Eranos

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Eranos is the name of an annual conference held since 1933 at a private estate on Lake Maggiore, at Ascona in southern Switzerland, where a recurring circle of scholars built an influential and contested approach to the study of religion: comparative, attentive above all to symbol and image, and willing to read the myths and mysticisms of the world as variations on shared inner themes. The Greek word eranos names a shared meal to which each guest brings a dish; the theologian Rudolf Otto proposed it for the new meeting. The estate, and the gatherings, were the work of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who organised them and chose each year’s theme.

The participants were not a school in any strict sense, and they disagreed about much. What they had in common was a year, a place, and a willingness to treat the religious imagination as a serious object. C. G. Jung was the early gravitational centre, and the lectures bear the imprint of his interest in recurring symbols across cultures. Around him gathered, over the decades, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, the Islamicist Henry Corbin, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, and many others; the proceedings were published yearly as the Eranos-Jahrbücher.

The intellectual stamp of the place is real and has been much studied. Several of its leading figures held, in varying forms, that the world’s religious and mystical traditions point toward something common beneath their surfaces. That conviction aligns Eranos with the broader perennialist and esoteric current of the twentieth century, and with the older idea of a philosophia perennis. The comparative warmth came at a cost. Critics have argued that themes were abstracted from their histories, and that the search for universal symbols could flatten what each tradition meant on its own terms. Scholem, notably, kept a certain distance from the more speculative readings even as he lectured there. The relationship between several participants and the politics of the 1930s has also drawn sustained and unresolved scholarly scrutiny — above all Eliade’s documented sympathies for Romania’s fascist Iron Guard, and the charge of antisemitism surrounding Jung’s 1934 essay contrasting “Jewish” with “Germanic” psychology.

The legacy is double. On one side, Eranos helped make the comparative study of myth and symbol respectable, and shaped how a wide readership came to think about archetype, initiation, and the sacred. On the other, it is read by later scholarship as a case study in how the impulse toward one underlying truth can quietly govern what the comparison is allowed to find. The conferences continued, in changed forms, long after the founding generation; the early volumes remain the record of a particular wager about what religions, taken together, might be saying.

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