Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s Ashram: The Great Mother and the Personal History of Eastern Religions

The Eranos endeavor started in Switzerland with the aim of creating a cultural bridge between East and West in the European political scene of the 1930s. Its founder, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was an artist, an intellectual, a scholar with a political agenda and a personal vision of the study of religions as a path of consciousness, a psychological healing, and a political instrument of harmony among religions. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn also actively built a network of relevant relationships in the cultural and political landscape of central Europe, which facilitated the success of Eranos and its survival beyond the disturbances of the Second World War. This article explores the relational capital Fröbe-Kapteyn with the help of the theologian Rudolf Otto; it also examines how her interest in the Eastern religions and analytical psychology entangled with biases and gender stereotypes differently pursued by the academic trio of C.G. Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, and Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.