Bollingen And Coomaraswamy And Archive

Bollingen

This lively, intimate, sometimes disrespectful, but always knowledgeable history of the Bollingen Foundation confirms its pervasive influence on American intellectual life. Conceived by Paul and Mary Mellon as a means of publishing in English the collected works of C. G. Jung, the Foundation broadened to encompass scholarship and publication in a remarkable number of fields. Here are wonderful portraits of the central figures, including the Mellons, Jung himself, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, D. T. Suzuki, Natacha Rambova, Vladimir Nabokov, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, and Kurt and Helen Wolff.

Archives of Asian Art

The Disguises of the Demon

Among the most ancient deities of South Asia, the yaksha straddle the boundaries between popular and textual traditions in both Hinduism and Buddhism and both benevolent and malevolent facets. As a figure of material plenty, the yaksis epitomized as Kubera, god of wealth and king of the yaks In demonic guise, the yaksis related to a large family of demonic and quasi-demonic beings, such as nagas, gandharvas, raks, and the man-eating pisaacas. Translating and interpreting texts and passages from the Vedic literature, the Hindu epics, the Puranas, Kālidāsa's Meghadūta, and the Buddhist Jātaka Tales, Sutherland traces the development and transformation of the elusive yaksfrom an early identification with the impersonal absolute itself to a progressively more demonic and diminished terrestrial characterization. Her investigation is set within the framework of a larger inquiry into the nature of evil, misfortune, and causation in Indian myth and religion.