| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: I will suppose - and God forgive me for supposing it - that Damien
faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose
that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of
incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had
sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath - he, who was so
much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never
dreamed of daring - he too tasted of our common frailty. "O, Iago,
the pity of it!" The least tender should be moved to tears; the
most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to pen
your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!
Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: Zeus-descended Priam. The Hindu understood that Dyaus ("the
bright one") meant the sky, and Sarama ("the creeping one")
the dawn, and spoke significantly when he called the latter
the daughter of the former. But the Greek could not know that
Zeus was derived from a root div, "to shine," or that Helena
belonged to a root sar, "to creep." Phonetic change thus
helped him to rise from fetichism to polytheism. His
nature-gods became thoroughly anthropomorphic; and he probably
no more remembered that Achilleus originally signified the
sun, than we remember that the word God, which we use to
denote the most vast of conceptions, originally meant simply
Myths and Myth-Makers |
