Today's Stichomancy for George Armstrong Custer
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: as the Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love,
she adored one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the
virtues which she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there
was of vice between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless
marriage unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to
justify, but which no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at
last, that she had a daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom
to desire a noble life and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy
or not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure,
untainted sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the
most disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pericles by William Shakespeare: PERICLES.
An armour, friends! I pray you, let me see it.
Thanks, fortune, yet, that, after all my crosses,
Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself,
And though it was mine own, part of my heritage,
Which my dead father did bequeath to me,
With this strict charge, even as he left his life.
'Keep it, my Pericles; it hath been a shield
'Twixt me and death;' -- and pointed to this brace; --
For that it saved me, keep it; in like necessity --
The which the gods protect thee from! -- may defend thee.'
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: been for ages the great witness for these ideas; and all classes, like
their forefather Adam--like, indeed, the Old Adam--the selfish,
cowardly, brute nature in every man and in every age--were shifting the
blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationships and
duties, and therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying, as
of old, 'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the
tree, and I did eat.'"
Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by asserting her
moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no
suspicion that she was the true complement of the man, not merely by
softening him, but by strengthening him; that true manhood can be no
|
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 Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar: est) tanti oneris turrim in muro sese conlocare confiderent?
Ubi vero moveri et adpropinquare muris viderunt, nova atque inusitata
specie commoti legatos ad Caesarem de pace miserunt, qui ad hunc modum
locuti, non se existimare Romanos sine ope divina bellum gerere, qui
tantae altitudinis machinationes tanta celeritate promovere possent, se
suaque omnia eorum potestati permittere dixerunt. Unum petere ac
deprecari: si forte pro sua clementia ac mansuetudine, quam ipsi ab aliis
audirent, statuisset Atuatucos esse conservandos, ne se armis despoliaret.
Sibi omnes fere finitimos esse inimicos ac suae virtuti invidere; a
quibus se defelldere traditis armis non possent. Sibi praestare, si in
eum casum deducerentur, quamvis fortunam a populo Romano pati quam ab his
|
|
|
