| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare: And dying but beginning of new life.
Let come the hour when he that rules it will!
To live or die I hold indifferent.
[Exeunt.]
ACT IV. SCENE V. The same. The French Camp.
[Enter King John and Charles.]
KING JOHN.
A sudden darkness hath defaced the sky,
The winds are crept into their caves for fear,
The leaves move not, the world is hushed and still,
The birds cease singing, and the wandering brooks
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: saw how a strange artist, French or German, sometimes not even a
painter by profession, but only a skilful dauber, produced, by the
celerity of his brush and the vividness of his colouring, a universal
commotion, and amassed in a twinkling a funded capital. This did not
occur to him when fully occupied with his own work, for then he forgot
food and drink and all the world. But when dire want arrived, when he
had no money wherewith to buy brushes and colours, when his implacable
landlord came ten times a day to demand the rent for his rooms, then
did the luck of the wealthy artists recur to his hungry imagination;
then did the thought which so often traverses Russian minds, to give
up altogether, and go down hill, utterly to the bad, traverse his. And
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: daughter of the Senora, and the sister of Felipe, should be herself
insane? Or, what more likely than that these ignorant and half-
witted people should seek to manage an afflicted kinswoman by
violence? Here was a solution; and yet when I called to mind the
cries (which I never did without a shuddering chill) it seemed
altogether insufficient: not even cruelty could wring such cries
from madness. But of one thing I was sure: I could not live in a
house where such a thing was half conceivable, and not probe the
matter home and, if necessary, interfere.
The next day came, the wind had blown itself out, and there was
nothing to remind me of the business of the night. Felipe came to
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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 Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: to post several of his men for the night, and with the greatest
secrecy, in the mulberry trees on the embankment and on the roofs of
the adjoining houses, and to assemble at once the rest of his men and
escort him back to Plessis, so as to give the idea in the town that he
himself would not sup with Cornelius. Next, he told the miser to close
his windows with the utmost care, that no single ray of light should
escape from the house, and then he departed with much pomp for Plessis
along the embankment; but there he secretly left his escort, and
returned by a door in the ramparts to the house of the torconnier. All
these precautions were so well taken that the people of Tours really
thought the king had returned to Plessis, and would sup on the morrow
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