Pre~conference experience
Pre-Conference Experience
Pre- Conference Experience
At Eranos
September 8~10, 2025
Our Pre-Conference Experience offers us two days at the celebrated lakeside retreat of Eranos. Initially a Theosophical school in which Alice Bailey herself taught, it soon evolved a strong focus on depth psychology over which C.G. Jung presided for decades. The legacy of Eranos has been described as an alternative intellectual history of the 20th century. Conceived as a “free space for the spirit”, it drew together some of the most brilliant minds of its day to explore the unconscious, spirituality, mythology and wisdom traditions from the East, the West and beyond, launching a cultural stream that continues to be deeply influential today.
To enter Eranos is to step into another world with its library of leather-bound volumes where Jung himself must have sat and pondered over the decades, and its famous large, green, Round Table, underneath the cedar trees and facing Lago Maggiore, where so many gathered to broaden the contemporary worldview.
As longtime Quest faculty Christopher McIntosh shares, Eranos came to develop “a spirit with a mind of its own.” We’ll have two days of stimulating presentations that take us into this unique soul of Eranos, and time to just be in its tranquil and nourishing environment.
We’ll also have an opportunity to visit a nearby anthroposophical healing center, Casa Andrea Cristoforo, founded by Ita Wegman. One of Rudolf Steiner’s closest spiritual collaborators, she created this therapeutic refuge at the southern foot of the Alps; the center continues today to offer natural treatments to recover physical and emotional balance.
Pre-Conference Presentation 1
Welcome to Eranos
with Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D.
The word “Eranos” in ancient Greek means “banquet,” which comes to life through the contributions freely made by the diners. Born in the same place that had welcomed the revolutionary experience of Monte Verità some 30 years earlier, the Eranos cultural center emerged in 1933 in Ascona as a result of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s (1881-1962) idea to create a “meeting place for East and West”. The Eranos model is that of a cycle of annual Conferences, interdisciplinary and international in character,
reminiscent of both Italian Renaissance and German Romantic circles. Prompted by some of the great inspirational figures behind it – psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, theologian Rudolf Otto, and sinologist Richard Wilhelm, in particular – the Eranos Conferences have long been a unique opportunity in the world for scholars of different nationalities and from multiple disciplinary backgrounds to meet and engage in dialogue.
Eranos was the only international conference center active in Europe during World War II. The volumes of proceedings from the symposia, the Eranos-Jahrbücher (now in their 76th year), have rightly been called “one of the most important encyclopedias of our time.” Animated by an interest in cross-cultural dialogue around the great questions of spirit and the human condition, the Eranos Foundation still continues its activities more than 90 years after the start of the symposia. Eranos’ Casa Gabriella, which still retains its original charm, holds an important archival and book collection. The quiet of Eranos, the beauty of the park, the elegant atmosphere of the rooms, the proximity of the lake and the view of the Brissago Islands, undoubtedly radiate something magical.
Pre-Conference Presentation 2
Eranos:
A Bridge Between East and West
Christopher McIntosh, D.Phil.
The Eranos meetings, which began in 1933, were the fulfillment of the vision of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a remarkable woman of Dutch parentage and owner of the Casa Gabriella at Ascona on Lago Maggiore. From the start, the Eranos lectures had a spiritual as well as a scholarly agenda, a key element of which was to bring together the spiritual wisdom of East and West, drawing on a variety of disciplines.
This talk will describe Olga Fröbe’s own character and vision and her inspiration to use the Casa Gabriella as a meeting place for people ready to share in her spiritual quest. This short-lived forerunner of Eranos took the form of a summer school featuring Alice Bailey. It then emerged as Eranos, a more high-level gathering, with the help and ongoing participation of Carl Gustav Jung as well as a constellation of distinguished minds from many different fields – including Martin Buber, Mircea Eliade, Erich Neumann, Henri Corbin, Gershom Scholem and Annemarie Schimmel.
We will explore some of the contributions of these speakers, and their interactions at what became the famous round table on the terrace of the Casa Gabriella, where they had lunch after the morning lectures. We will also consider the way in which, over time, Eranos seemed to develop a guiding spirit with a mind of its own, symbolized by a stone stele on the terrace with the inscription, GENIO LOCI IGNOTO (“to the spirit of this place”), and how Ms. Fröbe came to see herself as the servant of this spirit.
Pre-Conference Presentation 3
Eranos and the Rediscovery of the Core Esoteric Dimension of Religion:
Gershon Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henri Corbin
Yuri Stoyanov, Ph.D.
The unprecedented streams of spiritual and scholarly interchange and creativity at the Monte Verità and Eranos gatherings was predicated on an exceedingly rich complex of texts, ideas and artistic visions, ranging from Kabbalistic and alchemical doctrines to Jungian depth psychology and an enthusiastic assimilation of Eastern religious and esoteric notions drawn from Tantric Yoga, Buddhism and Taoism. These mutually enriching confluences underpinned the overriding Eranos agenda to create a multi-intersection platform mediating between antiquity and modernity, science and spiritual wisdom, and Eastern and Western artistic expressions and philosophical speculations. Systematically pursued by towering, if not uncontroversial, figures such as Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henri Corbin, a crucial driving force of this Eranos program was the exploration and reinstatement of the esoteric dimension of the Abrahamic faiths (and religion in general) as their core and fundamental nature.
PRE-CONFERENCE PRESENTATION 4
Music at Eranos
Joscelyn Godwin, Ph.D.
Music played little or no part in the worldviews of the original “giants” of Eranos. This lack was only repaired in its later years by the participation of the musicologists Victor Zuckerkandl and Hildemarie Streich. What did they contribute? And, in a broader sense, what does music have to contribute to the impulse behind the Eranos movement? Is it, as Beethoven is reputed to have said, “A higher revelation than all religion and philosophy”?
Pre-Conference Presentation 5
Carl Gustav Jung at Eranos
Riccardo Bernardini, Ph.D., Psy.D.
At Eranos, Jung most clearly outlined the idea of complex psychology – a model that values the depths of human experience and reflects the way many people experience their inner worlds. Even before it was a school of psychotherapy, complex psychology was intended to be a true general psychology with which the other sciences – from the history of religions to philosophy, from theology to anthropology – would be able to dialogue. In this talk, we will reconstruct Jung’s participation in Eranos from several perspectives:
tracing his intellectual itinerary over a 20-year period of Conferences (1933-1952); looking at his pioneering initiatives (in particular, the Eranos Archive for Research on Symbolism, which now sits at the Warburg Institute in London); and also casting a glance at the more intimate side of his involvement in Eranos and his intellectual relationship with Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn.
Price: $495
Includes airport transfer from Milan’s Malpensa Airport (MXP) on the 8th of September, all presentations and activities, all meals from lunch on the 8th through lunch on the 10th and transfer to Monte Verità for the Main Conference.
Accommodations are priced separately.