Everybody has to be the hero of their own journey, wrote P.L. Travers in the first issue of Parabola, “The Hero,” published in 1976. The curious name of the magazine was meant to echo “parable,” but also to describe the dynamic arc of a hand-held fishing net when it is flung—the soaring shape of a journey out and home again, enlarged by what it found. The mission was to gather food for seekers—everyday heroes on a journey to discover the meaning and purpose of their lives.
With this Spring 2016 issue, the journey taken by Parabola’s readers and editors has continued for forty years. The world has changed and the challenges have grown steeper, yet the magazine endures, sustained by the conviction that the deep truth we seek is more crucial than ever, and always news.
In recent years, it has become clear that the qualities of a hero have expanded to include the feminine. The Divine Feminine is not strictly related to gender, as Jungian author Marion Woodman and others explain in these pages. This wisdom requires that we learn to consciously hold the truth, respecting even difficult or seemingly opposing aspects without fighting—or fleeing or fixing—in a traditionally masculine mode. Sometimes this wisdom is expressed in literal holding, as in the case of Amma, the “hugging saint” of India, profiled here. But as Amma explains, wisdom always involves the subtle actions of patience, compassion, and love.
“The feminine is the matrix of creation,” writes Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in this issue. Far from the inert partner of the active masculine, it is “the mystery of the renewal of life,” according to J.M. White, who offers here the earliest images of the Mother. Collectively and individually, we are learning that just as consciousness is not “mine”—not an achievement won in isolation, but shared from a greater source—so the planet itself must be received as a gift, held with compassion, and shared. We must all help. The good news is that the wisdom of the Divine Feminine is here to help us, waiting like water under the earth, an oracle to guide us home.
—Tracy Cochran
Cover Description: Tara. Nepal, seventeenth or eighteenth century. Gilt copper. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Art Archive. Photo by Daderot
