This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Private Collections gathers three custodians outside any institution, each showing what private control changes about access, authenticity or influence.
The Sodhi family of Kartarpur has held the Kartarpur Bir, believed to be the original 1604 manuscript of the Adi Granth compiled under Guru Arjan, within one Punjabi family for four centuries rather than in a temple, museum or state body. The family permits only rare scholarly viewing and has consistently declined unrestricted examination or physical dating, itself the center of long-running debate, while many Sikhs regard the manuscript as their scripture's most authoritative surviving copy.
Oded Golan, an Israeli engineer and collector, held the James Ossuary before and after it became internationally famous in 2002. Without a museum's continuous access, conservation or independent oversight, his ownership became central to the object's controversy alongside its unclear excavation history; a decade-long forgery trial ended in his 2012 acquittal, though the court ruled only that fraud had not been proven, not that the inscription was authentic.
The Bollingen Foundation is a different kind of private custodian again, a publishing and funding body rather than a holder of one sacred object. Established in 1945 by Paul and Mary Mellon and named for the Swiss village where Carl Jung built his tower, its Bollingen Series funded the English translations of Jung's Collected Works, the Wilhelm and Baynes I Ching, and the work of Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, meaning many primary texts this atlas cites exist in English because of money it spent before winding up its grant making in 1969.