| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: looked up listlessly as Mr. Miles and Charity came in,
and a woman's thick voice said: "Here's the preacher."
But no one moved.
Mr. Miles paused and looked about him; then he turned
to the young man who had met them at the door.
"Is the body here?" he asked.
The young man, instead of answering, turned his head
toward the group. "Where's the candle? I tole yer to
bring a candle," he said with sudden harshness to a
girl who was lolling against the table. She did not
answer, but another man got up and took from some
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: 148, - pages from which you will probably arise with a sense of the
infinity and complexity of Nature, even in what we are pleased to
call her "lower" forms, and the simplest and, as it were, easiest
forms of life. Conceive a Crystal Palace, (for mere difference in
size, as both the naturalist and the metaphysician know, has
nothing to do with the wonder,) whereof each separate joist,
girder, and pane grows continually without altering the shape of
the whole; and you have conceived only one of the miracles embodied
in that little sea-egg, which the Creator has, as it were, to
justify to man His own immutability, furnished with a shell capable
of enduring fossil for countless ages, that we may confess Him to
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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 Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: suppose I had 'em? Why, at my cousin Emma McIntyre's wedding, her
that married the apothecary over in Jersey City, though her mother
appeared to her in a dream and told her she'd rue the day she done
it, but as Emma said, she got more advice than she wanted from the
living, and if she was to listen to spectres too she'd never be
sure what she'd ought to do and what she'd oughtn't; but I will say
her husband took to drink, and she never was the same woman after
her fust baby--well, they had an elegant church wedding, and what
you s'pose I saw as I was walkin' up the aisle with the wedding
percession?"
"Well?" Ann Eliza whispered, forgetting to thread her needle.
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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 Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: The king on the left, however, shrugged his shoulders and answered: "That
may perhaps be a goat-herd. Or an anchorite who hath lived too long among
rocks and trees. For no society at all spoileth also good manners."
"Good manners?" replied angrily and bitterly the other king: "what then do
we run out of the way of? Is it not 'good manners'? Our 'good society'?
Better, verily, to live among anchorites and goat-herds, than with our
gilded, false, over-rouged populace--though it call itself 'good society.'
--Though it call itself 'nobility.' But there all is false and foul, above
all the blood--thanks to old evil diseases and worse curers.
The best and dearest to me at present is still a sound peasant, coarse,
artful, obstinate and enduring: that is at present the noblest type.
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
