The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: sickly blue light of the boarding-house hall, and it took her
one-half of one second to discover that she liked his mouth, and
his eyes, and the way his hair was mussed.
"Why, you're only a kid!" whispered the Kid Next Door, in
surprise.
Gertie smothered a laugh. "You're not the first man that's
been deceived by a pig-tail braid and a baby blue waist. I could
locate those two gray hairs for you with my eyes shut and my feet
in a sack. Come on, boy. These Robert W. Chambers situations make
me nervous."
Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a
 Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: considered the most vital and regenerative of fluids, the
very elixir of life, so in earliest times it was common to
wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be born
anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first
die. So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged,
and baptized with his own blood, or, in cases, one of
the candidates was really killed and his blood used
as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt
HUMAN sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later
it was sufficient to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as
in the Mithra cult,[1] or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb'
 Pagan and Christian Creeds |