ZOLLA, ELÉMIRE. Elémire Zolla (1926–2002), an Anglo-Italian polymath, writer, historian of ideas, metaphysical thinker, and spiritual seeker, 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...