| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: our English idiom, stuff and rubbish). "Why are you always trying to
scare me with your fancies, Allan? Dingaan is our friend, not our
enemy. So let us take the gifts that fortune gives us and be thankful.
Come, march."
This he said about eight o'clock in the morning.
We strolled through the gates of the Great Kraal, most of the Boers,
who, as usual, had piled their arms under the two milk trees, lounging
along in knots of four or five, laughing and chatting as they went. I
have often thought since, that although every one of them there, except
myself, was doomed within an hour to have taken the dreadful step from
time into eternity, it seems strange that advancing fate should have
Marie |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Little, flitting, white-fire insect
Little, dancing, white-fire creature,
Light me with your little candle,
Ere upon my bed I lay me,
Ere in sleep I close my eyelids!"
Woodrow W. Morris
April 1, 1991
The Song of Hiawatha
Introduction
Should you ask me,
whence these stories?
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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 Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Slip vaguely from my own control --
Of my own spirit let me be
In sole though feeble mastery.
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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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any
more than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives),
but yet was really the matrix of tribal thought and the
spring of tribal action. It was this sense of unity which
was destined by the growth of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light
and evidence in the shape of all manner of rituals and
ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE INTELLECT to
embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of deities.
Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark
soaring in the eye of the sun, and singing rapt between
its "heaven and home" realizes no doubt in actual fact
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
