Eranos

An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

Hans Thomas Hakl, Christopher McIntosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317548126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Every year since 1933 many of the world's leading intellectuals have met on Lake Maggiore to discuss the latest developments in philosophy, history, art and science and, in particular, to explore the mystical and symbolic in religion. The Eranos Meetings - named after the Greek word for a banquet where the guests bring the food - constitute one of the most important gatherings of scholars in the twentieth century. The book presents a set of portraits of some of the century's most influential thinkers, all participants at Eranos: Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Martin Buber, Walter Otto, Paul Tillich, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, Joseph Campbell, Erwin Schrodinger, Karl Kereyni, D.T. Suzuki, and Adolph Portmann. The volume presents a critical appraisal of the views of these men, how the exchange of ideas encouraged by Eranos influenced each, and examines the attraction of these esotericists towards authoritarian politics.

1. The Significance of Eranos

For more than seven decades the Eranos meetings have played a unique role in the cultural and intellectual history of our age, taking place each year with amazing regularity (with the single exception of 1989). The deaths of the founder and the key early participants have altered nothing except for the outer form. On 30 March 1957, C.G. Jung wrote, “May the light of the European spirit, which has radiated out from Eranos for so many years during this time of darkness, enjoy a further lease of life so that it can fulfill its role as a beacon lighting the way towards the unification of Europe.”¹ As he had already remarked in 1951, Eranos was “the only place in Europe where scholars and interested lay participants could come together and exchange ideas, unrestricted by academic boundaries.”²

Jung’s follower, the well-known psychologist Erich Neumann, went even further when he described Eranos as “inconspicuous and off the beaten track, and yet a navel of the world, a small link in the Golden Chain,”³ by which he meant the Golden Chain of wisdom teachers, beginning with Hermes Trismegistus. And Mircea Eliade, probably the best-known religious scholar of the twentieth century, wrote in his autobiography: “Ascona and the Eranos group fascinated me from the start.”⁴ No wonder, for there he met intellectual giants like Jung, Gershom Scholem—the most influential Kabbalistic scholar of our age—and Karl Kerényi, the mythologist and expert on ancient Greece. In the foreword to the second volume of his diaries he described the “spirit of Eranos,” the theme that we shall examine in detail in this volume, as “one of the most creative cultural experiences in the modern Western world.”⁵ In an issue of the Swiss journal Du, dedicated to the Eranos meetings, he even compared these to “certain ‘circles’ during the Italian Renaissance or the German Romantic period, that is to say [with] groups that, at a certain moment in history, represent the most fruitful and advanced intellectual tendencies.”⁶ The significance of this remark will be apparent to anyone who knows the central role that these Renaissance groups played in the history of ideas and the importance that Eliade attached to them.

Art historian, writer, publisher, and critic Sir Herbert Read for his part saw in Eranos the upsurge of a “new humanism,”⁷ and the biologist Adolf Portmann went so far as to say that his “encounter with the circle that met during the Eranos meetings at Moscia-Ascona was like a stroke of destiny”⁸ and that Eranos came to be a center of his “innermost life.”⁹ Another commentator, Michel Cazenave, responsible for the French translation of Jung’s works and himself a much-respected author, called Eranos “one of the richest centres of intellectual and spiritual interchange known to our century” and a place of central importance in the life of Jung.¹⁰

This provisional selection of quotations should for the time being suffice to make clear that Eranos was no commonplace phenomenon. The list of contributors contains one prominent name after another. Besides those already mentioned, the participants included the physicist and Nobel prize-winner Erwin Schrödinger; the theologians Paul Tillich, Ernst Benz, and Hugo Rahner; the Japanese scholar Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki, who brought Zen Buddhism to the West; the ethnologist Paul Radin; the expert on Gnosticism Gilles Quispel; the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner, who described Eranos as the “Bayreuth of depth psychology”; the classical scholar Walter F. Otto; the philosophers Karl Löwith and Hans Leisegang; the scholars of religion R.C. Zaehner and Robert Eisler; the philosopher and humanist Martin Buber; the prominent rabbi Leo Baeck; and the orientalists Giuseppe Tucci, Hellmut Wilhelm, Henry Corbin, and Heinrich Zimmer. Later the names include the “archetypal” psychologist James Hillman, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the expert on Western esotericism Antoine Faivre, and the “alternative” physicist Herbert Pietschmann. In addition, the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser took part in the sessions between 1942 and 1948 and established fruitful contacts with Jung, Kerényi, and Portmann, although he did not actually give any lectures.¹¹

From the most recent times one could mention, inter alia: Annemarie Schimmel, Moshe Idel, Reinhold Merkelbach, Ilya Prigogine, Erik Hornung, Zwi Werblowsky, Jan Assmann, Moshe Barash, David Carrasco, Remo Bodei, and Elémire Zolla. The smaller-scale Eranos meetings, which have taken place in Moscia since 1990 with an emphasis on the I Ching, have included such names as Stephen Karcher, Michiyoshi Hayashi, Bruno Rhyner, Claudio Risé, and Claudio Bonvecchio. And we shall encounter other important participants as we explore the history of these meetings. The Swiss psychological journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie has commented, “Eranos is among the most important manifestations of the present age.”¹² Perhaps I will succeed, within the scope of the present investigation, to show that this description is not merely rhetorical exaggeration.

Consequently, I could not understand why there was hardly any information to be found about such an important and long-standing intellectual forum. There is no reference to Eranos in any of the relevant reference books on the history of religion (including the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade, nor in the second edition edited by Lindsay Jones), nor in standard works on anthropology, psychology, and philosophy (not even in the index to the truly comprehensive Encyclopédie Philosophique Universelle, published by the Presses Universitaires Françaises, with its 11,000 large-format pages and its countless cross-references), nor in numerous dictionaries of esotericism, symbolism, and mythology. I was able to find only two entries on the subject. The first one, in the third volume of the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche(Dictionary of theology and the Church), although very brief, does at least mention Rudolf Otto’s description of Eranos as “a place of encounter between East and West.”¹³ The second, somewhat longer, entry was written by Magda Kerényi and appears in the six-volume Schweizer Lexikon (Swiss lexicon).¹⁴ One might argue that the thematic range of Eranos is too wide for a specialized dictionary, but even the twenty-five-volume Meyers Enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch (Meyer’s encyclopedic dictionary) and the twenty-four-volume Brockhaus mention only the ancient Greek word eranos, meaning a banquet, without saying a single word about the meetings.¹⁵

The world-famous Encyclopedia Britannica—at least in the Internet version, which one would assume to be complete—also contains not a single entry. However, under the entry “religion, study of” one finds a passage referring to Eranos in the context of an article about C.G. Jung, stating that the Eranos circle has made a considerable contribution to the history of religion and that this movement was one of the main factors in the modern resurgence of interest in the analysis of myths. Giovanni Filoramo, a religious historian at the University of Turin, in a chapter on Eranos in his interesting work Il risveglio della gnosi ovvero diventare dio (The revival of gnosis or how to become God),¹⁶ which I shall return to later, also laments the lack of a proper history of these meetings. It is true that Olga Fröbe had in 1958 conceived a plan to collect contributions from the Eranos speakers themselves and work these into a history of the project, but this plan was never realized.¹⁷

Nevertheless, after some searching I did find a book that, although primarily not a history of the Eranos meetings, nevertheless yields the largest amount of information that has hitherto been available on the subject.¹⁸ Its author, William McGuire, was for many years the editor of the valuable Bollingen book series that also included Jung’s collected works translated into English. Through his work with and for Jung, McGuire went to Switzerland regularly from 1951 for almost twenty years and visited Ascona, where he got to know many of the key participants at Eranos. This series was financed by the American Bollingen Foundation, created by Paul and Mary Mellon, who undertook, at enormous expense, to have works (largely European ones) in the history of ideas and similar fields translated into English and made available in the United States. A large number of authors and researchers were by this means enabled, free of economic worries, to occupy themselves with specialized themes that would never have interested a purely commercial publisher. As the founder of Eranos as well as many of the speakers were also supported by the Bollingen Foundation, there were close connections between the two institutions. Thus, in his history of Bollingen, William McGuire also provides much interesting information about Eranos.

Looking further, we find that the Austrian “intellectual” radio network ORF 1 broadcast on 18 September 1998, as part of the series TAO, an informative forty-minute program on the Eranos meetings, which I have made use of in this work. There was also a report on Eranos broadcast by the Swiss radio network DRS in its first program on 22 April 1999 as part of the series Az.B. (“For Example”).

At the end of 1999 Princeton University Press published a book by the religious scholar Steven Wasserstrom that partly deals with a particular but very important episode in the history of Eranos. The book is entitled Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos. However, it contains no historical overview of the conferences or their participants. Instead the focus is on the “mystical” approach of the three scholars of religion, which Wasserstrom attributes to the “esoteric” atmosphere of Eranos and which he in part sharply criticizes. The fact that this atmosphere existed is not to be denied, but the question is whether one should judge it as negatively as Wasserstrom does. One of the main reasons for Wasserstrom’s critical attitude lay in the real or imagined political implications of these esoterically tinged attitudes, which he associated with fascist or fascistoid worldviews.¹⁹

Thus, up to the appearance of the German first edition of this book in 2001 there was no historical treatment of the conferences and their emergence—a fact that still surprises me. Even essays on the subject of Eranos in specialized journals were rare.²⁰ Besides the articles already mentioned and the journal Du,²¹ which I shall come to later, it was only the Spanish periodical Anthropos that covered Eranos to any extent.²² Anthropos contained several substantial essays and even a complete list of the speakers and lectures up to 1988. In addition, the journal published a review, averaging two pages, of each Eranos yearbook up to the 1988 volume. Furthermore, in that year there appeared a comprehensive supplement, containing a whole series of mainly philosophical essays about Eranos. This added up to a large amount of material but no historical facts.

Even the Internet offered practically nothing on Eranos in 2001. In the meantime this has changed. Awareness of the significance of Eranos has been significantly raised, probably first by Steven Wasserstrom’s work and the discussion that followed it, and later by my own rather more historically focused book. Gradually more and more scholars, especially younger ones, have begun to delve into the subject.

In 2004 a further book came on to the market thanks to the initiative of the Amici di Eranos (since dissolved) under the leadership of Tilo Schabert.²³ The subtitle of this book, mentioning Eranos, aroused certain expectations, but for me at least it is somewhat disappointing, as I had hoped for more investigation and new insights. Too many of the contributions deal only peripherally with Eranos.

However, since the first German edition of this book, research on Eranos has taken a further step forward thanks to Riccardo Bernardini whose dissertation Da Monte Verità a Eranos (From Monte Verita to Eranos) includes a mass of documentation containing previously unknown information. Much of it is from the archive of Eranos-Moscia, which was at that time closed to me. The dissertation also contains important information that adds new detail to the picture, especially concerning Oscar R. Schlag. But what is particularly striking about this documentation are the numerous photographs of Olga Fröbe and the leading participants at the meetings. Also included is a complete list of participants up to 1953.

I know of no dissertations on Eranos apart from that by Riccardo Bernardini already mentioned, although the conference organizer at the Amici de Eranos, Tilo Schabert, had plans to encourage scholarly work on certain aspects of Eranos. These plans were evidently abandoned when the Amici di Eranos were dissolved in 2007.

However, in the meantime a number of very interesting partial studies have appeared, the most important of which I would like to draw attention to, especially the report of the proceedings of the 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How This Book Emerged
• 1. The Significance of Eranos
• 2. An Esoteric Prelude to Eranos
• 3. Yearning for the East: Monte Verità and the School of Wisdom
• 4. Toward Eranos
• 5. The First Eranos Meeting: An Idea Comes to Life
• 6. Eranos and National Socialism
• 7. The Years 1934–37
• 8. Eranos 1938: The United States Shows Interest
• 9. The War Years
• 10. New Prospects after the World Conflict
• 11. The Heyday Begins
• 12. The Early 1950s
• 13. Polytheism Versus Monotheism
• 14. An End, Some New Beginnings, and Repeated Turbulence
• 15. Delicate Questions and Attempts to Answer Them
• 16. Eranos as a Prototype
• 17. The End of a Cycle ... or Perhaps Not
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index