| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: of men-
May we, O Mitra, Varuna, and Aryaman, like him be furtherers
of your
law.
36 A gift of fifty female slaves hath Trasadasyu given me,
Purukutsa's
son,
Most liberal, kind, lord of the brave.
37 And Syava too for me led forth a strong steed at Suvastu's
ford:
A herd of three times seventy kine, good lord of gifts, he
The Rig Veda |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: suppliant with kisses and smooth words. Things were at a
dead-lock. The criminal might be in the sorriest fright, but
he was still the greatest of vassals. Justice was easy to
ask and not difficult to promise; how it was to be executed
was another question. No one in France was strong enough to
punish John of Burgundy; and perhaps no one, except the
widow, very sincere in wishing to punish him.
She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal; but the intensity of her
eagerness wore her out; and she died about a year after the
murder, of grief and indignation, unrequited love and
unsatisfied resentment. It was during the last months of her
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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 Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the
Gulf-shore,--the loftiest bit of land along fourteen miles of
just such marshy coast as I have spoken of. Landward, it
dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to look at, a
wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with ranges of
bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of
saw-grass, stretching away to a bluish-green line of woods that
closed the horizon, and imperfectly drained in the driest season
by a slimy little bayou that continually vomited foul water into
the sea. The point had been much discussed by geologists; it
proved a godsend to United States surveyors weary of attempting
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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 Theaetetus by Plato: When they speak of motion, must they not include two kinds of motion,
change of place and change of nature?--And all things must be supposed to
have both kinds of motion; for if not, the same things would be at rest and
in motion, which is contrary to their theory. And did we not say, that all
sensations arise thus: they move about between the agent and patient
together with a perception, and the patient ceases to be a perceiving power
and becomes a percipient, and the agent a quale instead of a quality; but
neither has any absolute existence? But now we make the further discovery,
that neither white or whiteness, nor any sense or sensation, can be
predicated of anything, for they are in a perpetual flux. And therefore we
must modify the doctrine of Theaetetus and Protagoras, by asserting further
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