Today's Stichomancy for Charles Bronson
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: To this detested groom. [Points at Oswald.]
Gon. At your choice, sir.
Lear. I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell.
We'll no more meet, no more see one another.
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;
Or rather a disease that's in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,
A plague sore, an embossed carbuncle
In my corrupted blood. But I'll not chide thee.
Let shame come when it will, I do not call it.
King Lear |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: statues in the year 387. The friends of Demetrius, prudent and
conservative persons, gathered around Hermas and made him welcome
to their circle. Chief among them was Libanius, the sophist, his
nearest neighbour, whose daughter Athenais had been the playmate
of Hermas in the old days.
He had left her a child. He found her a beautiful woman.
What transformation is so magical, so charming, as this? To
see the uncertain lines of youth rounded into firmness and
symmetry, to discover the half-ripe, merry, changing face of
the girl matured into perfect loveliness, and looking at you
with calm, clear, serious eyes, not forgetting the past, but
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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 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: The woman was no fool, that is, she was superior to her class; nor
had misery quite petrified the life's-blood of humanity, to which
reflections on our own misfortunes only give a more orderly course.
The manner, rather than the expostulations, of Maria made a slight
suspicion dart into her mind with corresponding sympathy, which
various other avocations, and the habit of banishing compunction,
prevented her, for the present, from examining more minutely.
But when she was told that no person, excepting the physician
appointed by her family, was to be permitted to see the lady at
the end of the gallery, she opened her keen eyes still wider, and
uttered a--"hem!" before she enquired--"Why?" She was briefly told,
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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 The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: fight against any number to the last moment. One dying Indian
seized with his teeth the thumb of his adversary, and
allowed his own eye to be forced out sooner than relinquish
his hold. Another, who was wounded, feigned death, keeping
a knife ready to strike one more fatal blow. My informer
said, when he was pursuing an Indian, the man cried out
for mercy, at the same time that he was covertly loosing the
bolas from his waist, meaning to whirl it round his head and
so strike his pursuer. "I however struck him with my sabre
to the ground, and then got off my horse, and cut his throat
with my knife." This is a dark picture; but how much more
The Voyage of the Beagle |
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