| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: forest the great wall which surrounds the city of Kaol.
We had traversed the entire way without mishap or adventure,
and though the few we had met had eyed the great calot wonderingly,
none had pierced the red pigment with which I had smoothly smeared
every square inch of my body.
But to traverse the surrounding country, and to enter the guarded
city of Kulan Tith, Jeddak of Kaol, were two very different things.
No man enters a Martian city without giving a very detailed and
satisfactory account of himself, nor did I delude myself with
 The Warlord of Mars |
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 The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: hideous, starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned
their first lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And
if, to-day, forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently
nourished, because of our excessive brain-work, and with their
muscles weak and flabby from want of strenuous exercise, we wish
to contemplate the human form in its grandest perfection, we must
go to Hellenic art for our models.
The Greeks were, in the highest sense of the word, an
intellectual race; but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize
over the body. Spiritual perfection, accompanied by corporeal
feebleness, was the invention of asceticism; and the Greeks were
 The Unseen World and Other Essays |