| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: underneath it; but her face was so sad that he had not the
heart to ask.
So he said to himself, 'The day shall surely come when I will
lift that stone, though no man in Troezene can.' And in
order to grow strong he spent all his days in wrestling, and
boxing, and hurling, and taming horses, and hunting the boar
and the bull, and coursing goats and deer among the rocks;
till upon all the mountains there was no hunter so swift as
Theseus; and he killed Phaia the wild sow of Crommyon, which
wasted all the land; till all the people said, 'Surely the
Gods are with the lad.'
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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 Symposium by Xenophon: B.C.), and has conceived certain ideas concerning Socrates, "a
wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into
the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause."
Plat. "Apol." 18 B, 19 C. "Clouds," 101, 360, {khair o presbuta
. . . ton nun meteorosophiston . . . ta te meteora phrontistes}.
Soc. Which surely is a better fate than to be called a thoughtless
person?
The Syr. Perhaps, if you were not thought to split your brains on
things above us--transcendental stuff.[8]
[8] Or, "if only you were held to be less 'meteoric,' less head-in-
airy in your speculations."
The Symposium |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: believed in these things. The Moors, the best physicians of the
Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the "Arabian Nights" prove, of
enchanters, genii, peris, and what not? The Jewish rabbis had their
Cabala, which sprang up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy
founded on the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters of
the text of Scripture, which some said was given by the angel Ragiel
to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam talked with angels, the sun and
moon, summoned spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed;
and by that book of Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon became the
great magician and master of all the spirits and their hoarded
treasures.
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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 The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: At that dreadful cry the servants began to stir, and M. de Nueil fled
like a criminal.
When he reached his home again he wrote a few lines and gave them to
his own man, telling him to give the letter himself into Mme. de
Beauseant's hands, and to say that it was a matter of life and death
for his master. The messenger went. M. de Nueil went back to the
drawing-room where his wife was still murdering the /Caprice/, and sat
down to wait till the answer came. An hour later, when the /Caprice/
had come to an end, and the husband and wife sat in silence on
opposite sides of the hearth, the man came back from Valleroy and gave
his master his own letter, unopened.
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