| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: light which displayed them, being only that of two expiring
lamps, was extremely faint. The master--to use the Italian
phrase for persons of this description--approached the upper end
of the room, with a genuflection like that of a Catholic to the
crucifix, and at the same time crossed himself. The ladies
followed in silence, and arm in arm. Two or three low broad
steps led to a platform in front of the altar, or what resembled
such. Here the sage took his stand, and placed the ladies beside
him, once more earnestly repeating by signs his injunctions of
silence. The Italian then, extending his bare arm from under his
linen vestment, pointed with his forefinger to five large
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: the point of procreation; beyond that, into the regulation of sexual
selection. The problem becomes a circle. We cannot solve one part of
it without a consideration of the entirety. But it is especially at
the point of creation where all the various forces are concentrated.
Conception must be controlled by reason, by intelligence, by science,
or we lose control of all its consequences.
Birth Control is essentially an education for women. It is women who,
directly and by their very nature, bear the burden of that blindness,
ignorance and lack of foresight concerning sex which is now enforced
by law and custom. Birth Control places in the hands of women the
only effective instrument whereby they may reestablish the balance in
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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 A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: all travellers, and retraced their steps, and went warily, and at
last they reached the outskirts of the forest, and saw, far down in
the valley beneath them, the lights of the village in which they
dwelt.
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed
aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and
the Moon like a flower of gold.
Yet, after that they had laughed they became sad, for they
remembered their poverty, and one of them said to the other, 'Why
did we make merry, seeing that life is for the rich, and not for
such as we are? Better that we had died of cold in the forest, or
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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 House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter, and
never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth was,--and it
is Phoebe's only excuse,--that, although Judge Pyncheon's
glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the
feminine beholder, with the width of a street, or even an
ordinary-sized room, interposed between, yet it became quite
too intense, when this dark, full-fed physiognomy (so roughly
bearded, too, that no razor could ever make it smooth) sought to
bring itself into actual contact with the object of its regards.
The man, the sex, somehow or other, was entirely too prominent in
the Judge's demonstrations of that sort. Phoebe's eyes sank, and,
House of Seven Gables |
