Today's Stichomancy for Thomas Edison

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair:

You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is "published Monthly (D. V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and tells the story of her experiences. She "camped on the Word of God," she declares.

I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay there all night." I went down, and there was plenty of "let go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got wonderfully loosed.....

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon:

Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.

Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence. Living species, like the races of humanity, disappear when, too fixedly established by a long past, they become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.

Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium between these two contrary qualities of stability and malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

first to recover speech, and she said to her companion:

"My! wasn't it terr'ble?"

"The most terrible thing I ever saw," Pon agreed.

"And they froze Gloria's heart; so now she can't love you any more."

"Well, they froze her heart, to be sure," admitted Pon, "but I'm in hopes I can melt it with my love."

Where do you s'pose Gloria is?" asked the girl, after a pause.

"She left the witch's house just before we did. Perhaps she has gone back to the King's castle," he said.

The Scarecrow of Oz

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 American Notes by Rudyard Kipling:

lay a foot thick in the blind ruts, and under the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide.

A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees succeeded, and halting at