The priest gave him a cosmological drawing with a snake at its center. The Hopi, a native American tribe of Arizona, were famous for their ‘serpent ritual’ and although April was too early in the year to see this ‘tourist’ attraction, the time Warburg spent with the Hopi was a very important stage in his long journey through the South West of the United States. His visit to the Hopi created the basis on which he would develop his now famous lecture, which led him to establish iconography (literally ‘image writing’) as an independent discipline of art history.

Aby Warburg became known as the ‘father of iconology’ a.o. through his atlas of images, Mnemosyne. Twenty seven years after his visit to the land of the Hopi, he cured himself of his mental illness (extreme depression and schizophrenia) by performing an illustrated lecture on the Hopi Serpent Ritual. Warburg was the first to link art history and anthropology, paying much respect to animist practices. His anthropology of the image gave birth to the specific ways of classifying that revealed Modern man’s failure to classify the world singularly through western parameters.