William McGuire’s gentle and genial chronicle of the Bollingen Foundation and its services to scholarship in the fields of mythology, psychology, mysticism, and various forms of esoterica is not, by any means, a history of mere fads and fashionable ideas. But during its less than three decades of active operation—it was dismantled in the late 1960s and its publishing operations transferred to Princeton University Press—it was one of the few prestigious cultural organizations dedicated both to the recovery of the past and to the promotion of a spiritual approach to modern problems, an approach that was hospitable to mysticism and some of the odder branches of the occult.

The Bollingen Press, begun in 1940 by Paul and Mary Mellon, had as its worthy aim the publication of the writings of C. G. Jung, the most mystically minded of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis. (Both Mellons had undergone brief Jungian analyses and attended Jung’s seminars in Switzerland. The press itself was named after Jung’s tower retreat in the little town of Bollingen on Lake Zurich.) Under the aegis of the Bollingen Foundation, incorporated two years later, the Mellon millions sponsored important archeological expeditions (excavations at Samothrace, a center of Greek mystery cults), offered fellowships and grants-in-aid to eminent scholars, artists, and poets, and sometimes to indigent novelists (many of whom were driven out of Europe by the Nazis), established poetry prizes and distinguished lectureships (the annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), and engaged in ambitious publishing ventures