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Liber XV · History & Scholarship

Liber XV · History & Scholarship · Chapter III: Historians & Scholars

Eranos Conferences: Jung, Scholem, Corbin and Eliade at Ascona

The Eranos conferences at Ascona from 1933: Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Jung, Scholem, Corbin and Eliade, and their legacy for the study of myth and esotericism.

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The Eranos conferences are annual summer lecture meetings held since 1933 at Casa Gabriella, on the shore of Lake Maggiore near Ascona in southern Switzerland. Founded by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, they brought together scholars of religion, myth, psychology and the sciences, above all Carl Gustav Jung, Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin and Mircea Eliade, and shaped a whole generation's understanding of mysticism, symbolism and what would later be called Western esotericism.

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the founding of Eranos§

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was born in London in 1881 to a Dutch family and settled in the 1920s at Ascona, in the Swiss canton of Ticino. The district already had a reputation as a refuge for seekers: the nearby hill of Monte Verità had hosted vegetarian, artistic and Lebensreform communities since the beginning of the century. Fröbe-Kapteyn was drawn to Theosophy, Indian philosophy and meditation, and in the early 1930s her property hosted spiritual summer schools with a theosophical flavour.

She soon wanted something more rigorous. On the advice of the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer and, by most accounts, with the encouragement of the German theologian Rudolf Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, she decided to invite academic specialists rather than spiritual teachers. Otto is credited with suggesting the name Eranos, a Greek word for a meal to which each guest brings a contribution. The image captured the intended form: specialists from different disciplines would each bring a lecture on a shared theme, and the conversation around the table would do the rest.

The first conference was held in August 1933, on the theme of yoga and meditation in East and West. Among the speakers were Zimmer, Jung, the scholar of religion Friedrich Heiler, the Sinologist Erwin Rousselle, the Buddhologist Caroline Rhys Davids and the Italian church historian Ernesto Buonaiuti. Jung's lecture on the individuation process set the tone for much that followed. The same year closed an older chapter of modern esotericism: Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society, died at Adyar in September 1933, as the theosophical age of popular synthesis gave way to the more scholarly approach that Eranos represented.

How the conferences worked§

Eranos meetings followed a simple pattern that changed little for decades. Each August, a dozen or so lecturers spoke over about a week in a hall beside Fröbe-Kapteyn's house, usually in German, English or French, before an invited audience of scholars, analysts and interested lay people. Each year had a theme, such as the symbolism of East and West, the guidance of the soul, the idea of redemption, the Great Mother, the mysteries, the spirit, man and time, or the experience of transformation. Meals were taken at a round table on the terrace overlooking the lake, and much of the influence of Eranos came from the informal conversations there.

The lectures were published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch (Eranos Yearbook), which appeared annually from 1933. From the 1950s the American mythologist Joseph Campbell edited a six-volume English selection, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, in the Bollingen Series funded by Paul and Mary Mellon. The Bollingen Foundation, which also published Jung's collected works in English, supported Eranos financially and gave it an audience in the English-speaking world.

Fröbe-Kapteyn also assembled a large collection of photographs of religious and mythological images from many cultures, gathered to illustrate Jung's theory of archetypes. It became the core of the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, which is still used by analytical psychologists.

Jung and the psychological interpretation of religion§

From 1933 until the early 1950s, Jung was the dominant personality at Eranos. Many of his best-known studies of religious symbolism began as Eranos lectures, including work on the psychology of alchemy, the symbolism of the Mass, the spirit Mercurius and the Trinity. His readings of alchemy, Gnosticism and Hermetic imagery as projections of psychic processes, developed at length in Psychology and Alchemy, made Eranos a meeting point for psychology and the history of religions.

Jung's presence attracted collaborators such as the classicist Karl Kerényi, the psychologist Erich Neumann and, later, the archetypal psychologist James Hillman. It also tied Eranos to the controversy surrounding Jung's statements in the 1930s about Jewish and "Aryan" psychology, a debate that continues among historians. Jung's interpretation was never the only voice: the conferences also included historians, philologists, theologians and natural scientists, notably the Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann, who would later lead Eranos.

Scholem, Corbin and Eliade: the postwar circle§

After the Second World War, three scholars who first came to Eranos around 1949–1950 gave it a new centre of gravity.

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the founder of the academic study of Kabbalah, lectured at Eranos for more than three decades. Many of the essays later collected in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead were first delivered there. Scholem insisted on philological and historical rigour, yet shared with his Eranos colleagues a conviction that mystical symbols carried real religious meaning.

Henry Corbin (1903–1978), the French scholar of Islamic philosophy, used Eranos to present his studies of Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi and Iranian Shi'i thought, and his concept of the mundus imaginalis, an intermediate world of images between sense and intellect. His work later influenced Antoine Faivre's emphasis on imagination as a feature of esotericism.

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the Romanian historian of religions, presented his ideas on sacred time, myth and the "eternal return" at Eranos, and later made the University of Chicago a centre for the comparative history of religions. Eliade's 1930s sympathy for Romania's far-right Legionary movement has become an important topic in assessments of his work.

Other regular speakers included the Islamicist Louis Massignon, the historian of Gnosticism Gilles Quispel, the Catholic theologian Hugo Rahner, the scholar of Gnosis Henri-Charles Puech and the Zen writer D. T. Suzuki. For a period, Eranos was one of the few places where Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Asian religions and depth psychology were discussed at the same table.

Eranos after Fröbe-Kapteyn§

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn died in 1962. Adolf Portmann directed the conferences until the early 1980s, followed by Rudolf Ritsema, a specialist in the I Ching. From the late 1980s the programme shifted towards Ritsema's work on the Chinese classic, a change that divided former participants; on the classic itself, see the I Ching. In the 2000s a reorganised Eranos Foundation revived annual lecture series on broad themes, and the institution continues in Ascona today, though without the central place it once held.

Eranos and the study of esotericism§

Eranos matters to the history of Western esotericism in two ways. First, it brought esoteric material into serious discussion at a time when most universities ignored it. Lectures on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, Sufism and Christian theosophy were given by recognised scholars and published in a respected series. Many of the sources and themes later studied by the academic field first reached a wide educated readership through Eranos.

Second, Eranos became the main example of what Wouter Hanegraaff has called religionism: an approach that studies religion "from within", treats symbols as expressions of a timeless sacred reality, and does not clearly separate scholarship from spiritual commitment. Steven Wasserstrom's Religion after Religion (1999) argued that Scholem, Eliade and Corbin, despite great differences, shared a private theology of this kind, and that their elevation of myth and symbol over history had ethical and political consequences. Hans Thomas Hakl's Eranos (2001; English edition 2013) offered a more sympathetic and detailed history of the conferences and their participants.

The founders of the modern academic field, beginning with Antoine Faivre, both drew on and distanced themselves from Eranos. They kept its interdisciplinary breadth and its seriousness about esoteric texts, while insisting on historical method and on a clear line between studying a tradition and adopting it. That debate is traced in defining esotericism and in the wider story of the historians and scholars who built the discipline.

Frequently asked questions§

What does the word Eranos mean?§

In ancient Greek, an eranos was a meal or banquet to which each guest brought a contribution. The name, said to have been suggested by Rudolf Otto, expressed the idea that each lecturer would contribute his or her expertise to a shared theme.

Who attended the Eranos conferences?§

Lecturers included C. G. Jung, Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Karl Kerényi, Erich Neumann, Adolf Portmann, Louis Massignon, Gilles Quispel and D. T. Suzuki, among many others. Audiences were invited and included scholars, analysts and educated lay people.

Are the Eranos conferences still held?§

Yes. After Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn's death the meetings were led by Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema, and since the 2000s an Eranos Foundation has organised lectures in Ascona again, though on a smaller scale and with less influence than in the mid-twentieth century.

Why do historians criticise Eranos?§

Critics argue that its leading figures blurred scholarship and personal spirituality, treating myths and symbols as timeless truths rather than historical products. Political questions about Jung's and Eliade's attitudes in the 1930s have also shaped later assessments.

Sources and further reading§