| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Anabasis by Xenophon: to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
March 399 B.C.
PREPARER'S NOTE
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a
four-volume set. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though
there is doubt about some of these) is:
Work Number of books
The Anabasis 7
Anabasis |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: line of the beach, all the slope was white with the great
shearing of them. Clouds came, flew as in a panic against the
face of the sun, and passed. All that day and through the night
and into the morning again the breeze continued from the north.
east, blowing like an equinoctial gale ...
Then day by day the vast breath freshened steadily, and the
waters heightened. A week later sea-bathing had become perilous:
colossal breakers were herding in, like moving leviathan-backs,
twice the height of a man. Still the gale grew, and the
billowing waxed mightier, and faster and faster overhead flew the
tatters of torn cloud. The gray morning of the 9th wanly lighted
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: and misery, were absent or only weakly developed--namely,
PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.[1]
[1] For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
During the first century B.C. there was a great spread
of Messianic Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's
4th Eclogue, commonly called the Messianic Eclogue,
reflects very clearly this state of the public mind. The expected
babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian (Augustus)
the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded
it in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
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 Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: fetlock. Sunny brews, whence I had viewed the champaign and
traced my forward path, had become bare, wind-swept ridges. The
beech woods that had glowed with ruddy light were naked now; mere
black trunks and rigid arms pointing to heaven. An earthy smell
filled the air; a hundred paces away a wall of mist closed the
view. We plodded on sadly up hill and down hill, now fording
brooks, already stained with flood-water, now crossing barren
heaths. But up hill or down hill, whatever the outlook, I was
never permitted to forget that I was the jailor, the ogre, the
villain; that I, riding behind in my loneliness, was the blight
on all--the death-spot. True, I was behind the others--I escaped
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