Today's Stichomancy for Dean Martin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Koran:

the due of their piety.

Do they wait for aught but the Hour, that it should come to them suddenly? The conditions thereof have come already; how, when it has come on them, can they have their reminder?

Know thou that there is no god but God; and ask pardon for thy sin and for the believers, men and women; for God knows your return and your resort!

Those who misbelieve say, 'Why has not a surah been revealed?' but when a decisive surah is revealed and fighting is mentioned therein, thou mayest see those in whose heart is sickness looking towards thee with the look of one fainting in death. Preferable for them

The Koran

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis:

little group, here and there -- so commonplace.

Don't you LOATHE the commonplace?

Not loathe, really, of course -- because the har- monious mind does not let itself be disturbed.

The harmonious mind realizes that dirt is only useful matter in the wrong place, as Tennyson sings so sweetly somewhere.

Tennyson has quite gone out, of course. He is so -- so, well, if you get what I mean -- so mid- Victorian, somehow.

It seems he WAS mid-Victorian all the time, but

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft:

and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation.

Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea - a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal

Shadow out of Time

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 Marie by H. Rider Haggard:

experience, it had never occurred to me that the wonderful eyes of the vultures would see the flash of the powder even through the pervading sunlight, and swerve before the deadly bullet could reach them.

On that night I was indeed a hero in a small way. Even Henri Marais thawed and spoke to me as a father might to his child, he who always disliked me in secret, partly because I was an Englishman, partly because I was everything to his daughter and he was jealous, and partly for the reason that I stood in the path of his nephew, Hernan Pereira, whom he either loved or feared, or both. As for the rest of them, men, women and children, they thanked and blessed me with tears in their eyes, vowing that, young as I was, thenceforth I and no other should be

Marie