| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: sinister regard for the actions of the girl behind him.
Realizing that she could not again turn without
attracting his immediate and perhaps fatal attention,
Jane Clayton resolved to risk all in one last attempt
to reach the tree and clamber to the lower branches.
Gathering herself stealthily for the effort, she leaped
suddenly to her feet, but almost simultaneously the
lion sprang up, wheeled and with wide-distended jaws
and terrific roars, charged swiftly down upon her.
Those who have spent lifetimes hunting the big game of
Africa will tell you that scarcely any other creature
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault:
the population has been returned too large. How many men
are there to a square thousand miles in the country?
Hardly one. Does not America offer any inducement for men
to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd
Fellow--one who may be known by the development of his organ
of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and
cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on
coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in
good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the
virile garb, to collect a fund to the support of the widows
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking
middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans
for certain special information unobtainable from any local source.
His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an
Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit,
a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied
that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology.
On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely
professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever
it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps
Call of Cthulhu |
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 Common Sense by Thomas Paine: and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves,
so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult
and an imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals,
no ONE by BIRTH could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual
preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve SOME
decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might
be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest NATURAL proofs
of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it,
otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by
giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.
Secondly, as no man at first could possess any other public honours
Common Sense |
