| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: faith. Moreover, the whole body professes doctrines that are
sufficiently true and sufficiently mysterious to electrify into a sort
of tribal loyalty all adepts whenever they obtain even a slight
development. The attachment of the Companions to their laws is so
passionate that the diverse tribes will fight sanguinary battles with
each other in defence of some question of principle.
Happily for our present public safety, when a Devorant is ambitious,
he builds houses, lays by his money, and leaves the Order. There is
many a curious thing to tell about the "Compagnons du Devoir"
[Companions of the Duty], the rivals of the Devorants, and about the
different sects of working-men, their usages, their fraternity, and
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: stillness of all-embracing space.
Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these
peoples so different from us in this most fundamental of
considerations to any people, the consideration of themselves?
The answer leads to some interesting conclusions.
Chapter 8. Imagination.
If, as is the case with the moon, the earth, as she travelled round
her orbit turned always the same face inward, we might expect to
find, between the thoughts of that hemisphere which looked
continually to the sun, and those of the other peering eternally out
at the stars, some such difference as actually exists between
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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 Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the whole
bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be able to
pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how
much of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice,
whether less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a
tenth - or, say a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print
you will be in a position to share with us the issue of your
calculations.
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to
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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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and
read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me
and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that
family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let any-
thing come between us. Poor Emmeline made poetry
about all the dead people when she was alive, and it
didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make
some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat
out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make
it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's room trim
and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
