| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: cannot do permanently without sleep, and heaven has appointed us
dwellers on earth a time for all things. I will therefore go
upstairs and recline upon that couch which I have never ceased
to flood with my tears from the day Ulysses set out for the city
with a hateful name."
She then went upstairs to her own room, not alone, but attended
by her maidens, and when there, she lamented her dear husband
till Minerva shed sweet sleep over her eyelids.
Book XX
ULYSSES CANNOT SLEEP--PENELOPE'S PRAYER TO DIANA--THE TWO SIGNS
FROM HEAVEN--EUMAEUS AND PHILOETIUS ARRIVE--THE SUITORS
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: were indissolubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic. The
Parsees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from
Kant's three great philosophic problems: What is Man?--What may be
known?--What should be done? Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek
sages. Not one of them, of any school whatsoever--from the semi-mythic
Seven Sages to Plato and Aristotle--but finds it necessary to consider
not in passing, but as the great object of research, questions
concerning the gods:- whether they are real or not; one or many;
personal or impersonal; cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organisers
and rulers of it; in relation to man, or without relation to him. Even
in those who flatly deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius
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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 A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: years of service. Now you know the pair of antagonists.
"During the first three months of a partnership dissolved four months
later in a bout of fisticuffs, Cerizet and Claparon bought up two
thousand francs' worth of bills bearing Maxime's signature (since
Maxime was his name), and filled a couple of letters to bursting with
judgments, appeals, orders of the court, distress-warrants,
application for stay of proceedings, and all the rest of it; to put it
briefly, they had bills for three thousand two hundred francs odd
centimes, for which they had given five hundred francs; the transfer
being made under private seal, with special power of attorney, to save
the expense of registration. Now it so happened at this juncture,
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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 On Revenues by Xenophon: chiselled[4] temples and altars of rarest beauty and the glittering
splendour of images sacred to the gods. This marble, moreover, is an
obejct of desire to many foreigners, Hellenes and barbarians alike.
Then there is land which, although it yields no fruit to the sower,
needs only to be quarried in order to feed many times more mouths than
it could as corn-land. Doubtless we owe it to a divine dispensation
that our land is veined with silver; if we consider how many
neighbouring states lie round us by land and sea and yet into none of
them does a single thinnest vein of silver penetrate.
[3] Lit. "those good things which the gods afford in their seasons."
[4] Or, "arise," or "are fashioned."
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