| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Riverman by Stewart Edward White: "You don't expect me to work my driver under the face of that jam!"
cried the captain.
"Certainly," snapped Orde, wheeling.
"Not me!" said Aspinwall positively. "I know when I've got enough!"
"What's the matter?" asked Orde.
"It isn't safe," replied the captain; "and I don't intend to risk my
men or my driver."
Orde stood for a moment stock-still; then with a snort of anger he
leaped to the deck, seized the man by the neck and thrust him bodily
over the side to the bank.
Safe, you white-livered skunk!" he roared. "Safe! Go over in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other that I did
want. So there we split. I was cruel, and left her. Then I took on with
another girl, a teacher, who had made a scandal by carrying on with a
married man and driving him nearly out of his mind. She was a soft,
white-skinned, soft sort of a woman, older than me, and played the
fiddle. And she was a demon. She loved everything about love, except
the sex. Clinging, caressing, creeping into you in every way: but if
you forced her to the sex itself, she just ground her teeth and sent
out hate. I forced her to it, and she could simply numb me with hate
because of it. So I was balked again. I loathed all that. I wanted a
woman who wanted me, and wanted IT.
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: He works a greater ruin, far,
Deep down within my heart.
This roguish little tyke who sits
Each night upon my knee,
And hammers at his poor old dad,
Is bound to conquer me.
He little knows that long ago,
He forced the gates apart,
And marched triumphantly into
The city of my heart.
Some day perhaps, in years to come,
Just Folks |
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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its
original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day
a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed
by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on the contrary, so rapid
has the motion become that even brethren find themselves scattered
to the four winds.
An Occidental father and an Oriental head of a family are no longer
really correlative terms. The latter more closely resembles a king
in his duties, responsibilities, and functions generally. Now, in
the Middle Ages in Europe, when a king grew tired of affairs of
state, he abdicated. So in the Far East, when the head of a family
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