When Jupiter Meets Saturn: Aby Warburg, Karl Sudhoff, and Astrological Medicine in the Age of Disenchantment

Abstract: As disenchantment began to be recognized as a recurring, never-ending process in recent scholarship, “When Jupiter Meets Saturn” argues that Aby Warburg and Karl Sudhoff’s debate on Reformation astrological medicine provided a new theory of the emergence of modern science and rationality. Drawing on their encounter and divergence in interwar Germany, especially their curatorial collaboration for the 1911 Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung, the article shows that Warburg and Sudhoff generated completely opposite historical evaluations of astrological medicine using the very same materials. Approaching history as healers, they developed different ways of seeing from medical epistemologies and brought out entangled temporalities from images.