| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: were, an enemy of the other. The tears and the terror that marked her
face at the moment when this tale of a domestic drama then lowering
over the quiet house begins, were caused by the fear of having
sacrificed her children to her husband.
In 1805, Madame Claes's brother died without children. The Spanish law
does not allow a sister to succeed to territorial possessions, which
follow the title; but the duke had left her in his will about sixty
thousand ducats, and this sum the heirs of the collateral branch did
not seek to retain. Though the feeling which united her to Balthazar
Claes was such that no thought of personal interest could ever sully
it, Josephine felt a certain pleasure in possessing a fortune equal to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . .
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . .
and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . .
shall not perish from this earth.
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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 Critias by Plato: was designed to be the second part of a trilogy, which, like the other
great Platonic trilogy of the Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, was never
completed. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the
creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy
of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, as he
has already told us (Tim.), intended to represent the ideal state engaged
in a patriotic conflict. This mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical
of the struggle of Athens and Persia, perhaps in some degree also of the
wars of the Greeks and Carthaginians, in the same way that the Persian is
prefigured by the Trojan war to the mind of Herodotus, or as the narrative
of the first part of the Aeneid is intended by Virgil to foreshadow the
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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 The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Toward the south stretched the rugged, ice-clad waste to the edge of
the mighty barrier. Toward the east and west, and dimly toward the
north I descried other Okarian cities, while in the immediate foreground,
just beyond the walls of Kadabra, the grim guardian shaft reared its
somber head.
Then I cast my eyes down into the streets of Kadabra, from which
a sudden tumult had arisen, and there I saw a battle raging,
and beyond the city's walls I saw armed men marching in great
columns toward a near-by gate.
The Warlord of Mars |
