life—and doubtless much in that attraction stemmed from an episode in his childhood, his first encounter with Indian landscapes, which had come about in strained circumstances.
The scene was imprinted on him: he saw it in pictures and in deep mood washes that swept through him once more as he gazed back. When Warburg was only six years old, his beloved mother had fallen deathly ill during a family holiday in the Alpine resort of Ischl, at the heart of the Salzkammergut. In her weakness, she seemed to him then both pitiful and uncanny. He sensed her illness ‘like a frightened animal’: it was on her; he could smell it. In silence he watched as she was carried in her litter to the shrine with twin cupolas on the flank of the Kalvarienberg, high above the town. They all made the pilgrimage: and there he saw for the first time with his own eyes scenes from the passion of Christ, ‘whose tragic and naked power’ he mutely sensed. He remembered how the children had been obliged to abandon her and return home at the worst moment of her sickness: they were driven away in a mail carriage, drawn by a red postilion. Before their departure, they were taken to visit the patient. An atmosphere of inner despair crept over Warburg: it reached its climax when their grandfather urged them to pray. Pray? To which God? Dutifully, they sat down on some trunks with their Jewish prayer books and, bent over them, muttered out something.
During that holiday, which seemed to stretch out for an eternal length, Warburg was only able to free himself from his surrounds by reading: there was a lending library at Ischl, on the esplanade that faced the lake; it was full of Indian romances, the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, which were hugely popular throughout the German-speaking world in those days. He devoured ‘entire piles’ of these novels; he steeped himself in the highly coloured landscape of the frontier—and when at last he reached the American west, he looked round for traces of that world that had so held and consoled him; but it had vanished. Terrifying battles between the Apache and the invading armies over the preceding decades had resulted in a vast destruction. After some years, as he soon discovered, the Apache survivors had been deported to the regions along the borderline with Canada, and transferred to ‘those human zoos called Indian reservations’.
*
It was through the library of the Smithsonian that Warburg found his way in: an image, and a book, opened the door. He was studying the pages of a newly published Swedish monograph, written by a young archaeologist named Gustaf Nordenskiöld. The text described in detail the Mesa Verde region of northern Colorado, where ‘the remains of the enigmatic cliff dwellings are found’—and a particular photograph in the volume caught Warburg’s eye: a wide view, showing the ruins of a Pueblo village, its half-crumbled towers shadowed by a cliff-face overhang.
Like many photos of the era, when the art of deliberate pictorial composition was still predominant in camerawork, the printed image, spread as it is across two pages of the folio, has a haunting quality: it seems to invite one in; it demands prolonged, reflective scrutiny; it leads the eye through the maze of tumbled bricks in multiple directions, but always to the dark, receding shadows of the engulfing mountain wall. For Warburg, it was a summons. He absorbed the image: he would make the voyage to that landscape, and see that scene. He learned all he could about Nordenskiöld, who had been out in the field only four years previously. In winter there were great difficulties in visiting the cliff dwellings—but this simply attracted Warburg: it was something to be overcome.
He set out by rail for Denver, armed with brief, fulsome letters of recommendation, determined to follow his precursor’s path step by step, and by the beginning of December he was deep in the abandoned landscape of the Anasazi, surrounded by remote, inaccessible sites. Finding no guide to these prehistoric fortresses, he made his way south to the centre of the Pueblo region, where the boundaries of the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, and took up lodgings at the Palace Hotel in Santa Fe. From this base camp he plunged deep into the Indian landscape; he visited a string of pueblos, stretching as far as distant Albuquerque to the south.
In a letter to his family he described his experiences, and his sense of the country: the land was dotted with the outposts of vanished civilisations, but also by the homes of the Pueblo Indians of the present day, who lived in little settlements about the town, and on a more substantial reservation further to the west. What, though, was the connection between the ruins and the Indians? To establish that was Warburg’s ‘true task’ in investigating the primal history of America—and it was a task that was vital, for his own conception of the world as much as for the knowledge he might gain. ‘I do not believe I am wrong,’ he wrote, ‘to consider that gaining a vivid representation of the life and art of a primitive people is a valuable corrective to the study of any art.’ In truth, these distinctions were dissolving in Warburg’s mind: all his categories were unstable, and this flux served, in turn, to stimulate the scaffold of elaborate schemas and systems for classifying cultures that he was devising in his transit through the west.
On the tenth of January, 1896, in his room at the Palace, Warburg received a visit from two Indians: they were Cleo Jurino, the priest-painter at the nearby Cochiti sanctuary, and his son Anacleto. Father and son executed a set of drawings, using coloured pencils: depictions of their view of the universe. Totemic figures and the potent forces of nature were ordered in those images: they sank deep into Warburg’s being. He was careful to take Jurino’s photograph as a record of the event, and the image survives: the Indian priest is handsome; his face is open; it has a gentle candour. Behind him are
the horse-drawn open carriages and shanty houses of the township, and the surrounding rangeline, beneath a blurred and sombre sky.
This meeting spurred Warburg to a height of field research and frenzied speculation. Jurino had drawn for him the lightningbolt snake, the celestial serpent, which brings rain to the parched desert, and forms the central axis of the Pueblo fertility cult. The snake, with its flickering tongue, moved between the heavens and the step-gabled house of the world: what was the creature but a messenger of things to come, a guarantor of life, an emblem of time’s sinuous, rhythmic path?
Warburg’s understanding of his travels in the desert was changed by this meeting: it is hard not to feel that the encounter with Jurino was the key to his life’s course and the weavings of his mind in later years. He set out directly afterwards, together with the Catholic priest Pere Juillard, on an inspection tour to the Indian hill settlement of Acoma: ‘We travelled through this gorse-strewn wilderness for about six hours, until we could see the village emerging from the sea of rock, like a Heligoland in a sea of sand’—so wrote Warburg, long afterwards, fusing this experience with his memory of the windswept cliff-island of the North Sea where he walked as a child. Immediately on entering the sanctuary Warburg understood that the heart of the Indian cult had been infiltrated into the Christian rite; the church wall of Acoma was covered in pagan symbols: snakes, lightning signs; and there was the stylised world-house, with its stepped gable—the ladder by which one might ascend to the stars. As his eyes adjusted to the dark of the church interior, and the rhythm of the service bore in on him, he even made out the fork-tongued lightning images Jurino and his son had drawn. Theory, at this point, came rushing in: surely these emblems were embodiments of knowledge; surely the mind, here, was depicting itself: the steps even spoke of advances, progress, evolution—the forward march of humanity. It was clear. Man who no longer moves on four limbs can hold his head aloft; standing upright is thus the human act par excellence, the striving of the earthbound towards heaven—and this notion propels Warburg to an unhinging discovery, one that whispers like a secret in his work. Light draws man: but there is a light beyond the light, there is code beyond all codes—the world of the senses, the wide world that exceeds us will simply not submit. Its glare annihilates: ‘contemplation of the sky is the grace and curse of humanity.’
As if torn apart by realisations of this nature, Warburg fled the desert: he made his way to California; he dreamed of crossing the Pacific, and pursuing his investigations in Japan—but by the end of March he was back in Arizona, in quest of deeper traces of the pagan past. Years later, in his recreation of his western travels, Warburg sees himself as journeying not just through topography but through history: from the Catholic churches, where hybrid religious rituals were enacted, to the surviving dance sites of the Pueblo—and on, further, beyond the borderline of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, into the territory of the Hopi, where the dances were still performed not just as mementoes of lost time, but with active intent. And what journey could make sense without an arc, a looming endpoint in its narrative?
Even at the beginning of his quest, Warburg knew he was in search of a goal that would escape him all his life: self-release. He had spoken, in Washington, just before his departure, to Frank Hamilton Cushing, the pioneering and veteran explorer of the Indian psyche. Cushing, he felt, was filled with grace and splendour, as if the attributes of the men and women he had studied had transferred themselves to him. ‘I found his insights personally overwhelming,’ remembered Warburg: ‘This pockmarked man with sparse reddish hair and of inscrutable age, smoking a cigarette.’ And what were those insights? One came first: animals had a special gift, which the Indians recognised. Man could only perform what the animal actually is, and is wholly. Man’s mind and words are what help to make him incomplete.
As the discussion advanced, it seemed to Warburg almost an initiation: as he sat in that office at the bureau, he realised he was being told the secrets of man’s will to leave his own awareness, to change himself into the form of animals. This would be a running theme, all through the years ahead, of Warburg’s researches in the depths of art—and it was already present in his imaginings: he spoke to birds, and to insects; they were signs and messengers for him; beings in the natural world were sincere, and true; they held beliefs, and were free from the dreadful weight of knowledge.
Such ideas had long been with Warburg when he travelled onwards from the railway halt at Holbrook, in a light-wheeled carriage, crossing desert sands during a journey of two days towards the Black Mesa foothills, driven by Frank Allen, his Mormon guide. ‘We experienced a very strong sand-storm, which completely obliterated the wagon tracks—the only navigational aid in this roadless steppe.’ They made it through—Warburg encountered another in the strange cast of helper figures who punctuated his progress through the Pueblo landscape: ‘Mr Keam, a most hospitable Irishman’. From Keams Canyon he could at last reach with ease the three remaining Indian villages where old beliefs, untrammelled, held sway.
At this point in Warburg’s attempt to recapture his experiences, though, for all the clarity of the event sequence, words begin to fail. Images take over: the photographs he preserved from his visit to the west are spare, and the austerity is deliberate. Warburg was an image man, for all the force and beauty of his analytic prose: he thrilled to images; his life was poured out worshipping them and deciphering them. Those he made in the desert bore the stamp of his character. They differ greatly from the pictures in the ethnographic surveys of the time, which are detailed, and aim at an objective clarity. Warburg’s photos are hazy, impressionistic, fiercely over-exposed: they are emblems, as much as records.
He arrived first at ‘the remarkable village of Walpi’, perched upon a rock crest, strangely resembling a Tuscan hill town, its step-roofed houses rising ‘in stone masses like towers’ from the rock. He climbed the narrow pathway between the walls. The view was of nothing: the blazing shimmer of the sky. There was the mesa’s edge, and a woman, walking; ladders up to raised first-storey doorways; goats, wandering here and there; stillness. He saw ‘the desolation and the severity of this rock and its houses, as they project themselves into the world’. Much like neighbouring Oraibi, where at last he was able to observe the Kachina, the dance ceremony of the growing corn, and even to spend an evening in the cultic temple underground—he watched the young men there, painting their masks for the coming day: green and red, crossed by a white stripe and white dots: raindrops; while the patterns on their helmets showed the heavens and the sources of rain, as did the painted decorations on the bodies of the dancers, and the red-dyed horsehair fringings and the feather ornaments that went snaking round their costumes.
The photos Warburg preserved of the rite are rich in texture, and in the sense of motion they convey: light blurs, but the blur is fixed, rather than bleached away; the images are at the scale of man, not nature, but the bodies of the dancers are not caught neatly in frame; it is the pattern and the play of elements in the composition that are all. Dance allows the imprisoned self to break its bonds—and there is even an image that shows Warburg himself in the attempt. He stands, in his morning coat and tie, wearing a large mask from the Kachina dance: much of his face is shaded by the painted helmet and its leafy fringe, but his eyes, dark-circled, open in a look of amazed vigilance, stare out; behind him, the desert, out of focus, stretches away. Transformation was the order of the rite, and of his visit. At last he was at Oraibi, which scores of books and articles had celebrated: he was at the heart of the Pueblo region. It was here that man’s longing for unity with nature through the animal world was at its height. It was in Oraibi that the dance of the snake handlers survived ‘in an intense expressive effort’, and could be witnessed in its unadulterated form. Each August, when rain was essential to preserve the crop, the redemptive lightning storms were invoked by dance sequences, nine days in their duration.
Warburg was not on the mesa in August, and he was far
too restless a spirit to bide his time, but, in a manner entirely characteristic of him and his style of thought, when it became necessary to draw together his impressions he pressed his narrative far beyond the point where the track of his own experience failed. He writes this section with immediacy: we have his notes; they race across the page. He relies on photographs by others, and old field descriptions, but he is very clear: he sees; he sees how the rattlesnakes and the dancers become one; the dances serve to join their beings; it is the mystery made visible. These events are more patent to him than what he has seen though his own eyes: and this pattern, as he knows well, is typical for him, a temptation, as for all who live beneath the sun—how hard a task it is to be present to oneself, to accept the day’s blessings, and not be blown through time, backwards and forwards by the dark horses of the mind. Now Warburg writes the magic down, in sinuous, subtle words: he is with the priests, he is with the animals; the entire ritual, for the snakes, is a ‘forced entreaty’, captive as they are, caught as soon as the storms are imminent, tended to by clan chiefs in a range of rituals. For days on end, they are purified, as if they themselves are initiates; they are held underground, in a dark temple; they are washed in water, then thrown onto sand paintings on the temple floor that depict lightning serpents, and clouds from which issue lightning bolts: at last, a ceremony unfolds in the open air at the summit of the citadel. A group of dancers approaches the serpent tree, festooned with rattlesnakes: the high priest pulls a snake down from the branches; a second Indian, wearing a fox skin, places the snake’s neck in his mouth and holds it there; a third companion distracts the creature by waving a feathered stick. The dance is swift; it is done to the sound of rattles—then, abruptly, the dancers rush out at lightning speed to the surrounding plains; the snakes are freed; they disappear; the rain comes.
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