| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Tonight, before my Ethiop friends eat you, I shall tell
you what has already befallen your wife and child, and what
further plans I have for their futures."
Chapter 8
The Dance of Death
Through the luxuriant, tangled vegetation of the Stygian
jungle night a great lithe body made its way sinuously
and in utter silence upon its soft padded feet. Only two
blazing points of yellow-green flame shone occasionally with
the reflected light of the equatorial moon that now and again
pierced the softly sighing roof rustling in the night wind.
The Beasts of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: times over; the better to inform myself of everything I could find
worth taking notice of.
I hope it will appear that I am not the less, but the more capable
of giving a full account of things, by how much the more
deliberation I have taken in the view of them, and by how much the
oftener I have had opportunity to see them.
I set out the 3rd of April, 1722, going first eastward, and took
what I think I may very honestly call a circuit in the very letter
of it; for I went down by the coast of the Thames through the
Marshes or Hundreds on the south side of the county of Essex, till
I came to Malden, Colchester, and Harwich, thence continuing on the
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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 A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: and an apron with a bib like those worn by hospital nurses.
Her face was thin and her voice shrill. When she was twenty-five, she
looked forty. After she had passed fifty, nobody could tell her age;
erect and silent always, she resembled a wooden figure working
automatically.
CHAPTER II
Like every other woman, she had had an affair of the heart. Her
father, who was a mason, was killed by falling from a scaffolding.
Then her mother died and her sisters went their different ways; a
farmer took her in, and while she was quite small, let her keep cows
in the fields. She was clad in miserable rags, beaten for the
A Simple Soul |
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 Gorgias by Plato: curable or incurable, and looks with love and admiration on the soul of
some just one, whom he sends to the islands of the blest. Similar is the
practice of Aeacus; and Minos overlooks them, holding a golden sceptre, as
Odysseus in Homer saw him
'Wielding a sceptre of gold, and giving laws to the dead.'
My wish for myself and my fellow-men is, that we may present our souls
undefiled to the judge in that day; my desire in life is to be able to meet
death. And I exhort you, and retort upon you the reproach which you cast
upon me,--that you will stand before the judge, gaping, and with dizzy
brain, and any one may box you on the ear, and do you all manner of evil.
Perhaps you think that this is an old wives' fable. But you, who are the
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