| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: 'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.
Reason, in itself confounded,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: [This paragraph needs to be verified from early editions]
It was a forlorn hope at best. At any moment the repulsive
ray tanks might be pierced. The men upon the Kaolian
ship were battling with renewed hope. In the bow stood
Kulan Tith, a brave figure fighting beside his brave warriors,
beating back the ferocious green men.
The Thuria came low above the other craft. The Kaolians
were forming under their officers in readiness to board,
and then a sudden fierce fusillade from the rifles of the
green warriors vomited their hail of death and destruction
into the side of the brave flier.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: 4. Passivity.--Although the oncoming of mystical states may be
facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the
attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in
other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the
characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic
feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes
as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter
peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite
phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as
prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance.
When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there
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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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: function; and how much more so to the wife whose estimate of
herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her husband!
Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent
intellectual power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of
feeling, of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on
which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger. She so
fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she
disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband.
She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of
perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.
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