From Monte Verità to Esalen: The Revenge of the Mystery Cults
The following essay was co-authored by Cynthia Chung and myself and is found in Revenge of the Mystery Cults volume 1. The important link of the Eranos Conferences which tied the Black Mass revivalism at Monte Verita to the emergence of the Esalen Institute (which shaped the social engineering project of the 1960s sex-drug-rock’n’roll counterculture) is featured here in some fairly grim detail. Half of this essay is available in this location for free. To access the full story, consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack (which comes with access to all live events and PDFs) or just pick up a copy of Revenge of the Mystery Cults volume 1.
The Rise of Monte Verità
In 1900, artists Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann founded an anarchist, bohemian, nudist, sun-worshipping, vegetarian artists’ colony within the small village of Ascona, Switzerland, and named it Monte Verità, meaning “mountain of truth.”
The concept for Monte Verità began with the arrival of Mikhail Bakunin, the recognized leader of international anarchism, in 1870, when he moved to Locarno, Switzerland (less than 2 km away from Ascona) and lived there for several years, attracting expressionist writers, artists, anarchists and radicals who took up residence in the surrounding region. Bakunin’s influence in the area would be the inspiration for the formation of a commune years later, Monte Verità.
Monte Verità became the international meeting place for all those who rebelled against science, technology, and the rise of the modern industrial nation-state. On the surface it was and is popularly regarded as a nature cure resort, offering treatments that include a vegetarian diet, health foods, fasting, earth cures, water cures, nude sun baths, nude air baths, and nature hikes.
The region of Ascona attracted an eclectic array of guests, from anarchists, theosophists, communists, psychoanalysts, vegetarians, rhythmic dancers, nudists, and bohemians alike. Among the notable regulars at Ascona were Herman Hesse, Carl Jung, Prince Peter Kropotkin (who became an anarchist, after joining the watchmakers of Jura in Switzerland, who were the disciples of Bakunin), Anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner, D.H. Lawrence (a mentor of Aldous Huxley), and the list goes on.
It had developed such a strong reputation as a Utopia, that even H.G. Wells was smitten, placing his utopia in Ticino, the Italian region of Ascona in his “Modern Utopia” (1905), and “In A World Set Free,” (1914) setting the rebirth of society in Lago Maggiore near Ascona.
In 1905, Otto Gross (an early disciple of Sigmund Freud) moved to Ascona and quickly became a sort of ruler amongst the diverse membership. Otto Gross was considered a major force in the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, and also became a key figure in the anarchist, psychoanalytic and spiritual circles. He would conduct psychoanalysis sessions, where he would advise his “subjects” to act out their sexual fantasies, often with himself and/or his wife. Gross wanted to revive pagan mysticism, with the freedom to engage in heavy doses of sex orgies.
In 1908, Gross’ addiction to morphine and cocaine (to which his mentor Freud shared[1]), would lead him to commit himself to the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich, where he was put under the care of Carl Jung.
At Burghölzli, Carl Jung diagnosed Gross as a schizophrenic.
Over the course of the therapy, however, Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview had changed when he attempted to analyse Gross and partially had the tables turned on him.[2] This led Jung to visit Ascona for himself, whereupon he adopted the ideas of Gross, turning to pagan sun worship and sun mythology.
Herman Hesse and Carl Jung are described as among the many who had found themselves under Otto Gross’ spell[3]. Historian Arthur Mitzman writes in his “Anarchism, Expressionism and Psychoanalysis,” that:
“Otto Gross, as Jung’s guru throughout most of this evolution and a man capable of exerting a remarkable charisma among the Bohemian artists and outcasts in Munich, Berlin, Ascona and Vienna, must be considered the principal source of the ideas inspiring Jung and his friends in the decade before 1920.”
What was Otto Gross’ philosophy?
Gross believed that in order to achieve freedom, one must never repress any desire. Nothing was forbidden no matter how seemingly irrational, even the encouragement of suicide if his patient so desired. Gross believed that Western civilization lay at the centre of this oppression of the individual’s freedom. Those who were coming to Monte Verità were ultimately all sick, and they were made sick by the repressive ideals and values of Western civilization.
At Monte Verità, Gross promised to cure them by arousing the animal desire from within, promising to free them from their inhibitions, fears, and self-imprisonment. It was uncommon for Gross not to have sexual intercourse with his treating patient as part of the prescribed therapy.
Gross became increasingly political, particularly in Ascona, where Jung himself writes, Gross had planned “to found a free college from which he thought to attack Western civilization, the obsessions of inner as well as outer authority, the social bonds which these imposed, the distortions of a parasitic form of society, in which everyone was forced to live from everyone else to survive.”[4]
One particular individual named Max Weber found himself devoting his passion to Otto Gross in the construction of this free college[5]. Although this project didn’t become reality as these reformers hoped (Otto Gross became too unstable to lead anything), it is interesting to note that among the goals of the new school was the merging of Freudian Psychoanalysis with Marxist theories of sociology in order to engage in an international cultural war that would create the conditions for an ultimate global revolution[6].
Otto Gross’ biographer noted that the degenerate psychologist "is said to have adopted Babylon as his civilization, in opposition to that of Judeo-Christian Europe.... if Jezebel had not been defeated by Elijah, world history would have been different and better. Jezebel was Babylon, love religion, Astarte, Ashtoreth; by killing her, Jewish monotheistic moralism drove pleasure from the world." [7]
In ‘The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness’, historian Michael Minnicino writes:
“Gross's solution was to recreate the cult of Astarte in order to start a sexual revolution and destroy the bourgeois, patriarchal family. Among the members of his cult were: Frieda and D.H. Lawrence; Franz Kafka; Franz Werfel, the novelist who later came to Hollywood and wrote The Song of Bernadette; philosopher Martin Buber; Alma Mahler, the wife of composer Gustave Mahler, and later the liaison of Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and Franz Werfel; among others. The Ordo Templis Orientalis (OTO), the occult fraternity set up by Satanist Aleister Crowley, had its only female lodge at Ascona. It is sobering to realize the number of intellectuals now worshipped as cultural heroes who were influenced by the New Age madness in Ascona—including almost all the authors who enjoyed a major revival in America in the 1960's and 1970's.”[8]
Gross would encourage the suicides of Lotte Hattemer (in 1906) and Sophie Benz (in 1911) as the only way to liberate themselves. They had also been among his many, many lovers[9].
He had diagnosed the two women as having suffered from incurable mental illness (dementia praecox). He had left the poison with which Lotte Hattemer killed herself lying within her reach.[10] He informed psychiatrists in 1913 (during one of his many visitations to the asylum between 1912 and 1920), “When I could no longer intervene analytically, I had a duty to poison her,” in reference to Sophie Benz.[11]
Gross is also quoted commenting “A beautiful death is better than a low probability of cure.”[12]
Before Carl Jung rose to prominence, it had been the expectation of Freud that Otto Gross would be his heir in the psychoanalytic field, however, Gross was becoming increasingly unstable.
By 1912, Gross was forcibly interned in a psychiatric institution in order to avoid being tried for murder and assisting suicide. Otto’s father, Professor Hans Gross who is considered the founder of criminology, was behind this intervention.
In 1913, at the lunatic asylum in Tulln, Gross is recorded saying:
“My whole life was focused on overthrowing authority, for example that of the father. In my view there is only the maternal right, the right of the horde…So when I’ve finished my work, let come what may. Actually, I would like to live to the age of forty-five, and then go under…preferably participating in an anarchist assassination…That would be the most beautiful way.”[13]
Some have credited Otto Gross as the founding grandfather of the 20th century counterculture, a pioneer as the first rock n roller, hard punk lifestyle so to speak. And he did not disappoint. Gross died in 1920, at the age of forty-three, a few days after being found in the street, near-starved and freezing after eight years of going in and out of asylums, largely revolving around drug addiction. Not even Sid Vicious could ask for a more apt role model.
The same year that Gross was forcibly interned in a psychiatric institute, the start of his downward spiral of “individual freedom” to do whatever one wishes, Jung published “The Psychology of the Unconsciousness,” where he began to spiritualize the psychoanalysis movement and wrote of sun worship and sun mythology as the original natural religion of the Aryan people.[14]
It gave an academic respectability to Ascona’s Aryan sun religion, and he began to receive followers from all over the world, who wanted to experience the mythos of their own unconsciousness.
With the publishing of “The Psychology of the Unconsciousness,” a split began to develop between Jung and Freud.
In the years that followed, it became fashionable among banking and intelligence circles, to go under analysis with Jung.
In 1913, Edith Rockefeller traveled to Zurich to be treated for depression by Carl Jung and contributed generously to the Zurich Analytical Psychology Club. She would later become a Jungian analyst with a full-time practice in the States attracting many socialite patients. She also paid for Jung’s writings to be translated into English in order to help disseminate his ideas.[15]
Paul (son of Andrew Mellon, co-founder to the Mellon National Bank) and Mary Mellon financed the Bollingen Foundation dedicated to disseminating Jung’s work.
In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa, and his cousins Sara and Richard Mellon were all among the richest eight people in the United States with fortunes between $400-700 million each (around $3.7-6.5 billion in today’s dollars).
Through these initiatives, there was a spill over of the ideas of Ascona into the circles of the rich and powerful. British central banker Montagu Norman and members of the Dulles family also went under Jungian analysis.
Allen Dulles would be at the center of the formation of a vicious CIA program named MKULTRA during the Cold War. The relevance of this will be made clear in chapter 8.
Ordo Templi Orientis: The Secret Doctrine of “Sex Magic”
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”
– The core tenet of the Ordo Templi Orientis
Ascona was considered sacred ground for occultists going back hundreds even thousands of years, the area containing ruins of ancient ritual sites and artifacts.