Today's Stichomancy for Clive Barker

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

blessed land. I have answered you, my friend. Do you believe?"

"I believe," replied Tars Tarkas, "though I cannot understand."

As we talked I had been searching the interior of the chamber with my eyes. It was, perhaps, two hundred feet in length and half as broad, with what appeared to be a doorway in the centre of the wall directly opposite that through which we had entered.

The apartment was hewn from the material of the cliff, showing mostly dull gold in the dim light which a single minute radium illuminator in the centre of the roof diffused throughout its great dimensions. Here and there polished

The Gods of Mars

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells:

NIL, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.'

`That is all right,' said the Psychologist.

`Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.'

`There I object,' said Filby. `Of course a solid body may exist. All real things--'

`So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an INSTANTANEOUS cube exist?'

`Don't follow you,' said Filby.

`Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real

The Time Machine

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf:

annoyance. He had been occupied for over an hour in making things ready for her, and he now had his reward in seeing her look right and left, as she slipped her cloak from her shoulders, with evident satisfaction, although she said nothing. He had seen that the fire burnt well; jam-pots were on the table, tin covers shone in the fender, and the shabby comfort of the room was extreme. He was dressed in his old crimson dressing-gown, which was faded irregularly, and had bright new patches on it, like the paler grass which one finds on lifting a stone. He made the tea, and Katharine drew off her gloves, and crossed her legs with a gesture that was rather masculine in its ease. Nor did they talk much until they were smoking cigarettes over

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton:

human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain--that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love--this discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which did not press on an answering nerve. But for