| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: man.
9 Reliever is your mother's name, and hence Restorers are ye
called.
Rivers are ye with wings that fly: keep far whatever brings
disease.
10 Over all fences have they passed, as steals a thief into
the fold.
The Plants have driven from the frame whatever malady was there.
11 When, bringing back the vanished strength, I hold these
herbs
within my hand,
The Rig Veda |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: ried, and do nothing at all for the Evolution of
the Ego and the Development of the Race, and the
Conscious Guidance of the Next Generation, or any-
thing like that.
Thank goodness I could never be a Parasite
Woman!
And, yet, I PITY them, too.
I'm thinking quite seriously of starting a little
Mission of my own for the purpose of appealing
to and reforming the Parasite Women among my
acquaintances.
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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 A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: the strongest constitutions, could not have borne it. A violent and
successful passion takes a great deal of space in an ordinary life;
but when it is connected with a woman in the social position of Madame
de Vandenesse it sucks the life out of a man as busy as Raoul. Here is
a list of the obligations his passion imposed upon him.
Every day, or nearly every day, he was obliged to be on horseback in
the Bois, between two and three o'clock, in the careful dress of a
gentleman of leisure. He had to learn at what house or theatre he
could meet Madame de Vandenesse in the evening. He was not able to
leave the party or the play until long after midnight, having obtained
nothing better than a few tender sentences, long awaited, said in a
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: liberal offers of pay and patronage, were such men as the old Seven
Sages of Greece, or as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In these three
last indeed, Greek thought reached not merely its greatest height, but
the edge of a precipice, down which it rolled headlong after their
decease. The intellectual defects of the Greek mind, of which I have
already spoken, were doubtless one great cause of this decay: but, to
my mind, moral causes had still more to do with it. The more cultivated
Greek states, to judge from the writings of Plato, had not been an over-
righteous people during the generation in which he lived. And in the
generations which followed, they became an altogether wicked people;
immoral, unbelieving, hating good, and delighting in all which was evil.
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