| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Animal Farm by George Orwell: them in a dream and incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders. They, too,
were slaughtered. Then a goose came forward and confessed to having
secreted six ears of corn during the last year's harvest and eaten them in
the night. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking
pool--urged to do this, so she said, by Snowball--and two other sheep
confessed to having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of
Napoleon, by chasing him round and round a bonfire when he was suffering
from a cough. They were all slain on the spot. And so the tale of
confessions and executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses
lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of
blood, which had been unknown there since the expulsion of Jones.
Animal Farm |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call
it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by
means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember
when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were
strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in
the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit
of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going
out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I
went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined
myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
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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 Aesop's Fables by Aesop: thought a trick had been played upon him. But he took it home on
second thoughts, and soon found to his delight that it was an egg
of pure gold. Every morning the same thing occurred, and he soon
became rich by selling his eggs. As he grew rich he grew greedy;
and thinking to get at once all the gold the Goose could give, he
killed it and opened it only to find nothing.
Greed oft o'er reaches itself.
The Labourer and the Nightingale
A Labourer lay listening to a Nightingale's song throughout
the summer night. So pleased was he with it that the next night
he set a trap for it and captured it. "Now that I have caught
Aesop's Fables |
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 Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: clever as to keep up her reputation for smartness by always leaving a
ballroom in brilliant order, as she had entered it. Women whispered to
each other with a feeling of envy that she planned and wore as many
different dresses as the parties she went to in one evening.
On the present occasion Madame de Vaudremont was not destined to be
free to leave when she would the ballroom she had entered in triumph.
Pausing for a moment on the threshold, she shot swift but observant
glances on the women present, hastily scrutinizing their dresses to
assure herself that her own eclipsed them all.
The illustrious beauty presented herself to the admiration of the
crowd at the same moment with one of the bravest colonels of the
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