Today's Stichomancy for Mohandas Gandhi

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Salome by Oscar Wilde:

arriver un malheur.

LE JEUNE SYRIEN. Elle est tres belle ce soir.

PREMIER SOLDAT. Le tetrarque a l'air sombre.

SECOND SOLDAT. Oui, il a l'air sombre.

PREMIER SOLDAT. Il regarde quelque chose.

SECOND SOLDAT. Il regarde quelqu'un.

PREMIER SOLDAT. Qui regarde-t-il?

SECOND SOLDAT. Je ne sais pas.

LE JEUNE SYRIEN. Comme la princesse est pale! Jamais je ne l'ai vue si pale. Elle ressemble au reflet d'une rose blanche dans un miroir d'argent

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan:

'You have never shown me one. But how could you?' she added in haste; 'a photograph is always about the size of a door nowadays. It is simply impossible to keep one's friends and relations in a pocketbook as one used to do.'

They might have stopped there, but some demon of persistence drove Madeline on. She besought help from her imagination; she was not for the moment honest. It was an impulse--an equivocal impulse-- born doubtless of the equivocal situation, and it ended badly.

'She will bring something of the spring out to you,' said Madeline-- 'the spring in England. How many years is it since you have seen it? There will be a breath of the cowslips about her, and in her

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner:

"Y-e-s," she said, with her slow Colonial drawl; "I'm so glad."

We stood looking at each other.

Then they came in and swept us away to dance. All the evening we did not come near to each other. Only once, as she passed, she smiled at me.

The next morning I left the town.

I never saw her again.

Years afterwards I heard she had married and gone to America; it may or may not be so--but the rose--the rose is in the box still! When my faith in woman grows dim, and it seems that for want of love and magnanimity she can play no part in any future heaven; then the scent of that small withered thing comes back:--spring cannot fail us.

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 War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells:

only begun to see clearly these last few days. There's lots will take things as they are--fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing some- thing, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of com- plicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety.

War of the Worlds