ERANOS CIRCLE

WHO IS WHO IN ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY?

ERANOS CIRCLE (*)

The Eranos Circle starts its existence at a very difficult time, in the early 30's. This was a period of different conflicts between extreme ideological and cultural positions: East and West, communist Marxism and fascist national-socialism, myth and reason, difference and identity. People experience an atmosphere with violence and a feeling of lack of existential meaning.

The Circle was born as a reaction to this state of affairs. It proposes the mediation of the symbolic, approaching conflicts from the standpoint of archetypical ideas, inviting to oppose the polarity of the forces in conflict. As an example, Eranos's view tries to compensate cultural polarities, and within that view of its first discoveries is that behind Indo-European “patriarchal” mythology lie archaic traces of a Mediterranean “matriarchal” mythology that requires to be studied in order to counterbalance the influence of the first one.

Eranos has the intention to reunite disciplinary groups of investigators who look for the conjunction of the opposite, guided by the god Hermes who symbolizes crossroads and the conjunction of ways. Although its basic theme is the symbolic hermeneutic of “Sens”, its works are extended gradually to archetypical human questions. This explains why the Eranos Circle continues its work after more than 70 years of activities, and that is because of its analysis of problematic eternal to the human beings.

Eranos Circle was founded in 1933 by Olga Fröbe (1881-1962), a woman of high knowledge born in England from Dutch parents. Since her early youth she had shown great interest in philosophical gatherings aiming at building bridges between East and the West. Nonetheless, the creation of the Circle occurs when she meet Rudolf Otto, a phenomenologist of religion, who actually is the one who proposes the name of Eranos, which in Greek means “food in common”. Also it was Otto who first used the expression of “numinose”, used later by Jung to designate something fascinating and mysterious that causes sacred fear). The Eranos meetings took place were made annually, during the month of August in Ascona, Switzerland by the shores of Lake Maggiore.

But it was the presence of Carl Gustav Jung the one that offered Eranos the continuity of its meetings, which lasted until 1988 when conferences were closed but the work of small committees continued working on specific subjects. The 2005 conferences were held from July 31 to August 7, in Ascona, and had as a central theme "God or Gods" (http://www.eranos.org/start_deu.htm).

Collegio Papio, Ascona

Aside from the influence of Jung, there were others who selected thematic for the meetings. Jung represented the hermeneutic of the unconscious, Fröbe the oriental mystical influence, and Otto the field of phenomenology of religion. It is possible to define three great chronological stages in Eranos:

• In an initial stage topics are centered on mythical-mystical thought. Main representatives were Kerényi, Otto, Newmann, Eliade, and Jung.
• The second stage is more oriented towards anthropological topics, and their lecturers were Portmann, Plessner, Buytendijk, von Uexküll, Read, van der Post, Corbin, and Wilhelm.
• The last stage specialized in symbolic thought, and is represented by Durand, Hillman, Miller and von Franz.

There were few years in which Jung could not attend the meetings. He participated with a total of 14 lectures, many of which he used later as basis for some of his books. Eranos has reunited in 57 volumes the accumulated conferences from 1933 to 1988, in German, English and French. At present, Anthropos Editorial has published three volumes with the translation of some of these conferences in the Hermeneusis Collection, directed by Andrés Ortiz-Osés and Patxi Lanceros.

Some of the topics of the lecturers of Eranos were: Yoga and meditation, guide of souls, redemption and salvation, the Great Mother, symbolic of the Renaissance, the Trinity in Christianity, the hermetic, mysteries, the spirit, the human being, the mythical, fundamental images, rite, creativity, sense, renovation of human being, polarity of life, the world of colors, the sense of imperfection, the beauty of things, crossroads, among several others.

Jung was always against limiting his theories to a single discipline because he considered that could lead to dogmatism. The Eranos Circle was cause and effect of this conviction, since it became a space in which ideas were open for debate among members of multiple disciplines. It is considered that Eranos contributed enormously to extend the conception Jung had of the world to other fields of the knowledge, and to have influence not only in the field of psychotherapy, but also in those of anthropology, religion, simbology, mythology, and others.

A short review of the most representative figures of Eranos Circle is presented below.

	Corbin, Henry: He was born in 1903. Was a deep connoisseur of Sufism. His main works were History of the Islamic Philosophy, The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabî, Man and his angel, Spiritual Body and Celestial Land, From Mazdeist Iran to Shiite Iran (1996), and The Man of Light in the Iranian Sufism (2000). In 1946 he created the Iranology Department of the Franc-Iranian Institute in Teheran, where several Persian and Arab critical texts were published. He was director of Studies at the Sorbonne between 1954 - 1974. He died in 1978.
	Durand, Gilbert: Born in 1921, anthropologist and French symbologist, professor in Grenoble University. Among his works its worth mentioning emphasizes: Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, The Symbolic Imagination, From Mythcritic to Mythanalysis. He was founder of the school of mythcritic and mythanalysis, and was also director of Cahiers de l'Imaginaire.
	Eliade, Mircea: Born in Bucharest in 1907, he received a M.S. degree in Philosophy. By the age of 21 he traveled to India, where he became interested in Hindu Philosophies. He collaborated with Jung in the Eranos Circle. He lived in the United States from 1956 on where he taught at the University of Chicago courses in Religions History till his death in 1986.
	Campbell, Joseph: Born in New York, he held a M.A. in English Literature in Columbia University. Later he pursued studies in Europe on the legend of King Arthur. He became interested in Jungian thought and he spread many of Jung's arguments related to mythology. As friend with film director George Lucas, he inspired with his theories about the hero's trips, for the series War of the Galaxies. He compiled the summaries of the Eranos Circle. Author of The Hero of the Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. He died in Hawaii in 1987.
	Kawai, Hayao: Born in 1928, mythologist and symbologist Japanese of Kyoto, National Japanese Prize of Essay. Among his works stands out Beauty in Japanese Faire-tales and The Japanese Psyche.
	Kerényi, Karl: Hungarian. One of the most prestigious students of Greek mythology, interested in facilitating understanding of the mythical world. He lived near Ascona, which made easy to come in contact with Jung and with the Eranos Circle. Mythologist of classic culture, he made an effect on the pre-Indo-European substrate of Indo-European Greek culture by studying Mediterranean matriarchal backgrounds. He died in 1973.
	Post, Laurens van der: He was born in 1906 in Philippolis, South Africa, and died in 1996. Writer and Philosopher. He was captured by the Japanese during World War II. After his liberation he returned to South Africa where he made several trips of exploration into hinterlands. He wrote several novels, but he is more known by his books on trips, anthropology, and metaphysical speculation. A personal friend of Jung he wrote Jung and the History of Our Time.
	Scholem, Gershom: Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1897. He was Eranos's expert in Jewish symbolism, and particularly in the Cabala. He died in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1982.
	Suzuki, D.T.: Born in 1870. Jung wrote the prologue to his book The Great Liberation: Introduction to the Buddhism Zen. He lectured in universities in Europe and U.S.A. in which he drew parallels between Zen and the compatible Western Mystical Traditions, in particular referring to the ideas of Meister Eckhart and Christian existential thought of psychoanalytic direction developed by Paul Tillich. He became the great promoter of Zen in the West. He died in 1966, at the age of 95.
	Zuckerkandl, Victor: musician and expert in Hermeneutics. One of the conferences he gave at Eranos was on "To Sing and to Speak".
	Wilhelm, Richard: He was born in Stuttgart in 1873 and died in Tübingen in 1930. As a Christian missionary he remained many years in China, where he assimilated their ancestral culture. Upon retiring and returning to the West he undertook the task to present these China millenarian treasures, where he had Jung as an associate. Jung wrote the prologue for his translation of the I Ching. In addition he co-authored with Jung the book The Secret of the Golden Flower.
	Zimmer,Heinrich: Born in Germany in 1890, he moved to the United States in 1940, at the high-test peak of his intellectual achievements. At the moment of his death, in 1943, he was teaching in Columbia University. Author of King and the Corpse, as well as of Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization and Philosophies of India. These two works were prepared for publication by Joseph Campbell based on the extensive annotations left by Zimmer.

(*) Most of the information on this page has been taken from Anthropos Review No.153, February 1994, as well as the works of the Hermeneutist Collection, Anthropos Publishing House.