Today's Stichomancy for Tyra Banks

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

if you have your money's worth?

SIR OLIVER. Well, I'll be the purchaser: I think I can dispose of the family canvas.--[Aside.] Oh, I'll never forgive him this! never!

Re-enter CARELESS

CARELESS. Come, Charles, what keeps you?

CHARLES. I can't come yet. I'faith, we are going to have a sale above stairs; here's little Premium will buy all my ancestors!

CARELESS. Oh, burn your ancestors!

CHARLES. No, he may do that afterwards, if he pleases. Stay, Careless, we want you: egad, you shall be auctioneer--so come along with us.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon:

their conduct. Reason was continually figuring in their speeches, but never in their actions. These were always dominated by those affective and mystic elements whose potency we have so often demonstrated.

The psychological characteristics of the Legislative Assembly were those of the Constituent Assembly, but were greatly accentuated. They may be summed up in four words: impressionability, mobility, timidity, and weakness.

This mobility and impressionability are revealed in the constant variability of their conduct. One day they exchange noisy invective and blows. On the following day we see them ``throwing

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy:

feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow have claimed and sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her for one moment. Soon his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his heart thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm. "Dear me! what will she think of me, so altered as I am!" he said to himself; and the door opened.

Tess appeared on the threshold--not at all as he had expected to see her--bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman

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 Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson:

And when last to the temple of Oro the boat with the victim sped, And the priest uncovered the basket and looked on the face of the dead, Trembling fell upon all at sight of an ominous thing, For there was the aito (1) dead, and he of the house of the king.

So spake on the beach the mother, matter worthy of note, And wattled a basket well, and chose a fish from the boat; And Tamatea the pliable shouldered the basket and went, And travelled, and sang as he travelled, a lad that was well content. Still the way of his going was round by the roaring coast, Where the ring of the reef is broke and the trades run riot the most. On his left, with smoke as of battle, the billows battered the land;

Ballads