Paradise Revisited

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.

Pages: 532, Hardcover, Pleiades Books