Today's Stichomancy for Michael Jackson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

was precisely as he had described it. So huge was it that it could have been brought to this inaccessible part of the world by no means of transportation that existed there--it could only have come in the way that David Innes said it came--up through the crust of the earth from the inner world of Pellucidar.

I spent a week with him, and then, abandoned my lion hunt, returned directly to the coast and hurried to London where I purchased a great quantity of stuff which he wished to take back to Pellucidar with him. There were books, rifles, revolvers, ammunition, cameras,

At the Earth's Core

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac:

back to you."

"Are you speaking of that little Minoret?"

"That little Minoret is eighty-three years old," said the abbe, smiling. "My dear lady, do have a little Christian charity; don't wound him,--he might be useful to you in other ways."

"What ways?"

"He has an angel in his house; a precious young girl--"

"Oh! that little Ursula. What of that?"

The poor abbe did not pursue the subject after these significant words, the laconic sharpness of which cut through the proposition he was about to make.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson:

insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!"

CHAPTER XXXIII - THE PRINCESS MEETS WITH AN UNEXPECTED MISFORTUNE.

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 Love Songs by Sara Teasdale:

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold; They have put shawls of fog around them, see! What if the air should grow so dimly white That we would lose our way along the paths Made new by walls of moving mist receding The more we follow. . . . What a silver night! That was our bench the time you said to me The long new poem -- but how different now, How eerie with the curtain of the fog Making it strange to all the friendly trees! There is no wind, and yet great curving scrolls