El ritual de la serpiente

In 1923, after a two-year stay at the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen, where he was admitted due to a nervous breakdown, Aby Warburg wrote a "farewell speech" addressed to the doctors and the inmates of the institution, with the purpose of showing that he was already fully restored. Thus was born The Ritual of the Serpent, Warburg's catharsis, testament, and "monstrous creature" in whose pages he recounts his revealing 1895 encounter with the Pueblo Indians. Marveling at these men, whom he places "between the world of logic and the world of magic", Warburg describes his dance with live serpents, a magical ceremony that seeks to produce a real effect: rain. But the ritual of the serpent, extreme form of the animist cult of the Indians, is not for the German historian but the starting point of a reflection on the power of the image and the symbols, necessarily linked to the conception of his art. With this new revised edition, Sexto Piso once again makes a fascinating and essential classic available to the reader in Spanish, a cult book by an author who in recent years has been claimed not only as one of the great theoreticians of iconography , but because of its paramount importance in the foundation of contemporary cultural studies.