Today's Stichomancy for David Beckham

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso:

LI "To him therefore this wonder done refar, Give him the praise and honor of the thing, Of us the gods benign so careful are Lest customs strange into their church we bring: Let Ismen with his squares and trigons war, His weapons be the staff, the glass, the ring; But let us manage war with blows like knights, Our praise in arms, our honor lies in fights."

LII The virgin held her peace when this was said;

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard:

again about six o'clock, and trek with the moon till ten. Then I got into the waggon and had a good sleep till half-past two or so in the afternoon, when I rose and cooked some meat, and had my dinner, washing it down with a pannikin of black coffee--for it was difficult to get preserved milk in those days. Just as I had finished, and the driver, a man called Tom, was washing up the things, in comes the young scoundrel of a voorlooper driving one ox before him.

"'Where are the other oxen?' I asked.

"'Koos!' he said, 'Koos! the other oxen have gone away. I turned my back for a minute, and when I looked round again they were all gone except Kaptein, here, who was rubbing his back against a tree.'

Long Odds

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale:

Over my naked soul it blew, -- There is no peace for me on earth Even with you.

Morning

I went out on an April morning All alone, for my heart was high, I was a child of the shining meadow, I was a sister of the sky.

There in the windy flood of morning Longing lifted its weight from me, Lost as a sob in the midst of cheering,

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 Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn:

imagined a form of social existence in which selfishness would be naturally impossible. It remained for irreligious Nature to furnish us with proof positive that there can exist a society in which the pleasure of active beneficence makes needless the idea of duty,-- a society in which instinctive morality can dispense with ethical codes of every sort,-- a society of which every member is born so absolutely unselfish, and so energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.

To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of our moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than virtue, better than kindness, better than self-denial,-- in the present human

Kwaidan