A brilliant, eminently readable and (sometimes riotously) entertaining mythic comparison of the Garden of the Eden story from Genesis, as told by John Milton in his classic Paradise Lost and the Navajo creation story of the evolution of humankind through five worlds. Both narratives end with the arrival of humankind on earth as we are now. Dr. Paul Zolbrod, who for decades taught English literature at Allegheny College, went on to compile Navajo mythology while teaching at Dine College on the Navajo reservation. His book, Diné Bahane': The Navajo Creation Story has now been in print for more than 35 years. Paradise Revisited, which marries these two spectacularly similar and wildly dissimilar myths, is a book only Dr. Zolbrod has the knowledge and experience to have written. 532 pages with 147 illustrations, most color, and historical photos. With dozens of sidebars containing historical notes, explaining archetypal symbols, and illuminating sacred elements from mountains and medicine wheels to the ancient tree goddesses and sacred serpents that would find their way into burgeoning religions in reversed symbolism. With mythological notes on broader creation mythemes arising worldwide and a short biography of Paul Zolbrod, who died in 2025 while the book was in production. This book was his last quest, and he fulfilled it in the most spectacular possible fashion. This work of represents a collaboration of more than 250 painters, weavers, dancers, photographers, sandpainting artists, galleries, museums, scholars, mythologists, symbolists, editors, and university and Library of Congress research librarians.
Language
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 40 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-0-578-77131-1 (9780578771311)
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Schweitzer Classification
Scholar, playwright, and translator Paul G. Zolbrod was born in Pittsburgh in 1932. Following service in the Korean War, he matriculated at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he was graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English. He spent 1958 as a Fulbright Fellow in France, then returned to the University of Pittsburgh as an Andrew Mellon Fellow and earned a doctorate in late Medieval and early Renaissance English literature. Over the next decades, he would receive two research fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Paul joined the faculty of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1964 and would teach there for thirty years, eventually becoming Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English and the head of his department. He special passion was Paradise Lost, and it would run like a bright thread through the tapestry of literature he wove for his students.Yet there would be even more. In 1967, still early in his career, he made a visit to the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, and there a question formed in his mind that is answered by this book: he wanted to know if the Native American oral literature he was hearing reached the archetypal depths plumbed by the great epics laid down in writing. Homer's Odyssey was, after all, first a tale told by a poet, not a book to read.In 1984, after more than a decade and a half of research, Paul Zolbrod's Diné Bahane': The Navajo Creation Story went to press and gained the status of an anthropological classic instantly. It has been in print for more than four decades and has been a University of New Mexico Press Top Ten best seller every single year of its long shelf life. It would not be Paul Zolbrod's last adventure with Navajo culture. In 1996, accompanied by his anthropologist wife, Dr. Joanne McCloskey, he joined Navajo language teacher Roseann Willink, a professor at the University of New Mexico, in creating Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing for the University of New Mexico Press. It explored, among other things, Navajo weaving as storytelling, in the same way that Navajo desert pictographs, ceremony, ritual, and dance tell the story of the people. Zolbrod and Willink were joined by dozens of Navajo weavers and cultural analysts.In 1994, Paul Zolbrod retired from Allegheny College, yet never lost contact with the place that would always feel like home. He would go on to teach for another two decades at Diné College in Crownpoint, New Mexico, and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he taught Mythologies of the Native Americas, a doctoral-level course in the current mythologies of the Alaskan, Athabaskan and Native American tribes and those of pre-Colombian Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations. At age 90, Paul began to explore the idea of comparing the Navajo creation story with John Milton's Paradise Lost largely for one reason: to establish the status of Native American oral literature as being on an equal footing with any of the great epics produced by cultures with alphabetic writing. It is the first such comparison ever made, and it is also the only one that challenges the assumption that alphabetic history and literature must be superior to the works that are passed on by ceremonial enactment, petroglyph, pictograph, chant, oral recitation and weavings. This, the final work of Dr. Zolbrod, offers the world profound evidence of the mythic equality and epic depth of oral literature and, as he writes in his Conclusion, provides a healthier way to perceive and relate to the ecosystem that the Navajo experience as sentient and sacred. It also demonstrates a way to interact with women that honors their equality and full worth.We welcome you to the immense adventure it is to read this work, to learn both myths, and to explore their critical similarities and differences. It is a delightful journey. 532 pages with 147 illustrations.
