Today's Stichomancy for Liam Neeson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot:

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340 There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water

The Waste Land

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

known to need any illustration. Text books of psychiatry deal with the falsifications of paranoia and other insanities. That the really insane also sometimes lie pathologically, that is, tell for no normal purpose what they adequately know to be untrue, is a fact not so well understood. But even that we need not be especially concerned with in our case histories. It has been well brought out in the previous literature on pathological lying, as witness in our Chapter II. In the present chapter we do not include the out-and-out insane, nor the definitively feeble-minded, nor the recognizably epileptic.

Much more difficult of understanding and much less easily

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft:

and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diarite they were, with blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And Carter knew right well what they

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

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 Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy:

listened to Stepan reading the gospel and talking about what he had read. The most attentive among those who listened were two of the pris- oners, Vassily, and a convict called Mahorkin, a murderer who had become a hangman. Twice during his stay in this prison he was called upon to do duty as hangman, and both times in far- away places where nobody could be found to ex- ecute the sentences.

Two of the peasants who had killed Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky, had been sentenced to

The Forged Coupon