Today's Stichomancy for Fidel Castro

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain:

tions -- mummified in ignorance and sloth -- and that qualifies him to command live people, and take their weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other case, a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that qualifies him for office in the celestial camp. Does the king's grace approve of this strange law?"

The king said:

"Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange. All places of honor and of profit do belong, by natural right, to them that be of noble blood, and so these

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy:

suppressed and hide-bound for a while. Grace seldom showed herself outside the house, never outside the garden; for she feared she might encounter Giles Winterborne; and that she could not bear.

This pensive intramural existence of the self-constituted nun appeared likely to continue for an indefinite time. She had learned that there was one possibility in which her formerly imagined position might become real, and only one; that her husband's absence should continue long enough to amount to positive desertion. But she never allowed her mind to dwell much upon the thought; still less did she deliberately hope for such a

The Woodlanders

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

captivity. It seems evident that, as these five-and-twenty years drew on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against the growth of such a feeling. One after another of his fellow-prisoners was ransomed and went home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land. Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a man is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no more attains to a settled frame of resolution, than his eye would

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 Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley:

officers were) of ending his life as a Janissary at the Sultan's court. He had been at the Battle of the Three Kings; had seen Stukely borne down by a hundred lances, unconquered even in death; and had held upon his knee the head of the dying King of Portugal.

And now, as he said to Rose one evening, what had he left on earth, but a heart trampled as hard as the pavement? Whom had he to love? Who loved him? He had nothing for which to live but fame: and even that was denied to him, a prisoner in a foreign land.

Had he no kindred, then? asked pitying Rose.

"My two sisters are in a convent;--they had neither money nor beauty; so they are dead to me. My brother is a Jesuit, so he is