Guided Pathway

It was Saxl who called Warburg’s attention to the Mithraic relief discovered in 1928 in the old Roman city of Trier (#7), one showing the child Mithras holding an orb and encircled by the zodiac. Warburg would ultimately position a photograph of the monument just above the view of the San Clemente mithraeum and adjacent to two other images of deities similarly encircled: Aion or Sol (#6) and Chronos-Phanes (#8)—the latter represented via an engraving of an extant sculpture in Modena. Saxl, in a letter of February 21 accompanying a photograph of the Trier relief, had noted that Cumont thought depictions of a god within the zodiac represent a crossover from astronomers’ manuscripts into the image-world of the mystery religions. Thus the astonishing thing in the Trier monument was that the sculptor (schooled in a Hellenistic sense) tried to break out of scholarly planar construction to create deep space. Here, remarkably, an effort was made to establish a human relation with the divine savior like that found in Christian images of the Christ Child with the orb; the moral is that one must be cautious general formulations. Saxl returned to the subject on February 26 and wrote that he had been considering the image of the sun god encircled by the zodiac as it appears in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of the Judgment of Paris (the very print that was the source of Manet’s picnickers in the Déjeuner sur l’herbe—a topic that Warburg was simultaneously pursuing in Rome, his results offered in Panel 55 of the Atlas). The encircled deity, for Saxl, was the chief type (Haupttyp) through which to interpret the Mithraic relief, and he traced the form from the Babylonians through the Greeks who first liberated the deity from symmetrical rigidity and fashioned the three-dimensional zodiacal circle.

In Panel 8 the gods shown surrounded by the zodiac are primeval time deities placed at the pinnacle of hierarchies in the mystery religions. Aion is the god of eternal time (#6). Phanes, according to Orphic thought, generated life as he broke out of the world egg (#8). Mithras, too, was a cosmocrator and, on the Trier relief (#7), he is seen born from the rock, encircled by the zodiac (six signs shown) and the four winds, accompanied as well by the sun and moon above and the raven, dog, and serpent below. By analogy he becomes a god of time.