The Eranos
Foundation has the purpose of preserving and increasing
the value of the rich cultural, psychological, spiritual,
ancestral and archetypal tradition bound to the Eranos
property in Moscia (Switzerland), in particular by
continuing the series of academic seminars and meetings
initiated in 1933 and known as the "Eranos Tagungen". For
further informations see General Menu under
Who We Are
The Foundation exerts its
activities in two locations:
According to the
statutes the Foundation has the following
purposes:
Organise the annual
conferences called Eranos Tagungen in the spirit
and according to the aims of the initial founder Olga
Fröbe Kapteyn (comparative religion - ethics and
moral - natural sciences).
The collaboration with
other Institutions with the aim of generating additional
meetings following the spirit of Eranos
The collection and
publication of the conferences in annual proceedings
(Jahrbücher) in collaboration with an established
publishing house. The divulgation of the Eranos message
through all the available media in order to reach the
largest possible public.
The creation and
management of a place of study and relaxation to be
offered to people active and involved in the intellectual
and cultural fields. To those people, the Foundation
Council can grant a stay at Eranos for short or longer
periods either at free or at a moderate charge.
Fabio MERLINI,
PRESIDENT, PhD
Regional Director, Head of Basic Training Division,
Regional Head of the Swiss Federal Institute for
Vocational Education and Training (SFIVET- IUFFP Istituto
Universitario Federale per la Formazione Professionale).
Professore di Etica della Comunicazione, University of
Insubria, Varese, Italy.
Claudio
METZGER,
Historian and numismatic, Ascona
Luca PISSOGLIO,
MD
Vice-Mayor of Ascona
Sandro RUSCONI,
PhD
Director DCSU (Divisione della cultura e degli studi
universitari, Government of Cantone Ticino )
Legal advisor to
the Foundation,
Eros BERGONZOLI
Lawyer and notary
General
secretariate,
Paola CHOPARD TAMBURRINO
Former members since
relaunch 2006: - John Van Praag (president, 2005-2009)
- Laiping Fok van Praag (member 2006-2009)
- Aldo Rampazzi (member 2005-2008)
- Fausto Castiglione (member 2007-2009)
- Mauro Martinoni (member
2005-2007).
Meaning of
Eranos The word 'Eranos', in Greek language, applies to
a banquet, both spiritual and material, which lasts
thanks to the contributions each participant makes. The
Hungarian mythologist Karl Kerenyi took the
original meaning of the word, which appears for the first
time in Greek literature in Homer's Odyssey, in terms of
a 'spiritual nucleus': this was to be developed by
participants in an atmosphere of freedom and spontaneity,
with songs, poems, improvised verses, or with a
symbolical offering to the group.
From 1933 onwards, a
modern Eranos took place again and lasted for more than
seventy years at Ascona-Moscia, on the Swiss side of Lago
Maggiore. It was there that Olga Fröbe
Kapteyn's idea to create a 'free space for the
spirit', a 'meeting place between East and West' took
shape, and where the relation between the individual, the
spirit and the peculiar images of the soul were to be
unceasingly re-imagined.
The Eranos
Tagungen The banquet, alive thanks to the 'love-gifts'
brought by participants in the form of lectures and
discussions, was symbolised by the Round Table, the image
and meaning of which, together with the monument
dedicated to the 'unknown spirit of the place' and the
conference room full of light opening on Lago Maggiore
and the mountains, inspired many of the main thinkers of
the Twentieth Century. During the August Meetings, after
each conference, the lecturers would give their original
paper in exchange for Olga Fröbe's hospitality, as a
result of which a rich collection of more than sixty
Yearbooks (Jahrbücher) now bears testimony to
an immense work accomplished in various fields of
learning.
The influence of
Carl Gustav Jung Under the influence of the Swiss psychologist
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) in particular, the
Eranos Meetings found their way towards symbolical,
archetypal and mythological motives: as mentioned by
Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema in 1978,
these were features that seemed to refer to a distinct
sub-structure of the human being, which we could call
'a-historical' or 'archaic', and to which Eranos had
always been deeply bound. Notwithstanding the great
influence of Jung, in whom Olga Fröbe found a
fundamental shift from individualistic psychology towards
the archetype world, an additional dimension was
introduced through the encounter with the Sinologist
Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930); it was thanks to him
that Olga Fröbe had access for the first time to the
Far-Eastern thought and she found a way of meeting with
the extra-European cultures on a level of equality. In
addition, the historian of religions, Rudolf Otto
(1869-1937), introduced Eranos's founder to a
human-centred conception of religion and
mysticism.
Since the end of the
1930's, the program of the conferences thus concentrated
on a specific archetype theme chosen from year to year,
analysed and amplified by manifold perspectives thanks to
the lecturers' contributions: psychologists,
philosophers, theologians, orientalists, historians of
religions, ethnologists, Indologists, Islamists,
Egyptologists, mythologists and scientists found in the
Eranos conferences and in the informal talks held around
the great Round Table a place where they could meet and
feel that their highly specialised creative work, as
mentioned by M. Eliade in 1960, acquired a deeper meaning
when being presented and re-formulated as a contribution
to the knowledge of mankind.
Since the 1940's, the
theme of the Conferences was man and his relation to the
world, which would later flow into the idea of a new
humanism resulting from Eranos's work. Close to the
interest in the symbolical production of the human soul,
its speech and peculiarity of expression in legends and
fairy-tales, mythic images and religious figures, dreams,
art, poetry and music, it appears next to the idea of
possible syncretism between scientific and humanistic
disciplines, and, especially in more recent years,
between Eastern and Western thought
The Eranos Foundation could
never have seen its rebirth without the support of the
following institutions, to whom we remain
sincerely grateful for trusting our
vision: .
Willkommen!
