Parabola: Where Spiritual Traditions Meet, whose founder and editor was D.M. Dooling, began publishing in 1976 as a quarterly magazine on the subjects of mythology and the world's religious and cultural traditions. It is published by The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, a not-for-profit organization. The name of the magazine is explained by the editors as follows:

The parabola represents the epitome of a quest. It is the metaphorical journey to a particular point, and then back home, along a similar path perhaps, but in a different direction, after which the traveler is essentially, irrevocably changed.

The magazine's subtitle has changed over the years. In its first years, it was Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning, then Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, later Parabola: Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning, and now its current form.

Issues and subjects

Each issue focuses on a particular subject, with each article related to the main subject. The subjects of the first five years' issues are listed here. Issues prior to Vol. III No. 4 do not indicate the subject on the cover; later issues do.

• The Hero. Vol. I, No. 1 (1976)
• Magic. Vol. I, No. 2
• Initiation. Vol. I, No. 3
• Rites of Passage. Vol. I, No. 4
• Death. Vol. II, No. 1
• Creation. Vol. II, No. 2
• Cosmology. Vol. II, No. 3
• Relationships. Vol. II, No. 4
• Sacred Space. Vol. III, No. 1
• Sacrifice and Transformation. Vol. II. I, No. 2
• Inner Alchemy. Vol. III, No. 3
• Androgyny. Vol. III, No. 4
• The Trickster. Vol. IV, No. 1
• Sacred Dance. Vol. IV, No. 2
• The Child. Vol. IV, No. 3
• Storytelling and Education. Vol. IV, No. 4 (November 1979)
• The Old Ones. Vol. V, No. 1
• Music Sound Silence. Vol. V, No. 2
• Obstacles. Vol. V, No. 3
• Woman. Vol. V, No. 4 (November 1980)

Featured authors

Authors contributing articles to Parabola are listed as contributing editors, and include Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell

Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...

, Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, notably in fantasy and science fiction...

, Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...

, Jacob Needleman

Jacob Needleman

Jacob Needleman is an American philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University.He has published many books, most of which draw from G. I. Gurdjieff....

, Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore was an Irish poet, singer, songwriter, and entertainer, now best remembered for the lyrics of The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer. He was responsible, with John Murray, for burning Lord Byron's memoirs after his death...

, Christmas Humphries, William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...

, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer – July 24, 1991) was a Polish Jewish American author noted for his short stories. He was one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978...

, David Rosenberg, P. L. Travers

P. L. Travers

Pamela Lyndon Travers OBE was an Australian novelist, actress and journalist, popularly remembered for her series of children's novels about the mystical and magical nanny Mary Poppins...

, Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen

Jane Hyatt Yolen is an American author and editor of almost 300 books. These include folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and children's books...

, Robert Lawlor

Robert Lawlor

Robert Lawlor is a mythographer, symbologist and New Age author of several books.After training as a painter and a sculptor, he became a yoga student of Sri Aurobindo and lived for many years in Pondicherry, India, where he was a founding member of Auroville. In India, he discovered the works of...

, Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....

, Keith Critchlow

Keith Critchlow

Keith Barry Critchlow is an artist, lecturer, author, and professor of architecture in England, and a co-founder of the Temenos Academy.He was educated at the Summerhill School and the Royal College of Art...

, Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey , is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is best known for her studies and writing on the Gnostic Gospels...

, James Hillman

James Hillman

James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27,...

, Robert Bly

Robert Bly

Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...

, Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...

, Howard Schwartz

Howard Schwartz (writer and editor)

Howard Schwartz is a widely regarded folklorist, author, poet, and editor of dozens of books. He has won the international Koret Jewish Book Award, for the book Before You Were Born, and won the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism...

, Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

, David Rothenberg, John Anthony West, and many others in the fields of Jungian psychology, spirituality, ecology

Ecology

Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

 and the aforementioned subjects. The journal also publishes interviews with many of the same figures, as well as reviews of books in these fields.

Related materials

In addition to the journal, Parabola at one time also produced books, recordings and videos, including And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran

Jacques Lusseyran

Jacques Lusseyran was a blind French author and political activist.Lusseyran was born on September 19th, 1924, in Paris, France. He became totally blind in a school accident at the age of 8. He soon learned to adapt to being blind and maintained many close friendships, particularly with one boy...

; Sons of the Wind: the Sacred Stories of the Lakota; I Become Part of It: the Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life, edited by D. M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith; The Bestiary of Christ by Louis Charbonneau-Lassay and D. M. Dooling; A Way of Working, edited by D. M. Dooling; as well as the extended video The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers is an American journalist and public commentator. He served as White House Press Secretary in the United States President Lyndon B. Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1967. He worked as a news commentator on television for ten years. Moyers has had an extensive involvement with public...

's interview with Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell

Joseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...

.