| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and
sometimes a mixture of all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin,
and ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come
billions and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that
Satan himself couldn't understand. The fact is, where you strike
one man in the English settlements that you can understand, you
wade through awful swarms that talk something you can't make head
nor tail of. You see, every country on earth has been overlaid so
often, in the course of a billion years, with different kinds of
people and different sorts of languages, that this sort of mongrel
business was bound to be the result in heaven."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: Cloanthus conqu'ror of the naval games.
The prince with laurel crowns the victor's head,
And three fat steers are to his vessel led,
The ship's reward; with gen'rous wine beside,
And sums of silver, which the crew divide.
The leaders are distinguish'd from the rest;
The victor honor'd with a nobler vest,
Where gold and purple strive in equal rows,
And needlework its happy cost bestows.
There Ganymede is wrought with living art,
Chasing thro' Ida's groves the trembling hart:
Aeneid |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: He pointed, and came to a stop at a gap in the fence, the
vestiges of the old fence from which, in the company of his
neighbour Mr. Stringer the milkman, he had once watched the South
of England Aero Club's Saturday afternoon ascents. Dim memories,
it may be, of that particular afternoon returned to him.
"There, down there, where all that rus' looks so red and bright,
that's the gas-works."
"What's gas?" asked the little boy.
"Oh, a hairy sort of nothin' what you put in balloons to make
'em go up. And you used to burn it till the 'lectricity come."
The little boy tried vainly to imagine gas on the basis of these
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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 My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: his condition of absolute silence, while, stalking before them,
he led the way into the next apartment.
This was a large room, hung with black, as if for a funeral. At
the upper end was a table, or rather a species of altar, covered
with the same lugubrious colour, on which lay divers objects
resembling the usual implements of sorcery. These objects were
not indeed visible as they advanced into the apartment; for the
light which displayed them, being only that of two expiring
lamps, was extremely faint. The master--to use the Italian
phrase for persons of this description--approached the upper end
of the room, with a genuflection like that of a Catholic to the
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