THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS

“When the soul wants to experience something, she throws out an image. Something is coming. An image calls us.”

– Meister Eckhart

“It is as if we don’t know, or constantly forget, that all we know is through image”

– Carl Jung

“It is as if something somewhere were known in the form of images, but not by us.”

– Marie Louise Von Franz

Ami Ronnberg, the director of The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) came to Temenos Institute in Westport, CT to talk about the history of the organization which just produced The Book of Symbols

Ami discussed the origin of the Eranos Foundation. Established in Ascona Switzerland in 1933, the organization was dedicated to bringing scholars from the East and West together to explore a universal dialogue reaching across cultural and academic discplines.

Olga Froebe-Kapteyn was born into a privileged life in 1881 but ran away to join the circus, then moved to Zurich to study art where she met her husband, Irwin. He died when she was 27; then she lived alone, with only a servant, for seven years and studied theosophy and Eastern religion with Richard Wilhelm, translator of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese system aligning the inner and outer nature. This fascination with making the invisible visible led to the creation of ARAS .

Froebe-Kapteyn collected images in a shoe box under her bed to illustrate the papers at the annual meetings at her Eranos (which means "shared feast") Foundation.