Paul Zolbrod's Beautiful Book Is Out

Full-color hardcover with dust jacket ships in January. Order here.

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• 522 pages

• 147 images (most color)

• Foreword by Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery

• Publisher’s Preface on John Milton and a mythic analysis by Dr. Morgaan Sinclair. A wealth of mythic, image, cultural and historical notes.

Go to www.PleiadesBooks.com to Order

It was the last great dream of Dr. Zolbrod, a consummate Milton scholar and the man who compiled and translated the Navajo creation myth into English, to establish the great epics of the Native American oral literature as equal to any epics laid down in writing by any culture. He has succeeded spectacularly using the ravishing poetic work of John Milton and the complex, poignant, sometimes humorous, always deeply spiritual masterwork of Navajo story craft. The mythic landscape of the Navajo world is deeply moving, believing as they do that the earth is sacred and sentient and that the goal of one’s life should be the creation and maintenance of hozhoon, which roughly translates as the synergy of beauty, balance, and harmony. For them, spirit is immanent in all things and in all people.

A FEW IMPORTANT NOTES:

• We will not at this point be using Kindle or any other digital book marketing platform. Here’s why: We have 147 images in this book. The overwhelming majority of them are color, and they are licensed from professional photographers, museums, and art galleries all over the world. They come from Getty, Alamy, Adobe and other professional agencies. AI is ripping off images from artists all over the planet, and artists are losing money and losing RIGHTS, which is very serious. Until the legal terrain becomes much clearer, we have no idea we can protect these photographers OR DR. ZOLBROD’S WORK if we put out on as vulnerable a platform as Kindle.

• Second, we cannot encrypt a book on Kindle.

• The book will appear on Amazon, Bookshop and other warehousers — and in Barnes & Noble, etc. — in Febuary. When you purchase from us directly, you’ll get your book faster and give us a better bottom line.

• For you scholars out there, we’ll also send you permissions instructions if you want to quote. You can let us know which passages you’d like to quote and for what purpose—academic, editorial, or in a book you write. And then we’ll let you know how to proceed.

• If you want to access images for use in newspaper reviews, etc., we can help. Some images can’t be used at all (photographer’s privilege) and some are public domain and some are from Wikipedia and easily accessible. Every image in the book is accompanied by the photograph’s information, so you’ll be able to locate images to license very easily.

NOW FOR SOME FUN STUFF.

Consistent with Carl Jung’s theory that the archetypes of the collective unconscious appear in the myths of all peoples—and with Joseph Campbell’s theory that the Hero’s and Heroine’s Journeys are fundamental myths that appear in virtually all cultures globally—both the Christian myth of Paradise and the Navajo tale of how Five-Fingered Earth-Surface People emerged in the Fifth World are chock-full of heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, demons and monsters—and instances of our all-too-human fantastic successes and devastating failures. However, though our myths have many features in common, they are also shot through with and sometimes crucially shaped by beliefs that are particular to isolated human families. These are beliefs engendered by individual groups’ unique natural environments and their specific experiences, challenges, quests, and imaginative attempts to resolve the vital and sometimes existential questions we have about who we are and why we are here, about our purposes and potentials, about how we relate to the divine, and about how we should solve specific, pressing problems.

So, the myths Dr. Zolbrod explores are stunningly similar and radically different. The Judeo-Christian worldview is monotheistic, top-down hierarchical, and resolutely patriarchal, with a singular-authority deity who creates the natural world and yet is separate from it. For the Navajo, Spirit is emanate in the world, shining in everything. Women and men are equal—and need each other very much.

In both myths, the relationships between masculine and feminine conjure the generative forces that ignite evolutionary processes that will usher humanity into the physical Earth=world. These are human beings as we know them: beautiful and flawed. They love and are swept away by passions; they fight and are wounded by their disputes, Worse, they are subjected to the chaos wrought by Tricksters: in the case of the Navajo, that is a trouble-making rascal of a coyote; in the case of Adam and Eve, it is a quintessentially evil and viciously malignant demon.

But Tricksters, manifestly iniquitous or merely mischievous, are boundary-dwellers, and once boundary-dwellers are engaged, the world will change. For in every case, a boundary-dweller will take a knife to the sky of human reality, and the energies of change, pent up behind the starry veils between worlds, will rush through the gaping slit and bleed like dye into the fabric of consciousness. Happily, all is never lost, for from the ashes of the burnt old world’s fabrics, flocks of phoenixes will always rise.

Paradise Revisited is a joy to read, start to finish. It is, first, graced with the incandescent language of Milton. The poet’s riveting terrors of the war between God and Lucifer—at the end of which the Angel of Light is condemned to hell for eternity—are nothing short of mesmeric. His account of the Serpent’s cruel manipulation of a curious Eve—with the one thing she can’t have—is heartbreaking. And these are only two of the passages from Milton’s epic poem, among the most lauded works in the English language, that Zolbrod includes in Paradise Revisited.

Paradise Revisited is further blessed with the great narrative powers of the Navajo and the archetypal presences of Asdzaan nádleehe (Changing Woman), Jóhonaa’éí the Sun, the Warrior Twins, and the Trickster Ma’ii (the Coyote), whose great talent is wreaking havoc. In one episode he casts the stars into the heavens with no aforethought whatsoever—because he is impatient—and creates a dangerously disorganized mess strewn all over the sky—an act of truly asinine recklessness. The damnedest thing, of course, is that Coyote will be forgiven every single time—though he doesn’t deserve it, and though it certainly is not fair. No one has any other choice as Coyote is immortal: though he is repeatedly killed, he will be serially resurrected from the dead, becoming instantly available to subject humanity to his supremely irritating waggery once again. Apparently, annoying rascality, like hope, springs eternal.

There is devastation and soul-crushing loss in the story of Adam and Eve. There is pain, ribald sexuality, and healing humor in the creation mythology of the Navajo. Both are gifts for our time, yet blessings that never grow old.

Inside the covers of Paradise Revisited there wait two great epics. They are tales told by a man who is, in the same moment, one of the greatest storytellers in the world and one of the finest mythologists of our time. It is a profound honor for Pleiades Books to publish this work. We are grateful, dear professor. We are grateful indeed.