Bollingen Foundation

Mary Conover Mellon and Paul Mellon went to Zurich in the years before the war to work with Jung, and the foundation they established in 1945 took its name from the village on the upper lake of Zurich where Jung had built, by hand and in stages, the stone tower he retreated to. Mary Mellon, who had driven the project, died in 1946, and Paul Mellon carried it on.

Its instrument was a book series. The Bollingen Series ran to something over two hundred and fifty volumes across roughly a hundred works, published first through Pantheon Books and from the 1960s by Princeton University Press, which continues to keep much of it in print. The foundation also made grants and awarded fellowships, and it wound up its grant making at the end of the 1960s, leaving the series behind it.

It also gave a poetry prize, and that produced the one public controversy in its history. The Bollingen Prize, first awarded in 1949 for a book published the previous year, went to Ezra Pound, then confined in Washington after wartime broadcasts for Fascist Italy. The award was fiercely attacked, the Library of Congress withdrew from administering it, and the prize passed to Yale University, which still awards it.

Run an eye down what the Bollingen Series produced in English. The Collected Works of Jung. The Wilhelm and Baynes I Ching, which is the version through which most of the English-speaking world met the book. Heinrich Zimmer's work on Indian art and myth, edited after his death by Joseph Campbell. Campbell's own Hero with a Thousand Faces. Translations of Mircea Eliade. The papers from the Eranos conferences at Ascona. The essays of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Editions of Paul Valery and of Rilke. Substantial primary texts in translation across several traditions.

A great deal of what an English reader can read of comparative religion exists in that language because a private American foundation paid translators, editors and printers to make it exist. That is a custodial relationship of a kind the atlas has to be able to record: not holding an object, but holding the access to a body of material.

It is also a reason for care. A single editorial programme, formed around a particular reading of Jung and of myth, chose what was worth translating, and the choices shaped what a generation of English readers took the field to be. Works outside that orbit waited longer or never appeared. Naming the foundation as custodian rather than as a neutral conduit is the accurate description, and it is why the row exists.