Southern Cross Review

"Young Lady"

Fujishima Takeji (October 15, 1867 – March 19, 1943) was a Japanese painter, noted for his work in developing Romanticism and impressionism within the yoga (Western-style) art movement in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese painting. In his later years, he was influenced by the Art Nouveau movement.

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Editor's Page The Threefold Commonwealth by Frank Thomas Smith Charles Dickens, no lover of aristocrats and a staunch defender of the oppressed, paraphrased the French Revolution'a motto as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity...or Death. The Terror which accompanied the revolution wrote with a finger dipped in blood, and was what the ruling classes of all Europe were to expect if the social question was not resolved. In 1830 the barricades were raised in Paris, there were uprisings in Germany, Poland and Belgium. They were suppressed, but the sufferings of the peoples continued and revolt simmered below the surface. In 1848 revolutions swept Italy, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin and, again, Paris. In England in 1815 and 1832 riots of hungry workers broke out and Habeas Corpus was suspended for the first time in history... Continue reading Fiction The Diary of Desire by Gaither Stewart Lights from the nocturnal city below framed the silhouette in a disquieting pale halo so that the windows of the solitary apartment building at the summit of the hill looked like the portholes of an ocean liner. The image never failed to remind him of Fellini’s majestic Rex sailing past near the Adriatic shore in the night. He placed the plate of radishes on the coffee table. This evening was like so many others. Even his feelings in this precise moment resembled other identical moments of his life. He shivered as always at his awareness of the mystery of time and place... Continue reading Last Journey to Jupiter by Jeanpaul Ferro Two masked men with machine guns strapped over their shoulders drag the body of a man across the city square. His lifeless arms flop about in front of him like a drugged bear. He is a farmer, Farid Nasry, the seventh born of seven brothers, a farmer accused by ISIS, an al Qaeda splinter group in Syria fighting for the militia, of stealing one of his neighbor’s sheep. Under the heat of a searing Middle Eastern sun they tie the dead Syrian farmer to a pole like he’s Jesus Christ. A crowd of sundry looking old men begin to gather around. A boy is standing there among them. A smell of bitter almonds hangs in the air... Continue reading. The Machine Ends by E.M. Forster Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs...Continue reading. The Prisoner Exchange by Frank Thomas Smith   Plaza Dorrego, Buenos Aires  Airplanes seldom have to circle the Buenos Aires International airport and descend through complex traffic patterns. They start losing altitude somewhere over Uruguay, cross the mud-colored mouth of the Rio de la Plata, pass to the east of the sprawling city and glide straight onto a waiting runway. Joe Truman took a taxi from the airport to downtown Buenos Aires and registered at the Sheraton. A month previously two guests were blown out of their rooms by a terrorist bomb and since then the hotel was almost empty. Tourists no longer included Argentina in their itineraries and other visitors took the precaution of staying at less ostentatious hotels... Continue reading Current Events Resisting the Lure of Intervention - The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence by John Feffer They were the best and the brightest” but on a spaceship, not planet Earth, and they exemplified the liberal optimism of their era. The original whose three-year TV run began in 1966, featured a talented, multiethnic crew. The indomitable Captain Kirk had the can-do sex appeal of a Kennedy; his chief advisor, the half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, offered the cool rationality of that “IBM machine with legs,” then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara... Continue reading Features The Mystery of Mary Magdalene by Robert Powell In the last thirty or forty years, interest in Mary Magdalene has grown enormously, particularly with the idea — first presented through the 1971 rock opera (later a Broadway show), Jesus Christ Superstar, and the Oscar- nominated film adaptation thereof — that there was a love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This fired people’s imaginations. In 1982, this was brought into literary form by three journalists in England who wrote a book entitled The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, in which they put forward a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married, had children, and that the descendants of this lineage were the bearers of the mystery of the Holy Grail... Continue reading Getting Ahead - A Class Study of Social Class in the USA by William T. Hathaway This photo of my parents reveals much about their personalities (hers vivacious and outgoing, his withdrawn and closed off), their relationship (little real contact), and also the times (could be captioned Gender Roles in the 1950s: The Bathing Beauty and the Soldier). The typicality of their lives reveals much about the USA. My mother was a farmer's daughter whose father lost the farm to the banks, and they had to scrabble along in the slums of the big city, St. Louis. All her life she yearned for her bucolic childhood when everything was "nice." My father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner from West Virginia. He hated the mines so much that after the Second World War he stayed in the military as a professional soldier... Continue reading Anthroposophy The New Screwtape Letters to an Apprentice Demon by Jeremy Smith   Apprentice "Staudi"  Millions of readers have enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, written by C. S. Lewis and first published in 1942. In these letters, Lewis provides a devil’s eye view of how to undermine human beings and their faith in the spiritual world by promoting doubt and disinterest. The book consists of a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon in the Lowerarchy of Hell to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior and rather incompetent demonic apprentice, to whom he acts as mentor. In Screwtape’s advice, individual self-interest and greed are seen as the greatest good, and neither demon is capable of comprehending God’s love for human beings or acknowledging human virtue. Continue reading Yiddishe Kop by Fred Pollack Many know that Rudolf Steiner felt that Judaism has even today a mission toward Christianity, namely, to spiritualize it. But what is hardly known at all is that this task was to be accomplished through teaching Yiddishe Kop! You ask, what in the world is that? Yiddishe Kop is one of the great pearls to come out of Judaism—thanks to generations of Christian persecution. It is a way of thinking “outside the box,” a proclivity to observe reality with caution, to see many facets of reality rather than just the normal one, a way of “reframing” situations in new and surprising ways, a way of seeing amazing options where others see none, a capacity to see possibility where it seems like there is only impossibility... Continue reading Mathamatics and Occultism by Rudolf Steiner It is well-known that the words above the Platonic Academy were said to have excluded anyone ignorant of mathematics from participating in the teachings of the master. Whatever one may think about the historical truth of this tradition, it correctly expresses Plato’s views on the status of mathematics within the domain of human knowledge. By means of his ‘theory of ideas’ Plato wished to teach his students to move with their knowledge within the world of pure spiritual being. He believed that human beings cannot know anything of the true world as long as their thinking is permeated by the impressions of the senses. He demanded sense-free thinking. A person moves within the world of ideas once they have separated everything out of their thinking that is furnished by the senses. Above all for Plato the question arose: How can human beings free themselves from all sensory perception? He regarded this as an important question for the education of the spiritual life...Continue reading From "Meditations on the Tarot" by Valentin Tomberg Another example of an excessive accentuation of the knowledge of evil—and therefore of an occupation of consciousness with evil— is the preoccupation with the problem of the twofold (even threefold) evil amongst German Anthroposophists. Lucifer and Ahriman (and even Adzura), the two principles of evil, subjective and objective, the seducing principle and the hypnotising principle, have so taken possession of the consciousness of Anthroposophists that there is hardly a single thing which would not fall under the category of being Ahrimanic or Luciferic. ..Continue reading "Apologia" concerning the publication of the the First Class Lessons: Apologia Nine Lectures on Bees - Lecture Four by Rudolf Steiner Herr Müller has handed me another number of the “Swiss Bee-keeper's Journal” with an article dealing with the results of certain experiments with honey-cures — (“Our further Experiences with Honey-cures in the Frauenfeld Children's Home, Amden,” by Dr. Paula Emrich. Weeson.) (No III of the “Schweizerische Bienenzeitung” March 1923). It will be quite interesting, gentlemen, to add today a few remarks on this article. In this Children's Home an attempt was made to give honey treatments to children found to be suffering from some form or other of malnutrition. As described here, the treatment was to dissolve the honey and stir it well into moderately warmed milk, not brought to boiling point but kept just below it. This mixture was given to the children.. Continue reading Karmic Relations, Volume III, Lectures six and seven by Rudolf Steiner The members of the Anthroposophical Society come into the Society, as indeed is obvious, for reasons that exist in their inner life, in the inner condition of their souls. And as we are now speaking of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, or rather of the Anthroposophical Movement altogether, showing how it arises out of the karmic evolution of members and groups of members, we shall need to perceive the foundations of this karma, above all in the state of soul of those human beings who seek for Anthroposophy. This we have already begun to do, and we will now acquaint ourselves with certain other facts in this direction, so that we may enter still further into the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement... Continue reading Poetry The Listeners by Walter de la Mere Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still... Continue reading Do not go gentle into that good Night by Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Continue reading.    Letters to the Editor You can find us under the Southern Cross constellation in the Traslasierra Valley, Province of Córdoba, Argentina. Visitors always welcome. Just follow the sign that reads: La Cruz del Sur. Frank Thomas Smith, Editor JoAnn Schwarz, Associate Editor Contact Authors' Guidelines so we can advise you when the next issue is ready. Many people are switching to Gmail. If you do, please advise us so we can change your subscription address. For back issues, use the issue number. For example: http://southerncrossreview.org/79/index79.html will deliver SCR number 79. For authors or titles, enter names or keywords in the Google search box below. WWW SouthernCrossReview.org