Seba.Health
Figure · Seba Knowledge Graph
Rudolf Ritsema
Rudolf Ritsema
Dutch sinologist and director of the Eranos Foundation (1969–2002), the Swiss institution that hosted the annual conferences at which Jung, Kerényi, Corbin, Eliade, Hillman, and others worked. Ritsema’s life’s work was the Eranos I Ching project — a retranslation of the Yi that draws on archaeological and philological scholarship unavailable to Richard Wilhelm.
Ritsema’s edition (with Stephen Karcher, 1994) returns to the pre-Confucian substrate of the text — the yarrow-stalk oracle, the Han-dynasty Po Hu T’ung transformation schemes — and offers a translation vocabulary (Shades/Light for yin/yang, Wu/Wei for non-action) more archaic than Wilhelm’s. The edition’s significance is methodological: it demonstrates that the I Ching has strata pre-dating the Neo-Confucian harmonization, and that the divinatory function is not a degeneration of the philosophical function but its archaic substrate.
Within the Seba KG, Ritsema sits at the intersection of classical-philology and archetypal-post-Jungian: his directorship of Eranos kept the Jungian lineage alive through the 1970s and beyond, and his I Ching work drew the Chinese text into the same Corbin-Kerényi-Hillman circle that elaborated the Western Hermetic-alchemical line. The Eranos I Ching stands as the Chinese counterpart to Corbin’s retrieval of the Ismaili and Sufi imaginal corpus.