| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: The swine troop homeward; woods their arbutes yield;
So, various fruit sheds Autumn, and high up
On sunny rocks the mellowing vintage bakes.
Meanwhile about his lips sweet children cling;
His chaste house keeps its purity; his kine
Drop milky udders, and on the lush green grass
Fat kids are striving, horn to butting horn.
Himself keeps holy days; stretched o'er the sward,
Where round the fire his comrades crown the bowl,
He pours libation, and thy name invokes,
Lenaeus, and for the herdsmen on an elm
Georgics |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: work. It seemed the ordained order of things that dogs should
work. All day they swung up and down the main street in long
teams, and in the night their jingling bells still went by. They
hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up to the mines, and did
all manner of work that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley.
Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main they were
the wild wolf husky breed. Every night, regularly, at nine, at
twelve, at three, they lifted a nocturnal song, a weird and eerie
chant, in which it was Buck's delight to join.
With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars
leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its
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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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter,
at the risk of some repetition, to bring the whole argument
together. And the argument is that since the dawn
of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands
or perhaps a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic
evolution, a gradual development or refinement of
Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously
given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious
belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
the race at large or in any branch of it) always following,
step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: too apt to hawk God for what he will fetch; he is greedy for the
poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people
who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality
still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their
own purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet than a
magnificent Fetish. They did not really want him, but they have
heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use
of him. They call upon his name, they do certain things that are
supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying
prayers and repeating gross praises of him, or reading in a blind,
industrious way that strange miscellany of Jewish and early
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