Heinrich Zimmer

Heinrich Zimmer was the German Indologist whose work on Indian art, myth, and philosophy became, through the editorial labor of his student Joseph Campbell, one of the principal channels by which Indian religious thought entered twentieth-century depth psychology. Trained at Heidelberg and Berlin, Zimmer taught at Greifswald and Heidelberg until the Nazi regime drove him first to Oxford and then to Columbia, where he died before completing the major works that Campbell subsequently edited from his notes: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, The King and the Corpse, Philosophies of India, The Art of Indian Asia.

Zimmer was an Eranos lecturer from 1933 onward and worked in close intellectual proximity to Jung; the two shared a concern for Indian alchemy, tantric yoga, and the iconography of the goddess. His central claim — that Indian myth and iconography disclose a psychology of the soul no less disciplined than the Western — supplied the substrate for Campbell’s later comparative synthesis and for the Jungian reception of Indian material. See joseph-campbell.

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• joseph-campbell
• eranos