| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard: died of an infectious sickness -- probably smallpox -- whereon
the people drove him out of their villages into the wilderness,
where he wandered miserably over mountains for ten days, after
which he got into dense thorn forest, and was one day found there
by some white men who were hunting, and who took him to a place
where all the people were white and lived in stone houses. Here
he remained a week shut up in a house, till one night a man with
a white beard, whom he understood to be a "medicine-man", came
and inspected him, after which he was led off and taken through
the thorn forest to the confines of the wilderness, and given
food and this sword (at least so he said), and turned loose.'
Allan Quatermain |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its present form
as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes began to sever the
agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of his ancient forms of
social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may be called a modern
problem.)
Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the males of
the modern civilised world that these changes in the material conditions of
life have told in such fashion as to take all useful occupation from them
and render them wholly or partly worthless to society. If the modern man's
field of labour has contracted at one end (the physical), at the other (the
intellectual) it has immeasurably expanded! If machinery and the command
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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 The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: looked full into the soldier's face, but the real enigma was well-nigh
insoluble for him, so he set down these symptoms to physical suffering
and went on:
"Captain, I am about to speak of myself. I have had to force myself to
do so already several times since yesterday, while telling you about
the improvements that I have managed to introduce here; but it was a
question of the interests of the people and the commune, with which
mine are necessarily bound up. But, now, if I tell you my story, I
should have to speak wholly of myself, and mine has not been a very
interesting life."
"If it were as uneventful as La Fosseuse's life," answered Genestas,
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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 Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus by William Shakespeare: Behold one Orpheus came, as poets tell,
And them from rudeness unto reason brought,
Who led by reason soon forsook the woods.
Instead of caves they built them castles strong;
Cities and towns were founded by them then:
Glad were they, they found such ease,
And in the end they grew to perfect amity;
Weighing their former wickedness,
They termed the time wherein they lived then
A golden age, a goodly golden age.
Now, Bremo, for so I hear thee called,
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