Parabola's Summer 1983 issue: Animals Animals have played an enormous role in human thought and culture, in our spiritual and natural history. They inhabit our myths, fables, proverbs, and stories. Yet despite the growing advocacy of animal rights, despite extensive research conducted by biologists and zoologists, animals remain a mystery. Fundamental questions about animals need to be examined. Who are they? What is their place on this planet? What is the relationship between humans and animals? What might it be? While preparing this issue of Parabola, we found that attitudes towards animals are nearly as varied as the animals themselves: their energies symbolize stages of human development; they don't symbolize anything, but are manifestations of forces in themselves; they are accidents of natural selection, reduced to curiosities now that humans have arrived. To look at animals, we discovered, was to take a journey to a far continent; and with all such journeys, one is always surprised to learn more than expected about the place one has left behind. The way we see animals reflects the way we see ourselves. --from the editorial Focus Cover: "An Elephant of Many Parts" Seventeenth-century Indian miniature In this issue:

• "The Bison and the Moth: Lakota Correspondences" by Joseph Epes Brown
  - Animals of power
• "Renegotiating the Contracts" by Barry Lopez
  - Mutual obligations and courtesies
• "The Colomber" by Dino Buzzati
  - A story of the sea
• "Hieroglyph of Light" by L. Charbonneau-Lassay
  - The voices of the Sphinx
• "A Parabola Bestiary"
  - with contributions from Janwillem van de Wetering, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice van Buren, P.L. Travers, Vincent Rossi, Joseph Cary, Robert Bly, Peter S. Beagle
• "Let the Creatures Be"
  - Psychologist James Hillman interviewed by Thomas Moore
• "The Ark of the Mind" by Paul Shepard - The animals within
• "Come into Animal Presence"
  - A collection of poems
• "Of the Same Root" by Philip Kapleau
  - A Buddhist view of animals
• Arcs: "Other Nations"

Tangents - Reviews

• "The Persistence of Unicorns" by Rob Baker
  - The Last Unicorn and Merlin
• "Force of Conscience" by Gautam Dasgupta
  - Richard Attenborough's Gandhi

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Two African Tales" / Liberian and Bavenda retold by Paul Jordan-Smith
• "The Hare-mark on the Moon" / Buddhist
• "The Blackfoot Genesis" / Blackfoot (Native American)