This article accompanies the fable
Kama Sutra


Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland

Monte Verità is in the hills above Ascona, seen in this picture.

It all seemed to make sense... Old Europe’s empires were imploding and Christianity had lost its grip, industrialization soiled the landscape and people fled for the hills or for America.  From around 1900 and for several decades, Ascona would lure Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, among others.  Hermann Hesse too... It was in many ways the genesis of a Western counter-cultural movement that embraced all the –isms: surrealism, psychoanalysis, feminism, anarchism, communism, pacifism, nudism, vegetarianism, a lineage that eventually produced the hippies.  In those days it was about the notion of place – a pilgrimage to a physical place to share spiritual and intellectual ideas – and it was about a New Man or a New Woman, building on the insights of Nietzsche and Walt Whitman as well as earlier figures like Saint Francis of Assisi.

Nowadays the buildings on the hills of Monte Verità (“Hill of Truth”) are for the ghosts, although they are used occasionally for conferences and some are preserved as a museum.