| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchess of Padua by Oscar Wilde: Where I had hidden it to serve my need,
And drew it from the sheath, and felt the edge,
And thought of you, and how I loved you, Guido,
And turned to fall upon it, when I marked
The old man sleeping, full of years and sin;
There lay he muttering curses in his sleep,
And as I looked upon his evil face
Suddenly like a flame there flashed across me,
There is the barrier which Guido spoke of:
You said there lay a barrier between us,
What barrier but he? -
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Koran: guardian enough.
O ye who believe! when ye wed believing women, and then divorce them
before ye have touched them, ye have no term that ye need observe;
so make them some provision, and let them go handsomely at large.
O thou prophet! verily, we make lawful for thee thy wives to whom
thou hast given their hire, and what thy right hand possesses of the
booty that God has granted thee and the daughters of thy paternal
uncle and the daughters of thy paternal aunts, and the daughters of
thy maternal uncle and the daughters of thy maternal aunts, provided
they have fled with thee, and any believing woman if she give
herself to the prophet, if the prophet desire to marry her;-a
The Koran |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: that of the southern part of the moon, brought by the glasses
to within 450 yards. They did not again leave the scuttles,
and noted every detail of this fantastical continent.
Mounts Doerful and Leibnitz formed two separate groups very near
the south pole. The first group extended from the pole to the
eighty-fourth parallel, on the eastern part of the orb; the
second occupied the eastern border, extending from the 65@ of
latitude to the pole.
On their capriciously formed ridge appeared dazzling sheets, as
mentioned by Pere Secchi. With more certainty than the
illustrious Roman astronomer, Barbicane was enabled to recognize
From the Earth to the Moon |
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 Crowd by Gustave le Bon: profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be
desirous, it is true, of changing the names of their
institutions, and to obtain these changes they accomplish at
times even violent revolutions, but the essence of these
institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs
of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their
incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial
matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as
indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish-
like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious
horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential
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