Today's Stichomancy for Liza Minnelli

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James:

again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last. They had looks that survived - had them as great poets had quoted lines.

The newspaper lay by his chair - the thing that came in the afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it. Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a paragraph, he was caught by five words that made him start. He stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague, K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his friends and whose deposition from this eminence had practically

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Tanach:

Genesis 30: 4 And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife; and Jacob went in unto her.

Genesis 30: 5 And Bilhah conceived, and bore Jacob a son.

Genesis 30: 6 And Rachel said: 'God hath judged me, and hath also heard my voice, and hath given me a son.' Therefore called she his name Dan.

Genesis 30: 7 And Bilhah Rachel's handmaid conceived again, and bore Jacob a second son.

Genesis 30: 8 And Rachel said: 'With mighty wrestlings have I wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed.' And she called his name Naphtali.

Genesis 30: 9 When Leah saw that she had left off bearing, she took Zilpah her handmaid, and gave her to Jacob to wife.

Genesis 30: 10 And Zilpah Leah's handmaid bore Jacob a son.

Genesis 30: 11 And Leah said: 'Fortune is come!' And she called his name Gad.

Genesis 30: 12 And Zilpah Leah's handmaid bore Jacob a second son.

Genesis 30: 13 And Leah said: 'Happy am I! for the daughters will call me happy.' And she called his name Asher.

Genesis 30: 14 And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah: 'Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's ma

The Tanach

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert:

undertakings, telling him how many men had been bribed, what letters had been intercepted, and the number of spies stationed at the city gates. She did not hesitate even to tell him of her success in an attempt to befool and seduce Eutyches the denunciator.

"And why should I not?" she said; "it cost me nothing. For thee, my lord, have I not done more than that? Did I not even abandon my child?"

After her divorce from Philip, she had indeed left her daughter in Rome, hoping that, as the wife of the tetrarch, she might bear other children. Until that moment she had never spoken to Antipas of her daughter. He asked himself the reason for this sudden display of

Herodias

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 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe:

repeating my words, "'RESERVE AT LAST!' me no understand - but why not kill the devil now; not kill great ago?" "You may as well ask me," said I, "why God does not kill you or me, when we do wicked things here that offend Him - we are preserved to repent and be pardoned." He mused some time on this. "Well, well," says he, mighty affectionately, "that well - so you, I, devil, all wicked, all preserve, repent, God pardon all." Here I was run down again by him to the last degree; and it was a testimony to me, how the mere notions of nature, though they will guide reasonable creatures to the knowledge of a God, and of a worship or homage due to the supreme being of God, as the consequence of our nature, yet nothing

Robinson Crusoe