Guided Pathway

Warburg was especially struck by the fact that the double-sided relief was fashioned to pivot. On February 20, 1929, he reflected in the Tagebuch: “That the relief from Dieburg rotates could indeed lead to deeper insights into the cult.” The idea stayed with him. On April 14 (“a great day”), he met with Cumont and Wilhelm Gundel, another historian of ancient cosmologies, and in the Tagebuch recorded that Cumont went along with his idea that the pivoting of the Dieburg relief was a symptom of ceremonial: “rotatable double-contrast image of the lost (Phaeton) and redeeming son of the Sun.” Three days later Warburg laid out his ideas more explicitly in a letter to Saxl, saying that, for the interpretation of what went on in the cult, the purely external fact seemed important that individual cult images (Dieburg and also—as he had learned from Cumont—Heddernheim and Trento) have front and back sides and that those in Dieburg and Heddernheim have pivot holes. For Warburg, it was a matter of linking the two myths: “The legend of Phaeton as the failed and Mithras as the triumphant Genius of the Sun seems to me, in this instance, to furnish the high point of the drama of salvation.”