(19th October 1881-1962)

Born in London to Dutch philosopher and anarchist Truss Muysken and her husband, engineer and photographer Albertus Kapteyn (elder brother of the astronomer Jacob Kapteyn). As a child deep thinkers such as Bernard Shaw and Peter Kropotkin were frequent houseguests, and Olga was good friends with Marie Stopes, who went on to found the first birth control clinic in Britain. Olga grew up in a crucible of iconography, cosmic exploration, politics and human rights and the nuts-and-bolts practicalities of creating art.

In 1900, the family moved to Zurich and Olga started her studies at the School of Applied Arts, where she excelled in sewing, embroidery and jewellery-making. She went on to study history of art at the University of Zurich. Olga loved the outdoors; she was a keen skiier and mountaineer. In 1909 she married flautist Ian Hermann Fröbe, and the couple moved to Munich, then Berlin. As Europe descended into World War I, they moved back to the relative safety of Zurich, where Olga set up a literary salon and had twin daughters. Iwan died in a plane crash in September 1915.

It was a visit to the Monte Verità Sun Sanatorium, that seemingly gave Olga renewed purpose and direction. The Sanatorium was an established haven for philosophers, artists and anarchists and had become a place to explore utopian ideas; vegetarianism, nudism, light asceticism, dance therapy and occult beliefs. Olga adored it here, and her father bought Olga and her daughter Bettina Gertrude a farmhouse, Case Gabriella, near to the mountain. She was moved to study Indian philosophy, meditation and theosophy.

Olga’s circle of friends and influences included the poet Ludwig Derleth and the theologian Richard Wilhelm, whose translation of the I-Ching was, for Olga, a pivotal text. She was also introduced to members of the School Of Wisdom, who were investigating commonality between religions, and it’s believed that this is when she met Carl Jung.

Building on their mutual interest in the roots of religion, Jung and religious historian Rudolf Otto suggested that she used her recently-built conference room to establish a ‘meeting place between East and West’. From this, in 1933, sprang Eranos, a discussion group that met — and continues to meet — annually. The event sees scholars and thinkers come together to discuss all things spiritual, a ‘banquet’ of ideas. The theme of the inaugural symposium was ‘Yoga and Meditation in the East and the West’ and Jung spoke about ‘The Psychological Process of Individuation’.

Originally, a conference would last ten days, with two-hour lectures, given in the speaker’s mother tongue with no translation. An ancient gong would be struck at the beginning and resumption of speeches. There were also informal discussions outside, under two tall cedar trees with a view of Lake Maggiore.The conferences provided insights into the study of archetypes, and there was much discussion about how these archaic icons had remained almost unchanged over centuries, even millennia.

In 1934, commissioned by Jung, Fröbe-Kapteyn visited European and American libraries to research alchemy and archetypes to create an archive of over 6000 symbols. Now known as The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and described as a “magic wand of analogy”, the collection contains over 18,000 images, each with a description that places it in context culturally and geographically.

The ARAS is held at the Warburg Institute in London, with photographic copies at the Jung Institute in Zurich and Bollingen Institute in New York, and is used as a sourcebook for those interested in commonalities in mythology, dream imagery, ideologies and depth psychologies.

Olga dedicated her life to the cause, continuing to be a trailblazer in cross-disciplinary pollination, editing thirty Eranos Yearbooks (1933-1961). She died at Case Gabriella in April 1962. Posthumously, her work has been reevaluated and exhibited at the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou and was the focus of the Deep Knowledge exhibition at Kunsthalle Mainz in Germany. The Eranos Foundation is currently engaged in a project to restore and digitise Olga’s art collection.