Rudolf Ritsema
1918–2006 · Dutch
Dutch Jungian scholar and director of Eranos Foundation who produced foundational I Ching translations bridging East-West depth psychology.
In the record
- Born
- 1918, Velp, Gelderland, Netherlands
- Training
- University of Geneva (self-directed study in Jungian psychology, Tibetan Buddhism, French and German literature); psychoanalysis under Alwine von Keller (1944)
- Affiliation
- Fondazione Eranos (director and editor of Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1962–1990s); Jungian depth psychology tradition
Key works
- I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change: The First Complete Translation with Concordance (1994)
- I ching: il libro della versatilità (1997)
- Yi-jing: das Buch der Wandlungen (2000)
- The Original I Ching Oracle: The Pure and Complete Texts with Concordance (2005)
- The Ethic of the Image (1993)
Sebastian reads Ritsema
Ritsema matters because he refused to let the I Ching become a fortune-telling machine for the Western spiritual marketplace — which is to say, he refused the pneumatic appropriation before most translators had noticed it was happening. His philological project, built across decades at Eranos alongside figures including James Hillman and Henry Corbin, insisted that the hexagram-texts carry grammatical and semantic weights that cannot survive paraphrase: the original graphs hold a range, and any flattening into English consolation-speak is already an interpretation too far. The concordance is the argument — it lets the reader hold multiple renderings of a single character in tension rather than accepting the translator’s shortcut. Turn to Ritsema when you want the I Ching as a genuinely difficult text, not a mirror for what you already believe. He is essential reading for anyone bringing the oracle into clinical or scholarly depth work, where the difference between amplification and projection is the only thing that keeps the method honest.