Embodying the Great Mother
Approaching Religion December 2, 2025 Chloë Sugden
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of the Eranos Conferences and creator of the Eranos Archive, used her self-identification with the "Great Mother archetype" as a strategy for feminine spiritual authority. Through conference-hosting, image curation, archiving, and visionary art-making, she expressed this authority. Analysis of her Visions drawings (1934–37) and Archive images situates her within 1930s New Age esotericism. Her "mythopoetic performance" of the Great Mother is interpreted as a mode of institutional and visionary authority, exemplifying how fin-de-siècle women mobilized visionary experience and archetypal symbolism to construct autonomous spiritual and epistemic leadership within modernist intellectual cultures.