| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: before the arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris,
poured blood down the throat of the dead corpse, with the words,
"Glut thyself with the gore for which thou hast thirsted." But it
may be true--for Xenophon states it expressly, and with detail--that
Cyrus, from the very time of his triumph, became an Eastern despot,
a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in mysterious
splendour, in the vast fortified palace which he built for himself;
and imitating and causing his nobles and satraps to imitate, in all
but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom he had conquered. And
of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their empire ran
rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to which all
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: understand its interior: he had capped and crowned so many people, he
was always flinging himself at their heads, etc. His jokes about hats
and heads were irrepressible, though perhaps not dazzling.
Nevertheless, after August and October, 1830, he abandoned the hat
trade and the article Paris, and tore himself from things mechanical
and visible to mount into the higher spheres of Parisian speculation.
"He forsook," to use his own words, "matter for mind; manufactured
products for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence."
This requires some explanation.
The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a
number of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new
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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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by
means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic
enlightenment--which, with the aid of liberty of the press and
newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit
would not so easily find itself in "distress"! (The Germans
invented gunpowder-all credit to them! but they again made things
square--they invented printing.) But we, who are neither Jesuits,
nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we GOOD EUROPEANS,
and free, VERY free spirits--we have it still, all the distress
of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the
arrow, the duty, and, who knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT....
Beyond Good and Evil |
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 Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down,
twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt
imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the
Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a
ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there
are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days,
the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the
reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to
a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A
line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore
Moby Dick |
