| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from United States Declaration of Independence: of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
United States Declaration of Independence |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
Birds come and cry there and twitter in the chimney -
But I go for ever and come again no more.
XVII - WINTER
IN rigorous hours, when down the iron lane
The redbreast looks in vain
For hips and haws,
Lo, shining flowers upon my window-pane
The silver pencil of the winter draws.
When all the snowy hill
And the bare woods are still;
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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 The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: _Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?_
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
The Waste Land |
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 Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: seemed to him of greater weight than thousands of soldiers; a man to
whom nature, as a rare privilege, had given a heart in a frame of
bronze; mirthful and kind at midnight amid women, and next morning
manipulating Europe as a young girl might amuse herself by splashing
water in her bath! Hypocritical and generous; loving tawdriness and
simplicity; devoid of taste, but protecting the arts; and in spite of
these antitheses, really great in everything by instinct or by
temperament; Caesar at five-and-twenty, Cromwell at thirty; and then,
like my grocer buried in Pere Lachaise, a good husband and a good
father. In short, he improvised public works, empires, kings, codes,
verses, a romance--and all with more range than precision. Did he not
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