Guided Pathway

Warburg’s interest in Mithras had grown apace during the winter in Rome, fueled by Saxl’s enthusiasm. On February 18, Saxl wrote lengthily on the significance of the two-sided cult relief that had turned up in the newly discovered Mithraeum in Dieburg, as described in Friedrich Behn’s Das Mithrasheiligtum zu Dieburg of 1928. On one side Mithras could be seen hunting, surrounded by scenes from his mythic life (#10.2); on the other, there was an image of the Greek hero Phaeton approaching his father Helios-Sol to ask for a boon (#10.1): rashly granted, this led to Phaeton’s catastrophic ride in the solar chariot, the loss of control of the horses, the plunge to earth, and the ensuing conflagration. Saxl, who with Cumont, interpreted the hero as Mithras in the guise of Phaeton receiving from Helios the call to cataclysm, found in the image a story of the transmission of a pictorial type; he wove into his interpretation reference to Warburg’s notion of “energetic inversion”—the taming of antique images by inverting their ethical valence. He wrote:

Extraordinarily interesting in Behn’s work is the observation that on the reverse face of the Dieburg altar the Phaeton-composition used is that which we know from Domus Aurea. In the Domus-Aurea Zeus sits in the middle, Phaeton stands to his left, and his mother to his right. From this configuration comes Ahura-Mazda and Mithras in the Mithraic context. The mother is unusable and so is reinterpreted as a Hore. But the crucial thing is that Phaeton in his attempt to control the horses of the sun goes down while Mithras, by causing the end of the world, saves the world. It is historical-philosophically essentially precisely the same problem as in the epoch of the Renaissance: the problem of the reception and partial inversion of meaning.

Warburg later integrated Saxl’s thought into Panel 8, juxtaposing the Dieburg Phaeton relief (#10.1) with renderings of the relevant image from the ceiling of the Domus Aurea (#3, 4), as reproduced in Carl Robert’s great corpus of antique sarcophagi (vol. 3.3, 406–7).