| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the
story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life
made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of
sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal
attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to
a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty
coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what
numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same
parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated,
and how it had ultimately come down to bring
its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
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 The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: though it has not reached, the highest ideal of all.
But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart
of every child of man--should conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no
longer the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass,
but their equals. Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--
actually sunk to be their inferiors. And that such a fall did come-
-nay, that it must have come--is matter of history. And its cause,
like all social causes, was not a political nor a physical, but a
moral cause. The profligacy of the French and Italian
aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged itself on them by a
curse (derived from the newly-discovered America) from which they
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