A preliminary remark

An Anglo-Italian polymath, writer, historian of ideas, metaphysical thinker, and spiritual seeker, Zolla has a unique place in twentieth-century religious, comparative, and cultural studies. His rigorous and passionate explorations of shamanism, Gnosticism, alchemy, and esoteric doctrines, and his original views on archetypes as the unifying patterns underlying historical processes, on the mystic state conceived as the crux and marrow of human experience, and on syncretism as the equalization of philosophies and religions on a trans-historical plan, make Zolla an unusual thinker, and a candidate for a nonparochial reconsideration of his spiritual anthropology. Zolla's work is imbued with the passion for truth that Abraham Joshua Heschel immediately recognized at the time of their first encounter in Rome in the late 1960s. In fact, Zolla was the dedicatee of the Italian edition of Heschel’s Passion for truth (1974). (quoted from: Zolla, Elémire, Encyclopedia of Religion, Lindsay Jones Editor in chief, 2nd edition, 14, Macmillan Reference USA, 2004: 9984-9987).

Life

Elémire Zolla was born in Turin on July 9, 1926. His father, Venanzio, was a well known Anglo-Italian painter; his mother, Blanche Smith, was a musician from Kent. Zolla was brought up speaking English, Italian, French, Spanish and German. Later he would master several other languages, including Russian (he translated Pavel Florenskji’s Ikonostas as Le porte regali, Milan, 1977). He graduated in Law from the University of Turin, and also attended courses in psychiatry held at the town asylum. A severe lung disease contracted at the age of twenty-two gave him recurrent reminders throughout his life of the need to cherish every drop of vital energy. From a religious point of view, he was agnostic, but a fervent believer, as he used to say, in the boundless power of belief. In the prime of his life he wrote stories, including "An Angelic Visit on Via dei Martiri", and two novels, Minuetto all’inferno (Minuet in hell, 1956) and Cecilia o la disattenzione (Cecilia or inattention, 1961).

As a literary critic he freelanced for the main periodicals of the time, contributing essays on Franz Kafka, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Zolla developed a keen interest in American matters from literary, historical, juridical, and ethnological angles. On the suggestion of Mario Praz, the leading Anglicist at the University of Rome, who had been highly impressed by Zolla’s earlier investigations on Herman Melville’s Clarel, on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Septimius Felton, Zolla was offered the post of associate professor of American literature at the University of Rome in 1959. A full professorship followed in 1967. He was appointed director of the Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Genoa, where he was also chair of Anglo-American literature and Germanic philology (1970-1974). In those same years, before transferring to the University of Rome to serve as professor of American literature, he directed the Tessin Institute of Advanced Studies at Lugano, Switzerland, where he organized summer courses dealing with the metaphysical assumptions of Latin, Greek, Hindu, Chinese, Iranian, Hebrew, Islamic, and African civilizations. Zolla was also the founder and editor of an Italian-language journal in transcultural and religious studies, Conoscenza religiosa(1969-1983), and he was a regular contributor to numerous other journals, many in English. He served on the board of editors of Cahiers de l’hermetisme, Connaissance des religions, Incognita, and Quaderni di Italianistica, and was a member of the advisory board of the African Institute for the Studies of Humanistic Values at the University of Cincinnati, as well as for the Centre for the Study of Eurasian Shamanism at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and the scientific council of the Centre d’anthropologie et de civilizations Européenne at the University of Strasbourg. Zolla became professor emeritus in American Literature at the University of Rome after he retired in 1991. He spent the last 11 years of his life in Montepulciano, the small cité d’art in Southern Tuscany whose inhabitants speak even today Dante’s language. Assisted by his wife, Grazia, while his physical health was declining, Zolla completed ten new works, the last being Discesa all’Ade e resurrezione (Milan: Adelphi, 2002), a philosophical meditation on the hermetic motif of the journey of the human soul once the flesh has been discarded. Il dio dell’ebbrezza: Antologia dei moderni dionisiaci (Turin: Einaudi 1998), is an exegesis of the Dyonisian traces in modern literature, and Uscite dal mondo (Milan: Adelphi, 1992) is a collection of essays focusing on the goal of life in light of the amazing new perspectives offered by virtual reality technology.

Thought: A bird’s eye view

In a long interview with a journalist shortly before his death, Zolla teasingly predicted: "It won’t be easy to retrace the lives I have lived and the directions of my thought"(quoted from Un destino itinerante, E. Zolla, D. Fasoli eds. , Venice 2002). On another occasion, when asked who had been a key figure in his own quest, he replied by quoting two metaphors, both of them aquatic. The first is from Zolla’s collection of essays Che cos’è la tradizione (What is tradition?, 1971), a work that Bernard Wall described as a manifesto of a fearless program of reaction against the spiritual atrophy of modern civilization: "Humans are like carp,"wrote Zolla, "who flourish and grow when there is a rock in the center of their pond that they can swim around in harmonious circles" (p. 9). The second metaphor, from Zolla’s Verità segrete esposte in evidenza (Neglected truths exposed, 1990), is contained in a broader reflection, abbreviated here: "Every life,"wrote Zolla, "comprises an invisible interiority that is substantial to it. The only way to grasp this is to sidestep tangible appearances, to take a leap against the current like the salmon, who is the living symbol of knowledge in the Old Norse Scriptures". The carp circling the rock and the salmon swimming upstream towards the source – no images could better express the two leading traits in Zolla’s intellectual biography and at the same time the character of his peculiar philosophical vision.

Syncretism, which Zolla vigorously defended in his essay "Il sincretismo" (1986), and metaphysical experience, which in the first lines of Archetypes (1981) he described as "the gathering in of the aloof mind" when it "becomes absorbed in its self-existent identity and sameness," were as much leitmotifs in Zolla’s pursuit of a unitive knowledge as was his incoercible drive toward the systematic exploration of ‘otherness’, a notion that he shaped into an extraordinarily vast array of implications, much beyond its strict ethnological meaning. In a memorable lecture given at the Interreligious Colloquium at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 1974 (see Ibish and Marculescu, 1978), Zolla described otherness as an antipodal category of the human spirit, the paradigm of an inverted world where ordinary life might flow peacefully between action and contemplation, and the esoteric life as a joyous apprenticeship in metaphysical experience. This broader notion of otherness offers a key to an unbiased investigation of Zolla’s accumulated research into alchemy, including Western, Indian, and Daoist notions of immortality; esotericism, with a special bent for ecstatic Qabbalah, Sufism, Zoroastrian, and Tantric traditions; mysticism, which he explored in a monumental anthology of pagan and Christian contemplatives (I mistici dell’Occidente, 1963); shamanism, particularly in the Native North American and Korean contexts; and traditions and metaphysics, fields par excellence of Zolla’s lifelong spiritual quest. His encounters with survivals of the past among the North American Indians, in Africa (Nubia and Cairo), and especially in the East (Israel, Iran, India, Bali, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan), were analyzed in his quarterly journal Conoscenza religiosa. An international group of leading specialists contributed to its sighty-eight issues. A bi-lingual new series of Zolla’s journal, edited by Grazia Marchianò, is part of the services provided on-line by A. I. R. E. Z. from 2010 onwards.

Works

Eighty percent of Zolla’s writings are in Italian; approximately ten percent are in English, with the remaining works in Spanish, French, and German. Essays and papers provided to international conferences are scattered in several journals and volumes of proceedings. His articles in "Il corriere della sera", Milan, "La Naciòn", Buenos Aires and the Sunday Supplement of "Il sole 24ore"(published between 2000 and 2002) have ranged from travel accounts to social, literary, and art criticism.

Among Zolla’s early works in social criticism, The Eclipse of the intellectual (1959), translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1968), is a fierce attack on modern mass civilization. The influence of this book is acknowledged in Marshall Mcluhan’s From cliché to Archetype (New York, 1970).

The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the American Indian, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1973), is an impressive study of the images of the Indian in American literature from the beginning of colonization to 1969.

Among Zolla’s books in English, Language and Cosmogony (Ipswich, U. K. , 1976) is a philologically-based analysis of Indo-European roots leading to a reconstruction of the Vedic cosmogonical process. His The Uses of Imagination and the Decline of the West (Ipswich, U. K. , 1978) is a concise discussion on the decay of creative imagination as distinct from and opposite to fancy in the Modern West, with a learned, comparative approach to the theory of imagination in Iranian metaphysics and Indian Vedānta.

Archetypes: The Persisting of Unifying Patterns (New York, 1982) begins with a description of metaphysical experience in terms akin to samādhi in the Vedānta philosophy, then moves on to a consideration of the archetypal patterns and their modes of operation as mirrored in mathematics, poetry, history, and politics.

The Androgyne: Fusion of the Sexes (London, 1981), published in the United States as The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female (New York, 1982), is a scholarly and beautifully illustrated pageant of the man-woman image throughout history and myth.

Zolla’s essay, "Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action"can be found in Contemplation and Action in World Religions: Selected Papers from the Rothko Chapel Colloquium "Traditional Modes of Contemplation and Action", edited by Yusuf Ibish and Ileana Marculescu (Houston, Tex. , and Seattle, Wash. , 1978).

Encyclopedic entries by Zolla include "Les religions des Amériques: Tribus Indiennes du Canada et des Etats-Unis", in Encyclopédie des religions, edited by Frédéric Lenoir and Ysé

T. Masquelier, vol. 1, pp. 1235-1259 (Paris, 1997); and "Chamanisme: Amérique du Nord: Cheyenne"; "Amérique du Nord: Inuit"; and "Amérique du Nord: Sioux". Also in Dictionnaire critique de l’esoterisme, edited by Jean Servier, pp. 280-282 (Paris, 1998).

An annotated bibliography in Italian, updated to 1991, is available in La religione della terra. Vie sciamaniche, universi immaginali, iperspazi virtuali nell’esperienza sacrale della vita, edited by Grazia Marchianò (Como, Italy, 1991), pp. 35-41. This title, translated as Earth Religion: Shamanic Paths, Imaginal Worlds, Virtual Hyperspaces in the Sacred experience of life, is a collection of interdisciplinary essays offered to Zolla on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday by Francisco Garcìa Bazàn, Ioan Petru Culianu, Terence DuQuesne, Moshé Idel, Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, Wolfgang J. Jilek, Louise Jilek-Aall, Luce Lòpez-Baralt, Adam McLean, Viviana Pâques, and Lawrence E. Sullivan.

For evidence of the mark Zolla left on a new generation of Italian specialists in Anglo-American studies, see Angelica Palumbo’s "Elémire Zolla: An initiation to Research (in Italian), Studi Europei: Annals of the Department of History of European Thought, 10 (Genoa, 2002): 129-144, and Fedora Giordano’s "Zolla’ and the Native Americans"(in Italian), in Gli Indiani d’America e l’Italia, edited by F. Giordano and Alberto Guaraldi, Alessandria, 2002.

Bibliographies updated to the year of Zolla’s death (2002) are available in Viator, 6 (2002): 24-34, preceded by G. Marchianò’s extensive essay: "Elémire Zolla: Sprazzi di una biografia interiore", 11-23; and Idea viva: Gaceta de cultura 14 (2002): 52-54, where, in addition, the relevance of Zolla’s esoteric thought is examined by F. G. Bazàn in "E. Zolla y el esoterismo": 10-12, and 48. The British journal Sheshat: Crosscultural Perspectives in Poetry and Philosophy housed a special issue in memory of Zolla, edited by Terence DuQuesne and Mark Angelo de Brito, 6 (2003). See also Religion, Fiction, and History: Essays in Memory of Ioan Petru Culianu, 2 vols. , edited by Sorin Antohi (Bucharest, 2001), a collection to which Zolla contributed his "Culianu": 176-205. In the year marking the 80th anniversary of Zolla’s birth, two huge volumes in Italian by Grazia Marchianò saw the light, namely Il conoscitore di segreti: Una biografia intellettuale (The Knower of Secrets: An Intellectual Biography), Rizzoli, Milan 2006, and Conoscenza religiosa: Scritti 1969-1983, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2006, where Zolla’s writings which appeared in the journal he founded and directed from 1969 to 1983 at La Nuova Italia, Florence, are collected and commented by Prof. Marchianò. She is also editor of Elémire Zolla: Dalla morte alla vita, a monographic issue of Viator, anno IX, 2005-2006, where angles of Zolla’s thought and his human profile are critically examined by leading Italian specialists. The issue houses a cluster of Zolla’s texts including an intriguing short story: "Marco e il gatto mammone", dating back to the years of his youth.

The titles of Zolla’s works, initially scattered in the catalogues of many Italian publishers are in the process to be republished by Adelphi, Milan.

The list of volumes in Italian is given in the entry Opere at: www. elemirezolla. net