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 Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: maps were engraved. At Valparaiso, although in the 220
years before our visit, the elevation cannot have exceeded
nineteen feet, yet subsequently to 1817, there has been a rise,
partly insensible and partly by a start during the shock of
1822, of ten or eleven feet. The antiquity of the Indo-human
race here, judging by the eighty-five feet rise of the land
since the relics were embedded, is the more remarkable, as on
the coast of Patagonia, when the land stood about the same
number of feet lower, the Macrauchenia was a living beast;
but as the Patagonian coast is some way distant from the
Cordillera, the rising there may have been slower than here.
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "It is not for love of your father or your brothers,
nor yet hatred of Peter of Colfax, nor neither for any
reward whatsoever. It pleases me to do as I do, that
is all. Come."
He led her in silence to the courtyard and across the
lowered drawbridge, to where they soon discovered a
group of horsemen, and in answer to a low challenge
from Shandy, Norman of Torn replied that it was he.
"Take a dozen men, Shandy, and search yon hellhole.
Bring out to me, alive, Peter of Colfax, and My Lady's
cloak and a palfrey--and Shandy, when all is done as
The Outlaw of Torn |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: similar taste for parody appears not only in the Phaedrus, but in the
Protagoras, in the Symposium, and to a certain extent in the Parmenides.
To these two doubtful writings of Plato I have added the First Alcibiades,
which, of all the disputed dialogues of Plato, has the greatest merit, and
is somewhat longer than any of them, though not verified by the testimony
of Aristotle, and in many respects at variance with the Symposium in the
description of the relations of Socrates and Alcibiades. Like the Lesser
Hippias and the Menexenus, it is to be compared to the earlier writings of
Plato. The motive of the piece may, perhaps, be found in that passage of
the Symposium in which Alcibiades describes himself as self-convicted by
the words of Socrates. For the disparaging manner in which Schleiermacher
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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 The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: that I might time myself; and when the cycle was complete, set my
tinder-box ready, and blew out my taper. The matter of an hour
afterward I made a light again, put on my shoes of list that I had
worn by my lord's sick-bed, and set forth into the house to call
the voyagers. All were dressed and waiting - my lord, my lady,
Miss Katharine, Mr. Alexander, my lady's woman Christie; and I
observed the effect of secrecy even upon quite innocent persons,
that one after another showed in the chink of the door a face as
white as paper. We slipped out of the side postern into a night of
darkness, scarce broken by a star or two; so that at first we
groped and stumbled and fell among the bushes. A few hundred yards
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