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Since 1933 the annual Eranos conferences have been held at Ascona in southern Switzerland. Founded, inspired and directed until her death in 1962 by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, and carried on since then in the same way, they are based on ‘a secure sense that in the tumult and agonies of our age creative forces are at work’: thus writes Joseph Campbell, the editor of the series of selected and translated papers which is appearing over the years. They were first published in hard covers, but are becoming available in paperback form to a wider circle of readers.
The only British contributor to this volume, a Scot, Lancelot Law Whyte, speculates wildly that perhaps only ‘ten persons read and understood either Isaac Newton's Principia, or Whitehead and Russell's Principia during the first year after publication’. Fortunately Man and Transformation is not quite in the class of those two Principia, and Whyte's exaggeration need not be believed. While conceding to those with intellectual inferiority complexes that some of the Eranos lectures are as difficult as some pages of Jung, that need not deter those who study the Collected Works from reading the present selection. Eranos means ‘shared feast’. Most feast-goers cannot eat a large helping of each dish, nor drink all the wines with impunity. Attending the feast—reading this book—is like top-quality conversation with lecturers, Ernst Benz, Henry Corbin, Jean Daniélou, Mircea Eliade, Gerardus van der