Eranos conferences history

Eranos was an annual gathering held from 1933 onward at Casa Eranos in Ascona, on the Swiss shore of Lake Maggiore — a place Hillman once described in a letter as "very much a soul place," with its palms and bamboo forests and the Alps visible across the water. The word itself comes from ancient Greek, designating a shared meal to which each guest contributes a gift — a poem, a song, an improvised speech. That etymology named the operative principle: no single discipline presided. Each participant brought a distinct offering to a common table.

The conferences were founded and organized by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch woman from the Anglo-Indian theosophical tradition, who described her original intention as mediating between East and West — not through imitation of Eastern methods, but through a confrontation with Eastern wisdom that might help Westerners "rediscover the spiritual values that are most distinctively our own" (quoted in Clarke, 1994). The ambition was psychological as much as comparative: the question of East and West, Fröbe-Kapteyn believed, was above all a question of the soul.

Jung was the gravitational center of the early decades. He attended from 1933 to 1951 as a frequent lecturer and, as von Franz (1975) put it, the spiritual center of the meetings — presenting ground-breaking work on alchemy, archetypal theory, and synchronicity to an audience of world-class scholars who demanded papers of the highest quality. Writing to Fröbe-Kapteyn in January 1934, Jung struck a characteristically self-effacing note:

I would like to leave the floor to the Sinologists and Indologists and keep psychology in the background as a difficult and unsavoury subject for the Asiatic enthusiast, which nobody bothers about unless he must.

He lectured anyway — on "The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" at that first meeting. The self-deprecation was real and also a posture; Jung understood that Eranos was the venue where his most ambitious ideas would receive their first serious interdisciplinary hearing.

The roster of participants across the decades reads like a map of twentieth-century humanistic scholarship. Kerényi brought Greek mythology; Corbin presented for twenty-seven years, from 1949 to 1976, developing his phenomenology of Iranian Sufism and Islamic imagination; Eliade supplied the comparative framework of hierophany and sacred time; Neumann contributed his developmental reading of the archetypes; Gershom Scholem represented Jewish mysticism; Adolf Portmann led the biological sciences contingent from the early 1960s until his death in 1982. Rudolf Ritsema served as director and organizer of the conferences from 1969 onward, sustaining their institutional continuity through the second half of the century and announcing 1988 as the last "classic" Eranos.

Hillman entered the Eranos circle in the 1960s and gave fifteen lectures between 1966 and 1987. He regarded the Eranos lecture as the one that counted — the annual occasion that forced his thinking to its sharpest edge. What drew him was not prestige but marginality: the speakers were, as he put it in 2005, "each marginal figures in their fields, as I am marginal in a strange way in psychology. That's what united them" (Russell, 2023). He believed that "Eranos was one of those things that invented the modern world, intellectually." In his own account of archetypal psychology's origins, Hillman named the Eranos circle explicitly:

The Platonist inspiration at Eranos, its concern for spirit in a time of crisis and decay, the mutuality of engagement that transcends academic specialization, and the educative effect of eros on soul were together formative in the directions that archetypal psychology was subsequently to take.

Ritsema, writing in the 1988 Eranos yearbook, captured what the conferences had been trying to do across fifty-six years: studying "the spontaneous expression of the psyche in images, thoughts and emotions" — what Hillman had called in a 1968 lecture "the speech of the soul" — in its innumerable expressions: dreams, fantasies, myths, religions, poetry, scientific theories, fine arts, and alchemy (quoted in Russell, 2023).

The physical setting reinforced the intellectual atmosphere. No more than a hundred people could attend. The lecture hall had no amplification, no theatrical lighting. Speakers addressed audiences crowded onto stiff-backed wooden chairs in a low-ceilinged room, with windows on one side overlooking the garden's round table where speakers took their meals, and on the other side the lake. After lectures, everyone went down to swim. The elder generation had reserved seats. The whole arrangement enforced a closeness — an interpenetration of minds — that the institutional university could not replicate.

Eranos was not a school, not a society, not a journal. It was a recurrent occasion — a ritual container — in which otherwise isolated scholarly labors composed, for ten days each August, into something that felt, to those present, like a single interdisciplinary tradition.

  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, whose fifteen Eranos lectures shaped the direction of the post-Jungian tradition
  • Henry Corbin — the phenomenologist of Islamic imagination who presented at Eranos for twenty-seven consecutive years
  • Karl Kerényi — the classical mythologist whose collaboration with Jung began at Eranos
  • Erich Neumann — developmental theorist of the archetypes and a central Eranos contributor

Sources Cited

  • Clarke, J. J., 1994, Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
  • Jung, C.G., 1973, Letters Volume 1: 1906–1950
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman
  • Neumann, Erich, 1955, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype