Overview

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 of them 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.

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Paul Zolbrod claimed to have been a lackadaisical high school student, and his first job-as a delivery truck driver -didn't altogether portend a decorated scholar's life. The Korean War would change all that. Drafted in 1953 by the U.S. Army, he served in Japan from 1953-1955. When he returned, he had a G.I. Bill in his hand, and he'd spend it close to home.Paul was born in Pittsburgh to Caroline Engler Zolbrod and Herman Zolbrod, both immigrants, and had attended Mt. Lebanon High School. Now he would matriculate 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 was, by all accounts, a passionate, spellbinding teacher, and Milton's work, especially Paradise Lost, 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, 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.What was to come was a spectacular adventure. First he would write Diné Bahane': the Navajo Creation Story, compiled from historical translations and deep personal conversations with Navajo friends and teachers. Then, in 1996, accompanied by his anthropologist wife, Dr. Joanne McCloskey, he joined Navajo language teacher Roseann Willink in creating Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing for the Museum of New Mexico Press. 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 Highlands University; at Diné College on the Navajo reservation; and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he created a doctoral-level course on the mythologies of 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 or hieroglyphic writing. He accepted the invitation of Pleiades Books to publish this book. It is the first such comparison ever made, and it is also the only one that challenges the assumption that written history and literature must be superior to the works that are passed on by ceremonial enactment, ritual, petroglyph, pictograph, chant, storytelling, weavings and dance.This, Dr. Zolbrod's final work, offers profound evidence of the mythic equality and epic depth of oral literature. Further, Paradise Revisited offers a way of interacting with women that honors their equality and full worth and provides an example of a healthier way to perceive the environment, which the Navajo experience as sentient and sacred. His work complete, he died at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the morning of February 21st, 2025.

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