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The Scythe of Saturn. Shakespeare and Magical Sing. By LINDA WOODBRIDGE. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 391. $47.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.
Reviewed by JANE 0. NEWMAN
In the winter and spring of 1895-96, Aby Warburg, the great collector and scholar of Renaissance imagery and thought, spent several months touring the Navajo, Oraibi, and Pueblo tribes in Arizona and New Mexico. Some of the notes that he made are cited in E. H. Gombrich's "intellectual biography" of Warburg; there we read that Warburg believed he had found material that would allow him to finalize his theory of the "psychological law" that governed how the collective symbolic memory of a civilization worked.1 For example, Warburg appears to have witnessed or heard about the performance of "snake dances" by the Oraibi. The snake had traditionally functioned as a symbol of lightning, rain, and the thunderstorm; the dance was part of an ancient religious practice, according to Warburg, that was still performed by the "natives" to dominate or control their fear of these natural occurrences and perhaps also of nature itself.
The Native American deployment of the snake showed such symbols' potency over time and illustrated the possibility of the survival into the present of a kind of magical, even irrational thinking that Warburg, following Karl Lamprecht, Hermann Usener, and Tito Vignoli, associated with "primitive" phases of culture. The material practices Warburg observed in the American Southwest found their way many years later into his theory of the "engram" as the prime mechanism of social memory: "The symbol or 'engram' is a charge of latent energy, but the way in which it is discharged may be positive or negative . . . Through contact with the `selective will' of an age," the engram "become[s] polarized into one of the interpretations of which it is potentially capable," Gombrich writes.2 Warburg's famously complex example of the reception of the hybrid symbol of Saturn in Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I-part devouring demon, part serene and sovereign spirit-reveals the density of this theory, whereby the multiple "primeval strata" of preexisting meanings in a single artifact are differentially activated at various moments.
I dwell on Warburg because it is within this tradition of attempts to explain to postEnlightenment rationalists...