Further Studies on Jung's Eranos Seminar on Opicinus De Canistris1

[Translated by Vincent Marsicano]

On August 23, 1942, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, the creator of the Eranos Conferences, wrote to her friend and confidante Ada Hondius-Crone: 'Next year's topic is “Helios,” which is a very broad field of research. It will talk about the “sun” and the cult of the sun in mythology, the role of ‘light’ in the gnosis, the god Ra in ancient Egyptian texts, and Christ-Helios in ancient Christianity as well as the symbolism of the sun in Mexico, Babylonia, and the Nordic cults. It seems that this would be a favourable “omen” to treat this topic. The world really needs to get more “light” and more “consciousness” (Ritsema, p. 40ter).

We can just imagine how disappointed Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn must have been, when she found out that Jung was so busy working on the draft of his Mysterium Coniunctionis that he could not have enough time to prepare a text for the symposium for the following summer (Hannah 1976/1997, p. 275). Jung arrived in Ascona anyway that summer along with his wife Emma. For Jung and his wife, Eranos was an event that they looked forward to all year and that they took as a chance to relax even against the background of the liveliness that marked the symposium (Gaudissart 2010, pp. 101ff.). From August 4 to 11, Jung participated as a simple listener in the entire convention, which by then had taken on the title Helios. Mittelmeerische Sonnenreligionen (‘Helios: the Religions of the Sun in the Mediterranean’) (Fröbe-Kapteyn 1943, 1944).

Jung thus was able to attend the various presentations by the distinguished speakers. On August 4, 1943, Georges Hermann Nagel spoke on Le culte du soleil dans l'ancienne Egypte (‘The Cult of the Sun in Ancient Egypt’) and showed a series of slides on the topic Ägyptische Sonnensymbolik (‘Egyptian Sun Symbolism’). Nagel was a theologian and professor of Egyptology, Hebrew Studies, and the Exegetics and History of the Old Testament in Geneva. On