Today's Stichomancy for Charles Manson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac:

plainly seen.

"My daughter is ruined," said Madame Evangelista in a low voice.

The old and the young notary both overheard the words.

"Is it ruin," replied Mathias, speaking gently, "to constitute for her family an indestructible fortune?"

The younger notary, seeing the expression of his client's face, thought it judicious in him to state the disaster in plain terms.

"We tried to trick them out of three hundred thousand francs," he whispered to the angry woman. "They have actually laid hold of eight hundred thousand; it is a loss of four hundred thousand from our interests for the benefit of the children. You must now either break

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri:

Perhaps to a worse meaning than he had.

"Into this bottom of the doleful conch Doth any e'er descend from the first grade, Which for its pain has only hope cut off?"

This question put I; and he answered me: "Seldom it comes to pass that one of us Maketh the journey upon which I go.

True is it, once before I here below Was conjured by that pitiless Erictho, Who summoned back the shades unto their bodies.

Naked of me short while the flesh had been,

The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome:

the west, if there is revolution, they will use artillery at once, and wipe out whole districts. The governing classes in the west are determined and organized in a way our home-grown capitalists never were. The Autocracy never allowed them to organize, so, when the Autocracy itself fell, our task was comparatively easy. There was nothing in the way. It will not be like that in Germany."

AN EVENING AT THE OPERA

I read in one of the newspapers that a member of the American Commission in Berlin reasoned from the fact that the Germans were crowding to theatres and spectacles that

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 Jungle by Upton Sinclair:

of the movement.

The invitation was from a man named Fisher, a Chicago millionaire who had given up his life to settlement work, and had a little home in the heart of the city's slums. He did not belong to the party, but he was in sympathy with it; and he said that he was to have as his guest that night the editor of a big Eastern magazine, who wrote against Socialism, but really did not know what it was. The millionaire suggested that Adams bring Jurgis along, and then start up the subject of "pure food," in which the editor was interested.

Young Fisher's home was a little two-story brick house, dingy and