Embodying the Great Mother

Olga Fröbe’s Spiritual Authority at Eranos

Authors

• Chloë Sugden ETH Zürich

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30664/ar.162346

Keywords:

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, Eranos, Great Mother archetype, esoteric modernism, spiritual authority, self-mythologisation, visionary art, archetypal symbolism, non-ordinary states of consciousness, epistemic agency, mytho-cosmology

Abstract

This article examines the trans-disciplinary œuvre and hosting activities of the Swiss-based artist and archivist, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), founder of the Eranos Conferences and creator of the Eranos Archive. Drawn from my doctoral project’s findings, the text argues that Fröbe’s self-identification with the “Great Mother archetype” functioned as a strategy of feminine spiritual authority at Eranos—expressed through practices of conference-hosting, image curation, archiving and visionary art-making. Through unpublished correspondence, Eranos-Jahrbücher texts, and visual analyses of Fröbe’s Visions drawings (1934–37) and “Great Mother” Archive images, Fröbe is situated within 1930s New Age esotericism. Drawing on religious studies concepts and art-historical methods, her “mythopoetic performance” of the Great Mother is interpreted as a mode of both institutional and visionary authority. Fröbe’s opus exemplifies how fin-de-siècle women mobilised visionary experience and archetypal symbolism, constructing autonomous modes of spiritual and epistemic leadership within modernist intellectual cultures.