| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: seeing their nearest relations lest they should be instrumental to give
them the distemper, and infect or endanger them. If, then, there were
cases wherein the infected people were careless of the injury they did
to others, this was certainly one of them, if not the chief, namely,
when people who had the distemper had broken out from houses which were
so shut up, and having been driven to extremities for provision
or for entertainment, had endeavoured to conceal their condition,
and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily to infect others
who have been ignorant and unwary.
This is one of the reasons why I believed then, and do believe still,
that the shutting up houses thus by force, and restraining, or rather
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and lonesome years I had implored with outstretched arms
to carry me back to my lost love.
Not since that other March night in 1866, when I had
stood without that Arizona cave in which my still and lifeless
body lay wrapped in the similitude of earthly death had I felt
the irresistible attraction of the god of my profession.
With arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great
star I stood praying for a return of that strange power which
twice had drawn me through the immensity of space, praying
as I had prayed on a thousand nights before during the long
ten years that I had waited and hoped.
The Gods of Mars |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen: papers.
The copying-clerk turned round and spoke awhile with the man about the reports
and legal documents in question; but when he had finished, and his eye fell
again on the Shoes, he was unable to say whether those to the left or those to
the right belonged to him. "At all events it must be those which are wet,"
thought he; but this time, in spite of his cleverness, he guessed quite wrong,
for it was just those of Fortune which played as it were into his hands, or
rather on his feet. And why, I should like to know, are the police never to be
wrong? So he put them on quickly, stuck his papers in his pocket, and took
besides a few under his arm, intending to look them through at home to make
the necessary notes. It was noon; and the weather, that had threatened rain,
Fairy Tales |
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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that
she was his 'Heaven on earth.' Now he was to revisit Italy, and
see all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he
admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his
strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to
restore his former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth
that was to set forth upon this re‰nacted honeymoon.
The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it
seemed to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was
reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to
wander in his mind. It is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure
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