Why a Publisher Counts as a Custodian Here

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.