Rudolf Ritsema

In the early 1990s Ritsema passed on the presidency of the Fondazione Eranos (Eranos Foundation) to the Jungian analyst, Christa Robinson. He died on 8 May 2006, at the age of 87, on the 61st anniversary of his marriage to Catherine Gris.

The year 1988 marked a new departure for Eranos as Ritsema took the radical and in the event controversial decision to change the basic structure of the Eranos Conferences, electing to turn the meetings into a spiritual laboratory of an experimental character involving personal engagement of the participants. He also put the I Ching at the centre of Eranos activities.

In his spare time Ritsema pursued his research into the I Ching, which reached a turning point around 1971 when he grew dissatisfied with the critical apparatus in the Wilhelm translation, and conceived the idea of an entirely new translation. This took twenty years to materialize, but was aided in its progress by various scholars, notably James Hillman and Robert Hinshaw (co‑founder of the Daimon Verlag of Einsiedeln, Switzerland). Towards the end of the 1980s the American poet Stephen L. Karcher assisted Ritsema in bringing the work to completion.

In 1956 Ritsema began to collaborate with Froebe and the Swiss zoologist and natural philosopher Adolf Portmann (1897–1982) in the planning of the Eranos Conferences. Five years later Olga Froebe‑Kapteyn named Portmann and the Ritsemas as her successors entrusted to carry on the work of Eranos. However, when Froebe died in April 1962, the organizational work for the Eranos sessions fell squarely on the shoulders of Rudolf Ritsema, and from 1962 to 1982, the year of Portmann's death, the Ritsemas were single-handedly responsible for keeping the tradition of the Eranos Conferences alive.

In the summer of 1947, at the age of 28, Ritsema contracted poliomyelitis, a condition which entailed, in his case, diaphragm paralysis and which brought him to the threshold of death. Although he survived, the disease left him paralysed from the waist down. The following winter, at the suggestion of a neurologist who had recommended a warmer climate, the Ritsemas spent a month on the shores of Lake Maggiore, near Ascona in Switzerland, where Alwine von Keller had taken up residence at the Casa Shanti: the place happened to be situated next door to the Casa Gabriella, the house of the founder of Eranos, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881–1962). Froebe developed a liking for the Ritsemas and invited them to stay the next winter at the Casa Eranos. From then on the Ritsemas would spend a month every year as Froebe's guests, and a warm friendship developed among them (Froebe was also deeply interested in the I Ching).

At the age of 11 Ritsema entered the Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim, Germany, whose founders, Paul and Edith Geheeb, were to exert a profound influence on him. Upon the accession of the Nazis to power in Germany the Geheebs relocated to Switzerland, where they founded an alternative to their Odenwaldschule, the École d'humanité, and it was here that Ritsema met, towards the end of the course of his studies, his future wife, Catherine Gris, a young music teacher from Geneva. (They eventually married on 8 May 1945, when Ritsema was 26.)

In 1944 Ritsema and Catherine Gris began psychoanalysis under Alwine von Keller, whom Ritsema had previously encountered at the Odenwaldschule (where she worked as an English-literature teacher). It was von Keller who would now introduce him to the I Ching.

Rudolf Ritsema (3 October 1918, Velp, Gelderland – 8 May 2006) was the director of the Fondazione Eranos (Eranos Foundation) for over thirty years and the editor of the Eranos‑Jahrbuch serial (beginning with its vol. 38 published in 1972). Together with Shantena Augusto Sabbadini (b. 1943), the Italian physicist and spiritual thinker, he produced the first Italian rendering of the I Ching based directly on the Chinese original.