Rudolf Ritsema  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. Ritsema was born at Velp near Rheden in the Netherlands to the family of Ipo Christiaan Ritsema, whose ancestors hailed from Friesland, and his wife Frances Johanna, "née" Van den Berg, who was partly of Frisian, partly of British and Huguenot origin. From his mother and from maternal grandmother Ritsema inherited a religious disposition and a sense of being guided in life by God – indeed, of being carried in God’s arms. Ritsema’s father on the other hand, trained in chemistry and pursuing an abiding interest in biology, was by temperament a scientist and a rationalist thinker. 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.) After leaving the École d’humanité and subsequently obtaining his bachelor's degree Ritsema enrolled in the University of Geneva, but soon financial difficulties intervened as the outbreak of the Second World War put an end to the flow of money from the Netherlands. Ritsema then worked at odd jobs to support himself, but continued voraciously to read on his own, particularly in French and German literatures, Tibetan Buddhism, and in Jungian psychology. 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).