Panel 1: Verflucht

Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
Michaelistag, 1922

Wholly oblivious to any and all of the festive sacred and secular celebrations of the day, or even to it being St. Michael’s Day, Hamburg-born art historian Aby Warburg sat at his desk in his brightly lit apartment in the Bellevue Sanatorium. Discouraged and frustrated by the previous seventeen-month succession of fruitless therapies, medical director Dr. Ludwig Binswanger had suggested to Warburg that the composition of an anamnesis — a biographical account of his illness — might help heal his troubled body and soul.

Beginning with the scene of an episode of typhoid fever at age six, Warburg came immediately to the first image: “a ghostly vision of a little horse-drawn carriage rolling along a window sill”. With each sentence, Warburg inventoried the disquieting lantern slides of his childhood terrors: “fear aroused by the incoherence and the disproportionate force of visual memories”; “anxiety which gives rise to chaos”; “innumerable fits of anger”. Just as with his letters home from Bellevue, which were promiscuously laced with Warburg’s cacophonic keywords — “Satanic”, “demonic”, “diabolical”, “Devil”, “cursed”, “witch”, “monstrous” — his anamnesis strangely echoed the seventeenth-century demonologies which he had collected for his massive library, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW).¹

Tellingly, the terrible images ushered forth from books — the absolute center of Warburg’s world through every moment of his biography. One “sinister” children’s book whose illustrations assailed him was Ottilie Wildermuth’s Eine seltsame Schule (“A Strange School”). Recalling it as “a barely veiled satanic world”, Warburg was haunted to such a degree by the story’s main character, a cruel Dickensian master of street urchins, that he mistakenly conflated this persona with his real-life, loving schoolmaster.² Warburg remembered episodes of corporal punishment, culminating in a hallucination of being bitten by a rabid dog when he was ten. The impression was so strong that he feared he would die of hydrophobia and its associated delirium.

On the morning after composing the anamnesis, before the onset of the very same daily psychotic attacks that he had been enduring for four years, he wrote to his wife Mary, lamenting that his situation had returned to that of the fall of 1918, as he “again reverts to being a werewolf”.³ Warburg was in no way speaking metaphorically; in August 1918, after weeks of hallucinating that he was turning into a werewolf, he had written to four colleagues asking for reading suggestions on lycanthropy. At the end of September, he requested books about werewolves from the University of Gottingen library. Two weeks after his admission to Bellevue on April 16, 1921, nurse Friede Hecht reported that Warburg kept screaming out: “I am going to be a werewolf! I am a werewolf!” This declaration came toward the end of an explosion of blasphemy recorded by the nurse, interspersed with a hellish glossolalia: “Umburri, umburri, umburri. Meichucks . . . meichirix umbarigaisch umbarrigasch . . . he he he, why ne pavax navirtivit . . . meischucks mureischaks avant ivit . . . umbarigasch umbarigasch.”⁴

In the four years since his breakdown in November 1918, Aby Warburg had never stopped exhibiting wolfish behaviors. Along with the capricious violence regularly unleashed on nurses, doctors, and other attendants, and prolonged bouts of shouting and screaming, Warburg’s delusions, nearly all of them visual hallucinations, centered on eating, defecating, “territory” — the defense of his personal space — and other primitive, animalistic aspects of existence. He imagined that he was a cannibal, his food was poisoned, people around him were really ghosts, and that others had animal heads and teeth. He continued to hallucinate that either he or proximal criminal conspirators had killed his wife, children, and other family members, whose dismembered corpses lay in neighboring buildings.

When Warburg died in 1929, Atlas Mnemosyne’s mythological/historical photographic tableaux included hundreds of images of the werewolf’s therianthropic relatives — nymphs, sirens, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, maenads, mermaids, and minotaurs — running pandemoniac riot on nearly every one of its seventy-nine panels.⁵ Warburg’s image-hungry soul saw them not as magnificent expressions of pagan imagination, but a verfluchter Aberglaube (cursed superstition) expressing his deeply held conviction that all of human history was a perpetual battle between “Athens and Alexandria” — Reason and Unreason, Apollo and Dionysius, Fact and Superstition. In light of Warburg’s psychic struggle, one might add to these polarities Man and Wolf.⁶

Panel 2: Passionszene

Karfreitag, 1923

In October, a few days before Mary arrived with their three children to celebrate the couple’s silver wedding anniversary, Warburg attacked two of the Bellevue doctors. When his family came to his room, Warburg at first ignored them, complaining to the guard that the morning paper was not there. “If only I could be healed!” he later lamented to Mary, in a letter in which he remarked that it had been four years to the day since his illness had started.⁷

Just what exactly was that illness? His doctors — the Binswangers at Bellevue; Emil Kraepelin, University of Munich professor of clinical psychiatry; University of Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn; even Sigmund Freud in passing — pronounced a typically wide spectrum of diagnoses that express the mutability of the new science they were honing: “melancholia”, “schizoaffective psychosis”, “temporary demonomania”, “schizophrenia”, and “mixed manic-depressive state”.

While it entirely escaped the notice of the psychiatrists, Warburg’s own demonic declaration — “I am a werewolf!” — was the most exact and eloquent diagnosis of his condition: clinical lycanthropy. In the baroque history of human thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to wolves and werewolves, the birth of this medical term around 1850 marked the moment when over a dozen centuries of European respectful awe, abject horror, superstition, litigation, romanticization, and just sheer confusion settled into the seemingly safe capture of the werewolf within the iron cage of advanced medico-scientific reason.⁸

Believing that if he could successfully present a scholarly lecture at Bellevue, he would convince the doctors to release him home to Hamburg, Warburg began, in 1896, to organize a slide presentation on his experience of Hopi ceremonial dances. In March 1923, Warburg’s KBW assistant Fritz Saxl arrived at Bellevue to help him prepare for the lecture, whose date kept being pushed back due to Warburg’s daily agitations and anxieties. The second day of Saxl’s visit — three days before Good Friday — they walked to the Saint Ulrich Church, where Warburg, preoccupied with images of slithering snakes at Arizona’s Old Oraibi pueblo, showed Saxl a ceiling fresco of Moses and the brazen serpent in the Baroque Mount of Olives side chapel. Noting in his diary this “miracle”, Warburg understood the Old Testament scene as depicting Moses sanctioning the “idolatrous” fall into pagan serpent worship, a triumphant episode of the banishment of fear that was echoed in his own “tragic fate” of sacrificing his health on the altar of arcane knowledge.⁹

On April 21, Warburg spoke freely and easily for an hour and a half before Bellevue staff, patients, and invited guests. Condensing the elaborate thirteen-day ritual into a mere three slides (#41 to 43) depicting a line of costumed Snake dancers carrying rattlesnakes in their mouths, Warburg reached the apotheosis of this ceremony, when the priest flings a snake onto a sand drawing on the floor of the kiva. In the darkened dining room at Bellevue, Warburg barely paused before bringing up the final sequence of photographs: the Vatican’s much celebrated marble colossus Laocoön and His Sons (#44); a snake-handling Asclepios as the Scorpio decan figure in a Spanish astrological manuscript that Warburg had found in the Vatican Library (#45); and the Moses-and-the-brazen-serpent fresco that he had visited with Saxl but a few weeks before (#46). After this dramatic juxtaposition of images came Warburg’s final photograph, one he had taken himself near Oraibi, of a group of small children at the mouth of a sandstone cave. “One can only say ‘hurrah’”, his son Max Adolph, who had attended the lecture, added to Warburg’s note to Mary reporting the evening’s triumph.¹⁰

While he was preparing this lecture, Warburg had returned in memory to an early encounter with American Indians. In 1874, during a summer holiday in the Austrian spa village of Bad Ischl, Warburg’s mother had become dangerously ill with typhoid fever. She asked to be carried in a litter to Ischl’s Kalvarienbergkirche, whose Stations of the Cross path contained a series of small shrines featuring scenes of the Passion painted by Josef Frauenlob in 1845. Eight-year-old Aby had followed along, only to find himself repulsed at these paintings, which he now dismissed as “executed in a debased peasant style”. Even in the midst of recollecting his mother’s (and Christ’s) suffering and expected impending death, Warburg focused on his own discomfort. To relieve himself of the monotony of saying prayers for his mother, he found two diversions: a grocery where he could gorge on non-Kosher sausages and a small lending library where he “devoured in masses” stories about “Red Indians”. Warburg called the savage tales and sausages “my inoculation against active cruelty”.¹¹ Coming as it did while Warburg was supposedly finding the necessary “Denkraum” to perform his liberatory lecture, it is a naked confession of the primacy of Warburg’s raging id.

As a young boy on the simulated Bad Ischl Calvary, Warburg had unwittingly called out to the Werewolf. Fifty years later, when he and Fritz Saxl visited the Saint Ulrich Church, Warburg fantasized that the prophet Moses was an Old Testament precursor of himself, confronting snakes in a mock-heroic posture against primal fears. Standing before Kreuzlingen’s own miniature Calvary, the Werewolf-haunted Warburg chose the fear-inducing snake over the comforting call of the True Cross, turning the Passion scenes into self-serving inversions of Christ’s path of sacrifice.¹²

Panel 3: Fortuna

Schicksalstag, 1923

Since his arrival at Bellevue in 1921, Warburg was often observed by the nurses in conversation with moths and butterflies. Calling them “little creatures that have a soul”, he could be heard talking to the insects for hours. As with his seemingly inexplicable behavior of speaking to himself, these episodes are perhaps most easily understood as the activity not of Warburg, but his Werewolf, whose affinity for defenseless animals stood in sharp relief with the creature’s antipathy for humans — most of all for Warburg himself. While the Werewolf constantly attacked both Warburg and those around him, it would give milk to the moths or fetch them linden leaves during Warburg’s walks around the Bellevue grounds. Distressed when captive insects escaped from his room, the Werewolf would call out to lure them back.¹³

For months Warburg had been asking Mary to look for a Fortuna medallion which he had once purchased in Munich for thirty Marks, and which he insisted he had left in his study, “on the Italian shelf”, though he admitted that “in my fear, I may have hidden it”.¹⁴ Warburg’s Werewolf continuously sought objects and people who were suspected of having been hidden by any number of enemies.¹⁵ Obsessed as he was with ridiculing and denigrating the “suspicions” of others, including any ideation about “lucky” objects, Warburg was himself perpetually endowing inanimate objects with special significance. Some of this — like his lepidopteran menagerie — was the doing of his Werewolf, but the Fortuna medallion was Warburg’s own peculiar quarry, for he saw its maiden as a symbol of the Renaissance and hoped it might serve him as talisman of his own personal renaissance of body and mind.¹⁶

“Ludendorff should be kept in a lunatic asylum and Hitler should be hanged!” Warburg exclaimed to Mary on the afternoon of the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler and his thugs were yet one more curse — like his own twisted fate — caused by the war. If only Warburg were redeemed from his banishment, and did not have to accept “friendly acts from witches”, perhaps Fortuna would finally smile on him. But for the moment, he was still “incurably” sick, oppressed at close quarters by diabolical nurses and doctors, and also by devils out to destroy Germany from within. A full seven months after he had delivered his “(re)habilitation” lecture, Warburg was still within the strangling grip of his Werewolf, making every day a darkly fateful Schicksalstag.¹⁷

Panel 4: The Law of the Good Neighbor

Midsommar, 1924

For his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Aby Warburg famously coined the Gesetz der guten Nachbarn — “The Law of the Good Neighbor” — which guided the classification and placement of every volume in his vast library in an idiosyncratic fashion that abandoned the Dewey decimal system for a schema that aimed to make each book a “good neighbor” to those beside it. His quest for release and healing had begun in the summer of 1918 with his search for books on lycanthropy; some of these books were scattered through his library. Was there any “good neighbor” on the shelves next to them that might penetrate the mystery of the Werewolf?

The KBW’s commitment to the Law of the Good Neighbor relied upon its unique “Classmark” system that subdivided its four main thematic categories (Image, Word, Orientation, and Action) into lettered subcategories. For Warburg, who devised the system, no KBW Classmark surpassed “F” (Magic & Science) in importance for his entire intellectual and bibliographic project. “FB” (Magic) was further subdivided into “FBH” to distinguish different sources: Greek and Roman, Islamic, Medieval, and Modern. The final Classmark subdivision separated Theosophy and Anthroposophy (FBH 1000–1799) from Spiritualism and Parapsychology (1800–1999). The KBW’s Theosophy titles ranged from H. P. Blavatsky’s late-nineteenth century foundational texts Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) to more recent Theosophical authors like C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant. KBW holdings in Anthroposophy included Rudolf Steiner’s Goethe’s World View (1897), Christianity as Mystical Fact (1910), The Riddles of Philosophy (1914), the Anthroposophical Soul Calendar (1925), and Steiner’s autobiography The Story of My Life (1925).

Having served for a decade as leader of the Theosophical Society’s German section, Steiner had, in 1911, turned away from its Eastern occultism to found the Anthroposophical Society, which was firmly rooted in Christian-Rosicrucian esotericism. During Warburg’s tenure, the KBW acquired over a dozen books by Steiner, including his Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (Occult Science: An Outline). Published originally in 1910, the KBW copy — the seventh edition of 1920, with Classmark FBH 1105 — contained this extraordinary passage:

For the spiritual gaze, what is a cruel, prowling wolf? . . . Nothing but a soul that lives in passions and acts through them . . . the external form of the wolf [is] an embodiment of these passions.¹⁸

In these few lines, Steiner had elegantly diagnosed Warburg’s Werewolf and every other Werewolf that rampaged through human history. When crossing the threshold from the sensible to the supersensible, human beings would always encounter the wolf — an astral image of the entirety of an individual’s raging unconscious life of desires and passions:

even if a person had no organs with which to perceive this form, he would still have to acknowledge the existence of the being in question, if its passions showed invisibly in their effects; that is, if a power, invisible to the eye, were prowling around by means of which everything could happen that occurs through the visible wolf. . . . The animal is impelled to desire only by means of that in the outer world for which its three bodies are craving. Man possesses nobler pleasures because a fourth member, the ego, is added to the three bodily members.¹⁹

Unlike Eastern occult practices aimed at accelerating spiritual evolution via breathing and postural bodily yogas, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical path of initiation was a “yoga of thinking”, supplemented by strict moral training. For every step in spiritual perception, Steiner advised his students, three steps were to be taken in moral development. Given the violent, voracious nature of the astral body, it was absolutely essential that any novice seeking to cross the threshold from the physical to the astral world be purified of “wolfish” desires and habits, lest they be magnified upon freeing oneself from the body. Outside of the safe, hygienic sanctuary of modern initiation practices taught by Steiner in An Outline of Occult Science and his other books, the sensibly invisible Werewolf was inevitably “fed” by the atavistic yogas offered by neo-Theosophy and other occultisms in vogue during the early twentieth century. The history of modern popular occultism is filled with tragic tales of teachers and students whose “divine madness” has slipped in the direction of the unbridled Werewolf.

Aby Warburg’s voracious appetite for images had first plunged him headlong into the unparalleled visual pleasures of the Florentine Renaissance, after which he spent decades seeking and acquiring a vast catalogue of images of pagan “monsters” in paintings, sculptures, bas reliefs, rare manuscripts, medallions — so that they might, by the very magical act of training his Apollonian gaze upon them, be tamed and transformed into “Athenian”, rather than “Alexandrian”, icons. Juxtaposing this vast menagerie in essays, lantern lectures, and his Atlas Mnemosyne panels, Warburg acted the part of some cosmic lion — or rather wolf — tamer. But the Werewolf always had the upper hand. Warburg’s hardened Naturalism, egotism, and unbridled astrality made him the perfect, unsuspecting prey for the eternally foraging Werewolf. Wholly abandoned by his revered natural science and its foremost practitioners, he was condemned to suffer in solitude the nightmarish visions his possessing Werewolf precipitated.

After his release from Kreuzlingen on August 12, 1924, Warburg applied his considerable energy and talents to building up the KBW and his Atlas Mnemosyne, but his Werewolf seems never to have deserted him entirely. Until the end of his days (he died of a sudden heart attack in October 1929), his voice was broken, and he remained irritable and self-centered. Though he no longer attacked and verbally assaulted those around him, he was in a state of constant nervous agitation, moving about so much that Mary was unable to ever paint his portrait. Home at last and among his family and trusted colleagues, he felt like nothing so much as a “revenant”.²⁰

While working with his massive stacks of globe-trotting Zettelkasten — his ninety-eight index card boxes containing collections of thematically organized bibliographical references and notes — the specter of the Werewolf lingered. In box #2, where Warburg collected his thoughts about Geschichtsauffassung (conceptions of history) along with index tabs for “Law & History”, “Perception of History, Biographical”, “Art History”, and other such expansive subjects, there was the same-sized colored tab labeled “Werewolf”. In box #5, adjacent to “Historical Synthesis” and “Reformation”, Warburg filed a card labeled “Club of Werewolves”. On it, he had sketched a self-portrait in which his own mustachioed head was being swallowed — by a Werewolf.²¹