Introduction : Spiritual Scholarship and History of Religions as Self-Improvement at Ascona

The dossier explores the cultural and theoretical influences of scholarship produced at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, Switzerland, on twentieth-century developments of the history of religions in Europe and North-America. The two editors set out to investigate the working hypothesis according to which both the long talks delivered at the Eranos meetings – the rule was two-hour lectures followed by no questions-and-answers section, horribile dictu for today’s academic mores – and the resulting rich literature served as a source for «spiritual scholarship» throughout most of the twentieth century, under the influence of Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology and Rudolf Otto’s comparative phenomenology. The editors advanced a preliminary definition of «spiritual scholarship» as the tendency, mostly discernible with the scholars of religion who gathered at Ascona, of attributing psychological meanings to religious phenomena and of regarding the scholarly interpretation of myths, symbols, and religious images as means of self-improvement.