Parabola's Spring 1984 issue:
Hierarchy "Hierarchy? I'm against it." This was the most categorically negative advance response we've had to the theme of this issue, but there have been many people who, in one way or another, have recoiled from opening the question. I suppose it's because hierarchy is not generally taken as a question, but simply as a word which triggers a great number of distasteful associations: the pecking order; the master race and "inferior human types"; the caste system and untouchables; the Mafia; the military; bureaucracies, corrupt Popes, crooked Presidents. We think of the abuse of authority, the misuse of power, the arrogance of wealth, the exploitation of the helpless--and we are against it. Perhaps especially in the United States, the term sounds out-of-date, archaic, like something we've happily outgrown. That all men are created equal has the force of revelation, and it is threatening even to begin to consider in what ways this may be true and in what ways it may not be. We tend to assume that equality is a God-given right, even when we don't believe in God, and that hierarchy is manmade and fallible, rigid and static, arbitrarily imposed and externally enforced.    It is evident to us, however, that no individual, no society, no natural process can come into being and continue its existence without lawful relationship, without the various elements knowing their places and fulfilling their roles. It is often not as evident that hierarchy is inseparable from order, that it is inherent in order on every level, on all scales--that it is an organic principle without which the world could not exist. --from the editorial Focus
Cover: Copper with gold wash South India, c. eighteenth century
In this issue:
- "The First Initiation" by G. I. Gurdjieff
- A talk with his pupils
- "Becoming Unstable/Hierarchy and Evolution"
- An interview with Adin Steinsaltz
- "Participators of Sacred Things" by Roger Lipsey
- The structure of traditional art
- "The Taste for Things That Are True" by Henri Tracol
- The young ask for bread
- "Master/Disciple or how to beg for problems" by Janwillem van de Wetering
- Between two stools
- Arcs: "Seeds from Another World"
- "The Mythic Dimension" by D.M. Dooling
- Space for new perspectives
- "Tarot Card No. 12/The Hanged Man" by P.L. Travers
- The season of unknowing
- "Freedom and Equality" by Martin Lings
- A diagnosis of the modern age
- "A Sufi Prayer"
- "The Price of Harmony" by James B. Robinson
- Achieving order in the Confucian world
Tangents - Reviews
- "The Flattened Cosmos" by Philip Zaleski
- Science out of bounds: a survey of recent books
Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world
- "God and Pride" / Sudanese
- "Monkey's Double" / Chinese retold by Paul Jordan-Smith
- "Dana Nuk" / Mandaean retold by Anne Twitty
- "Lesson of the Ants" / Hindu
- "Payment" / from Mt. Analogue by Rene Daumal