Parabola's Winter 2003 issue: Truth and Illusion One of the most precious books in my library, Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece by the eminent classicist Marcel Detienne, provides a real picture of the Greek idea of truth, aletheia, or unforgetting. This truth is sung by poets, is inseparable from justice, and is served by a kind of deception.    Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that everyone must cross to reach the Underworld. Therefore, a-lethe-ia, no Lethe, is unforgetting. By crossing the river and forgetting, you can be rinsed of all ideas and concerns of this world and then remember the mysterious truths of the otherworld. Almost like a shaman, the real artist, the master of truth, makes this journey and recalls the deep and hidden nature of things, helping to give order to the world and meaning to our lives. Detienne says that truth is always edged with forgetfulness and lined with illusion. In fact, the poet deceives us in a positive way with the charm of musical language and the richness of imagery, but in that artful deception we come closer to the design of things, to the knowledge that really matters, than if we try to be objective and factual. Those who speak facts don't know they are also poets, and that self-deception is dangerous. --from "Songs of Unforgetting" by Thomas Moore Cover: Detail of a painting by Ando Hiroshige From The 53 Stations of the Tokaido,1834 Private collection, France. Copryight © Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York. In this issue:

• "Songs of Unforgetting" by Thomas Moore
  - Journeying byond the river Lethe
• "Tools of the Trickster's Trade" by Dustin Eaton
  - Disruptions of reality
• "From Spark to Flame" From the Yoga Vasistha
  - Overcoming Maya
• "The Awakening of Thought" by Jeanne de Salzmann
  - The transcendent power of vision
• "The Gates of Enchantment" by Mara Freeman
  - Faerie truths and glamours
• "Real Miracles" by Anna Kilmer
  - The Sufi search for the divine
• "The Invention of Deceit" by David Appelbaum
  - How illusion came to be in ancient Greece
• "Truth and Perception" by Mickey Lemle
  - Truth vs. facts in filmmaking
• "True Imagination" by George MacDonald
  - Discovering the divine purpose of things
• "Deus ex Machina" by Zach Weber
  - The obsessive search for perfection
• PORTFOLIO: "To Hear Through the Eyes"
  - Photographs by Paul Caponigro
• "Approaching Our True Nature"
  - An interview with Eckhart Tolle
• "The Death of Princes" by William A. McIntosh
  - The case of General James Wolfe
• "Illusions" by Simone Weil
  - Thoughts on goodness
• POINT OF VIEW: "A Change in Religion" by Roger Lipsey

Tangents - Reviews

• "Touched by Aldous Huxley" by Marvin Barrett

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "Moses and the Green Man" / Islamic - retold by Jennifer Caban
• "Eleven Trials" / Taoist - retold by Ng Kum-Hoon
• "The Old Lady in the Cave" / Traditional - retold by Jane Yolen
• "Indra Gets Caught" / Hindu - retold by Kamla Kapur
• "The Goose and the Moon" / Persian
• "Uom and Tak" / Marshall Islands - retold by Daniel A. Kelin II