Thread by @mullasadra

One major aspect of #Corbin was his long association from 1949-1978 with the #Eranos Tagungen, a circle of scholars of the human and religious sciences who met at Lago Maggiore near Ascona at the estate of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1962) 1/

In one sense it was a stellar collection of the leading scholars in the humanities of the 20thC but especially of those committed to esotericism - an alternative intellectual history of the period as Hans Hakl puts it books.google.co.uk/books/about/Er… 2/

#Fröbe had long been interested in the occult and archetypes and was a theosophist and spiritualist who ran a salon in #Zurich from 1914 3/

In 1920 her father acquired the estate near Ascona and she began to meet friends to discuss spiritual and esoteric matters including #Jung, Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930) who translated the #I_Ching, and Count Hermann Graf von Keyserling (1880-1946) 4/

She was also involved in the ecumenical group in #Marburg that crucially included the scholar of religion Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) 5/

#Eranos was inspired by Otto - and it was in fact during her visit to Marburg in 1930 that #Corbin also met her 6/

Another major influence was Carl Jung (1865-1961) who was a regular at #Eranos from 1933 and in fact it was he who suggested that she build a conference room at her estate for ‘a meeting place between east and west’ - the Eranos house 7/

The term came from the Greek ἔρανος which meant something like a symposium - the week long annual meetings that ran from 1933-1988 (although of course they have been revived) comprised long lectures, discussions, eating and drinking together in a residential 8/

#Corbin started being invited from 1946, his mentor Jean Baruzi was supposed to attend the first meeting in 1933, his associate from Marburg Friedrich Heiler (1892-1967) did that same year, Louis Massignon (1883-1962) was a regular from 1937-1955 when he felt out over politics 9/

In his speech on Fröbe’s death #Corbin summed up the #Eranos ethos: ‘press on into the innermost part of ourselves, pursuing that truth until we reach its furthest limits’ 10/

For #Corbin it was a gathering of esotericists like himself and of the ‘spiritual’ in the company of angels as his friend and #Eranos participant Gilbert Durand (1921-2012) put it 11/

This esotericism was a #thirdway between fake ‘guru esotericism’ and the positivism and historicism of the academy 12/

#Eranos allowed #Corbin to focus on his commitments to spiritual hermeneutics - phenomenology as he called it - the #mundus_imaginalis that mediated between the divine and the mundane, angelology and the concern for the #Temple 13/

This last interest led him to establish a parallel #Eranos in the L’université de Saint Jean de Jérusalem in 1974 with Durand, Antoine Faivre (b. 1934) and others, an enterprise continued by Stella Corbin until 1987 14/

This #Temple centred interest allowed him to bring together his research on #Shii mysticism, #spiritual_knighthood, #futuwwa and the #Templars and many a paper that he gave at #Eranos reflected the meeting of the philosopher, esotericist and ‘islamologue’ in his person 15/