Today's Stichomancy for Alyssa Milano

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Legend of Montrose by Walter Scott:

less time than I could smoke a pipe of tobacco."

"Saxon," said the dying man, "speak to me no more of thy priest-- I die contented. Hadst thou ever an enemy against whom weapons were of no avail--whom the ball missed, and against whom the arrow shivered, and whose bare skin was as impenetrable to sword and dirk as thy steel garment--Heardst thou ever of such a foe?"

"Very frequently, when I served in Germany," replied Sir Dugald. "There was such a fellow at Ingolstadt; he was proof both against lead and steel. The soldiers killed him with the buts of their muskets."

"This impassible foe," said Ranald, without regarding the Major's

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis:

"Wrap the rug about my feet, George," she said hastily, and then sent him away upon an errand, looking after him uneasily.

It was very pleasant to hear her boy thus formally sum up his opinion of her. But when he found that it was based upon a lie?

For Frances, candid enough to the world, had deceived her son ever since he was born.

George had always believed that she had inherited a fortune from his father. It gave solidity and comfort to his life to think of her in the stately old mansion on

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso:

Flowed pure streams of crystals east and west, With laurel crowned stood the princes old, Their wars the hermit and their battles told.

LXVII He showed them Caius first, when first in prey To people strange the falling empire went, First Prince of Est, that did the sceptre sway O'er such as chose him lord by tree consent; His weaker neighbors to his rule obey, Need made them stoop, constraint doth force content; After, when Lord Honorius called the train

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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche:

ages, and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--namely, the immediate SUCCESSION OF OPPOSITES, of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a "saint," a good man. The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into the text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of

Beyond Good and Evil