| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum: "I adore stuffing," said the Patchwork Girl.
"Well, as for that, my head is stuffed with
pumpkin-seeds," declared Jack. "I use them for
brains, and when they are fresh I am intellectual.
Just now, I regret to say, my seeds are rattling a
bit, so I must soon get another head."
"Oh; do you change your head?" asked Ojo.
"To be sure. Pumpkins are not permanent, more's
the pity, and in time they spoil. That is why I
grow such a great field of pumpkins--that I may
select a new head whenever necessary."
The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: important buildings, and the like - for guidance in further explorations.
We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing
as it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago,
for the sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains
and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary
vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvelous and mystic
beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot the clammy sense
of sinister oppression with which the city’s inhuman age and massiveness
and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and
weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the denizens
of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror;
At the Mountains of Madness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--
the casement opened forward--and gave herself up. There was a great
still moon to help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision.
She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake,
and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do.
What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her,
to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter.
I got to the door without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it,
and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her.
While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her brother's door,
which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me
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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 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere
Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that
appealed to men's eyes - that is to say, in a spectacular form, in
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