| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: 5 The sovran all-imperial Doors, wide, good, many and manifold,
Have poured their streams of holy oil.
6 With gay adornment, fair to see, in glorious beauty shine
they
forth:
Let Night and Morning rest them here.
7 Let these two Sages first of all, heralds divine and eloquent,
Perform for us this sacrifice.
8 You I address, Sarasvati, and Bharati, and Ila, all:
Urge ye us on to glorious fame.
9 Tvastar the Lord hath made all forms and all the cattle of
The Rig Veda |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: seekers, never finding wonder within, always rushing for it
without. His heart, for all his much experience, or perhaps
because of that, was a simple heart. He took them for what
they said they were, for friends, and he talked of the Indies
and all his voyages past and to come, for he would
yet find Ciguarre and retake the Sepulchre.
He had not much money. All his affairs were tangled.
Yet he rested Admiral of the Ocean-Sea, and in name, at
least, Viceroy of the Indies. He was much concerned over
his mariners and others who had returned with him to Spain.
All their pay was in arrears. He wrote begging letters for
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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 The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: and Susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households,
children may play a part less romantic but not less useful than
that assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact of
giving their parents no leisure to dwell on irremediable
grievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life had
been so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapid
mental readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery her
private cares were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature,
diet and medicine.
Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time it
happened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility of
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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 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: unknown, for the practice often continues when the cause has
ceased; and concerning superstitious ceremonies it is vain to
conjecture; for what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain.
I have long believed that the practice of embalming arose only from
tenderness to the remains of relations or friends; and to this
opinion I am more inclined because it seems impossible that this
care should have been general; had all the dead been embalmed,
their repositories must in time have been more spacious than the
dwellings of the living. I suppose only the rich or honourable
were secured from corruption, and the rest left to the course of
nature.
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