| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: horses innumerable, gold and silver without end.
I saw that he was inclined to expatiate on the riches of the man; so I
asked him, Well, Erasistratus, and what sort of character does he bear in
Sicily?
ERASISTRATUS: He is esteemed to be, and really is, the wickedest of all
the Sicilians and Italians, and even more wicked than he is rich; indeed,
if you were to ask any Sicilian whom he thought to be the worst and the
richest of mankind, you would never hear any one else named.
I reflected that we were speaking, not of trivial matters, but about wealth
and virtue, which are deemed to be of the greatest moment, and I asked
Erasistratus whom he considered the wealthier,--he who was the possessor of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: short cuts, would use methods that were quicker and more
effective in spite of the fact that they were also risky. His
fourth day at his work Jurgis saw a man stumble while running in
front of a car, and have his foot mashed off, and before he had
been there three weeks he was witness of a yet more dreadful
accident. There was a row of brick furnaces, shining white
through every crack with the molten steel inside. Some of these
were bulging dangerously, yet men worked before them, wearing
blue glasses when they opened and shut the doors. One morning as
Jurgis was passing, a furnace blew out, spraying two men with a
shower of liquid fire. As they lay screaming and rolling upon
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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 Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: scaffold, to their tomb. That, no doubt, is fine; the motive of the
crime is a great passion, which awes even human justice. Other women
bow their heads and suffer in silence; they go their way dying,
resigned, weeping, forgiving, praying, and recollecting, till they
draw their last breath. This is love,--true love, the love of angels,
the proud love which lives upon its anguish and dies of it. Such was
Eugenie's love after she had read that dreadful letter. She raised her
eyes to heaven, thinking of the last words uttered by her dying
mother, who, with the prescience of death, had looked into the future
with clear and penetrating eyes: Eugenie, remembering that prophetic
death, that prophetic life, measured with one glance her own destiny.
Eugenie Grandet |
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 Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 248.
[97] See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 939.
[98] The Buddhistic as well as the Zarathustrian reformation
degraded the Vedic gods into demons. "In Buddhism we find
these ancient devas, Indra and the rest, carried about at
shows, as servants of Buddha, as goblins, or fabulous heroes."
Max Muller, Chips, I. 25. This is like the Christian change of
Odin into an ogre, and of Thor into the Devil.
If we trace back this remarkable word to its primitive source
in that once lost but now partially recovered mother-tongue
from which all our Aryan languages are descended, we find a
Myths and Myth-Makers |
