Today's Stichomancy for Mel Gibson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Salome by Oscar Wilde:

LE SECOND SOLDAT. Il a l'air sombre.

HERODE. Pourquoi ne serais-je pas heureux? Cesar, qui est le maitre du monde, qui est le maitre de tout, m'aime beaucoup. Il vient de m'envoyer des cadeaux de grande valeur. Aussi il m'a promis de citer e Rome le roi de Cappadoce qui est mon ennemi. Peut-etre e Rome il le crucifiera. Il peut faire tout ce qu'il veut, Cesar. Enfin, il est le maitre. Ainsi, vous voyez, j'ai le droit d'etre heureux. Il n'y a rien au monde qui puisse gater mon plaisir.

LA VOIX D'IOKANAAN. Il sera assis sur son trone. Il sera vetu de pourpre et d'ecarlate. Dans sa main il portera un vase d'or plein

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske:

exponent was not a Sainte-Beuve, but a Boileau. Its typical sample of a reproduction of the antique was Pope's translation of the Iliad. That book, we presume, everybody has read; and many of those who have read it know that, though an excellent and spirited poem, it is no more Homer than the age of Queen Anne was the age of Peisistratos. Of the translations of Dante made during this period, the chief was unquestionably Mr. Cary's.[59] For a man born and brought up in the most unpoetical of centuries, Mr. Cary certainly made a very good poem, though not so good as Pope's. But it fell far short of being a reproduction of Dante. The eighteenth-century note rings out loudly on every page of it.

The Unseen World and Other Essays

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft:

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally

Call of Cthulhu

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 Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad:

the grass of pastures.

The darkness came from the hills, flowed over the coast, put out the red fires of sunset, and went on to seaward pursuing the retiring tide. The wind dropped with the sun, leaving a maddened sea and a devastated sky. The heavens above the house seemed to be draped in black rags, held up here and there by pins of fire. Madame Levaille, for this evening the servant of her own workmen, tried to induce them to depart. "An old woman like me ought to be in bed at this late hour," she good-humouredly repeated. The quarrymen drank, asked for more. They shouted over the table as if they had been talking across a field. At one end four of them played cards, banging the wood with

Tales of Unrest