In search of potential speakers for the Jung Institute, in late August 1964 James Hillman crossed the Gotthard Pass to the southernmost edge of Italian-speaking Switzerland. Seventeen years earlier, on his first trip to Italy with his friend Morris Philipson, he had looked out the train window at Lake Maggiore and thought it “the most beautiful place in the world.” Now Hillman was traveling back there to attend the ten-day-long gathering known as the Eranos Tagung [Conference]. This event had been held annually for more than thirty years in the Moscia district of the little town of Ascona, overlooking the Swiss portion of the lake and facing the Italian Alps. Here Jung had delivered fourteen lectures and had played a role in planning the programs. Over the years the conferences had drawn many of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers—philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, mythologists, ethnologists and others. Each speaker presented a two-hour lecture; five were in German, three in French, and three in English. A small paying public attended. No feedback was allowed from the audience, but there were wide-ranging informal discussions in-between the lectures.
The word “ eranos ” comes from the ancient Greek meaning a “picnic” or “spiritual feast” where guests present a gift in the form of a song or poem or improvised speech “in this case, the knowledge of his or her field and an openness to meeting others from other fields of the natural sciences and the humanities,” a kind of modern-day Platonic symposium. Since the late 1930s, each program had focused around a specific archetypal theme, with conference founder, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, once saying it was Jung’s work which, “although never especially emphasized, represents the synthetic force at the heart of Eranos . It works, one might say, underground, invisibly; yet, it holds the whole together and embodies the real significance of these meetings.”
Indeed, the Bollingen Foundation dedicated to Jung’s oeuvre had its origins in the gardens of Eranos, as did initial plans for Jung’s biography Memories, Dreams, Reflections . “To get to know [Jung], to experience the incessant productivity of his mind in daily conversation and the force with which he grasped new insights, to be present as he approached and questioned the individual speakers who entered our circle with new topics— these were impressions of enduring grandeur,” wrote Adolf Portmann, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Basel who in the 1960s became a guiding force at Eranos.
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Just above where the Eranos conferences took place is the 1,150-foot high Monte Veritá (“Hill of Truth”). Beginning around 1880 and carrying through the early decades of the twentieth century, on Monte Veritá, people “who wanted to reform the world or try out different forms of living—artists, vegetarians, revolutionaries, or healers—found a place there for their different experiments.” Among the anarchists, nudists, and naturists were also Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin and Trotsky. Novelist Herman Hesse came in 1907 to be cured of alcoholism, and much of his later fiction was set against the backdrop of the enchanted hilltop. Then followed the Dadaist and Expressionist painters. In the 1920s, Baron Eduard von der Heydt, a prominent art collector, bought the hillside and built a hotel that became “a forerunner of the wellness centers of our present times.”
It was during this period that the father of a young Dutch widow, Olga Fröbe, bought her a 300-year-old stone house called Casa Gabriella, located at the foot of the hill and right above Lake Maggiore. Already studying Indian philosophy/meditation and theosophy, after a vivid dream in 1928 she hired a team of masons to build a lecture hall in the Bauhaus style on the long property, “a place that would lend itself to spiritual encounter among seekers, scientists and lay people.” Founding a “Summer School” of the International Centre for Spiritual Research with Alice Bailey, a leading theosophist of the day, Fröbe built a third house (Casa Shanti). Beautiful terraced gardens, with multiple paths at different levels of the steep hillside, connected the three buildings.
Then, in 1930, Fröbe met Jung at a “School of Wisdom” being run by Count Hermann Keyserling in Darmstadt, Germany, among a group of researchers seeking “common roots of all religions.” 15 It was Jung who apparently suggested that she use her lecture hall as a “Meeting Place of East and West.” After a falling-out with Alice Bailey over the direction things should take, the Eranos name was suggested to Fröbe by Rudolf Otto, a renowned historian of religions, and the first conference took place in 1933. Jung, staying in the early years at a villa on Monte Veritá, spoke at Eranos for the first time three years later, a lecture on “The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy.”