| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: slow to take.
'Have you patience to listen to a story?' I said, 'for I would seek
your help.'
'Ah!' he answered, 'it is the old case, the physician cannot heal
himself. Speak on, nephew.'
Then I sat down by the bed and told him all, keeping nothing back.
I told him the history of my mother and my father's courtship, of
my own childhood, of the murder of my mother by de Garcia, and of
the oath that I had sworn to be avenged upon him. Lastly I told
him of what had happened upon the previous night and how my enemy
had evaded me. All the while that I was speaking Fonseca, wrapped
Montezuma's Daughter |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: the admiral; already, or as soon after as the dawn permitted,
rescue lines were rigged, and the survivors were with difficulty
and danger begun to be brought to shore. And soon the cheerful
spirit of the admiral added a new feature to the scene. Surrounded
as he was by the crews of two wrecked ships, he paraded the band of
the TRENTON, and the bay was suddenly enlivened with the strains of
"Hail Columbia."
During a great part of the day the work of rescue was continued,
with many instances of courage and devotion; and for a long time
succeeding, the almost inexhaustible harvest of the beach was to be
reaped. In the first employment, the Samoans earned the gratitude
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg. - Notes on Same,
& Prof. Webb's Acct." The other manuscript papers were brief notes,
some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons,
some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably
W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest
comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults,
with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological
source-books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult
in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of
1925.
Call of Cthulhu |
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 The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: down on the grass and fell asleep. He was suddenly awakened,
as he stated, by a peculiar noise, a sort of singing he called
it, and on peeping through the branches he saw Helen V. playing
on the grass with a "strange naked man," who he seemed unable
to describe more fully. He said he felt dreadfully frightened
and ran away crying for his father. Joseph W. proceeded in the
direction indicated by his son, and found Helen V. sitting on
the grass in the middle of a glade or open space left by
charcoal burners. He angrily charged her with frightening his
little boy, but she entirely denied the accusation and laughed
at the child's story of a "strange man," to which he himself
The Great God Pan |
