| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: The one goeth to his neighbour because he seeketh himself, and the other
because he would fain lose himself. Your bad love to yourselves maketh
solitude a prison to you.
The furthest ones are they who pay for your love to the near ones; and when
there are but five of you together, a sixth must always die.
I love not your festivals either: too many actors found I there, and even
the spectators often behaved like actors.
Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the
festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman.
I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to
be a sponge, if one would be loved by overflowing hearts.
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: To live or die which of the twain were better,
When life is sham'd, and Death reproach's debtor.
'To kill myself,' quoth she, 'alack! what were it,
But with my body my poor soul's pollution?
They that lose half with greater patience bear it
Than they whose whole is swallow'd in confusion.
That mother tries a merciless conclusion
Who, having two sweet babes, when death takes one,
Will slay the other, and be nurse to none.
'My body or my soul, which was the dearer,
When the one pure, the other made divine?
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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 The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: with the old man, and taking no further notice of him; all the less
perhaps because the neophyte stood still beneath the spell which holds
a heaven-born painter as he sees for the first time an atelier filled
with the materials and instruments of his art. Daylight came from a
casement in the roof and fell, focussed as it were, upon a canvas
which rested on an easel in the middle of the room, and which bore, as
yet, only three or four chalk lines. The light thus concentrated did
not reach the dark angles of the vast atelier; but a few wandering
reflections gleamed through the russet shadows on the silvered
breastplate of a horseman's cuirass of the fourteenth century as it
hung from the wall, or sent sharp lines of light upon the carved and
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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 Euthydemus by Plato: limit of logic and metaphysics; if they give us a more comprehensive or a
more definite view of the different spheres of knowledge they are to be
studied; if not, not. The better part of ancient logic appears hardly in
our own day to have a separate existence; it is absorbed in two other
sciences: (1) rhetoric, if indeed this ancient art be not also fading away
into literary criticism; (2) the science of language, under which all
questions relating to words and propositions and the combinations of them
may properly be included.
To continue dead or imaginary sciences, which make no signs of progress and
have no definite sphere, tends to interfere with the prosecution of living
ones. The study of them is apt to blind the judgment and to render men
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