| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: Presently Ulysses got up to go towards the town; and Minerva
shed a thick mist all round him to hide him in case any of the
proud Phaeacians who met him should be rude to him, or ask him
who he was. Then, as he was just entering the town, she came
towards him in the likeness of a little girl carrying a pitcher.
She stood right in front of him, and Ulysses said:
"My dear, will you be so kind as to show me the house of king
Alcinous? I am an unfortunate foreigner in distress, and do not
know one in your town and country."
Then Minerva said, "Yes, father stranger, I will show you the
house you want, for Alcinous lives quite close to my own father.
 The Odyssey |
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 the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: came into the Union." Still thinking of the sanction which
the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it was
part of the original compact--let it stand."
Notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is
unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations,
and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the
intellect--what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here
in American today with regard to slavery--but ventures, or
is driven, to make some such desperate answer to the
following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a
private man--from which what new and singular of social
 On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |