Spring Journal, Vol. 92, Spring 2015: Eranos: Its Magical Past and Alluring Future: The Spirit of a Wondrous Place

More than eighty years have passed since the founding of Eranos by Fröbe-Kapteyn in 1933 in Ascona, Switzerland. The Eranos Conferences, a pioneering endeavor of interdisciplinary presentations and dialogues, have been properly recognized as “one of the most creative cultural experiences in the modern Western world” and “one of the richest centers of intellectual and spiritual interchange known to our century.” Eranos’ influence has been documented in a number of fields of knowledge, ranging from psychology to the history of religions, from philosophy to Eastern studies, from theology to anthropology, from biology to physics.

This Eranos issue of Spring focuses on Eranos’s history, cultural heritage, and future perspectives. It gathers a series of contributions by renowned specialists, together with a series of essays by great authors of the past, whose gratitude to Eranos is testified to in their writings. Historical essays re-published here are by Carl Gustav Jung, Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Adolf Portmann, and Rudolf Ritsema. Also published for the first time is an article by the founder of Eranos, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, entitled The Psychological Background of Eranos (1939), originally presented at the Analytical Psychology Club in New York. In addition more than fifty previously unpublished photographs from the Eranos Archives have been made available to Spring through the Eranos Foundation for this celebratory volume.