Eranos

Eranos is the name of the annual conferences held at Casa Eranos in Ascona, Switzerland, from 1933 onward, founded by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn as a meeting place for scholars of depth psychology, comparative religion, classical philology, and the history of symbols. The Greek word eranos means a shared meal to which each guest contributes — and under that sign the conferences brought together, across the middle third of the twentieth century, the constellation of scholars whose collective labor constituted one of the principal intellectual vessels of the Seba lineage.

Jung spoke annually at Eranos from 1933 to 1951 and was the conference’s gravitational center for two decades. The regular Eranos lecturers — Kerényi, Corbin, Eliade, Zimmer, Gershom Scholem, Hugo Rahner, Ernst Benz, Erich Neumann — constituted an informal academy through which Platonic, Hermetic, alchemical, Gnostic, Sufi, and Indic materials entered depth psychology as serious research rather than as curiosity. After Fröbe-Kapteyn’s death in 1962 the conferences continued under Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema, extending into the present under the Eranos Foundation. The Eranos Jahrbuch volumes are the published record. See carl-jung.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• henry-corbin
• karl-kerenyi