Today's Stichomancy for Ambrose Bierce

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tanach:

Hosea 1: 11 (2:2) And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint themselves one head, and shall go up out of the land; for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

Hosea 2: 1 (2:3) Say ye unto your brethren: 'Ammi'; and to your sisters, 'Ruhamah.'

Hosea 2: 2 (2:4) Plead with your mother, plead; for she is not My wife, neither am I her husband; and let her put away her harlotries from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts;

Hosea 2: 3 (2:5) Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst.

Hosea 2: 4 (2:6) And I will not have compassion upon her children; for they are children of harlotry.

Hosea 2: 5 (2:7) For their mother hath played the harlot, she that conceived them hath done shamefully; for she said: 'I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.'

Hosea 2: 6 (2:8) Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will make a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths.

Hosea 2: 7 (2:9) And she shall run after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them, and she shall seek them, but shall not find them; then shall she say: 'I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now.'

The Tanach

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley:

Alexandria. Dr. Layard, in his last book on Nineveh, gives some curious instances of its prevalence among them at an earlier period, well worth your careful study. But it was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cabbalism formed itself into a system. It was there that the Jews learnt to become the jugglers and magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till Claudius had to expel them from Rome, as pests to rational and moral society.

And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler thoughts and hopes. They could not read the glorious heirlooms of their race without finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, of old deliverances worked for their forefathers; and what seemed promises,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson:

brought up on Loch Carron side; men fished over the gunwale, some of them under umbrellas; women did their washing; and every barge boasted its mongrel cur by way of watch-dog. Each one barked furiously at the canoes, running alongside until he had got to the end of his own ship, and so passing on the word to the dog aboard the next. We must have seen something like a hundred of these embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one after another like the houses in a street; and from not one of them were we disappointed of this accompaniment. It was like visiting a menagerie, the CIGARETTE remarked.

These little cities by the canal side had a very odd effect upon

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 Macbeth by William Shakespeare:

The Night is long, that neuer findes the Day.

Exeunt.

Actus Quintus. Scena Prima.

Enter a Doctor of Physicke, and a Wayting Gentlewoman.

Doct. I haue too Nights watch'd with you, but can perceiue no truth in your report. When was it shee last walk'd? Gent. Since his Maiesty went into the Field, I haue seene her rise from her bed, throw her Night-Gown vppon her, vnlocke her Closset, take foorth paper, folde it, write vpon't, read it, afterwards Seale it, and againe returne

Macbeth