Evolution of the Potential in Cosmological Gravitational Clustering

In recent years there has been a developing realization that the interesting large--scale structure of voids, ``pancakes", and filaments in the Universe is a consequence of the efficacy of an approximation scheme for cosmological gravitation clustering proposal by Zel'dovich in 1970. However, this scheme was only supposed to apply to smoothed initial conditions, and its efficacy for hierarchical clustering has not been justified. We show that this is explained by the fact that the gravitationally evolved potential from N--body simulations closely resembles the smoothed potential of the initial conditions. The resulting ``hierarchical pancaking" picture combines features of the former Soviet and Western theoretical pictures for galaxy and large--scale structure formation.