Today's Stichomancy for Emiliano Zapata

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard:

still, fighting with a wild impulse to kiss her on the lips as one would an awakening and beloved child. I doubt if I could have done so, however, for really I was immovable; my heart seemed to stop and all my muscles to be paralysed.

I do not know for how long this endured, but I do know how it ended. Presently in the intense silence I heard Bastin's heavy voice and looking round, saw his big head projecting into the sepulchre.

"Well, I never!" he said, "you seem to have woke them up with a vengeance. If you begin like that with the lady, there will be complications before you have done, Arbuthnot."

When the World Shook

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:

a piece of work very small, yet in the end they enter into the quality of it and bring it a little nearer to the real thing, which is always more or less of a secret.

But the strangest part of it all is the way in which a single thought, an idea, will live with a man while he works, and take new forms from year to year, and light up the things that he sees and hears, and lead his imagination by the hand into many wonderful and diverse regions. It seems to me that there am two ways in which you may give unity to a book of stories. You may stay in one place and write about different themes, preserving always the colour of the same locality. Or

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome:

State economy based on a small group of a ruling caste whose privilege in this case would be the management of the workersand peasants." That criticism of individual control, from a communist, goes a good deal further than most of the criticism from people avowedly in opposition.] The enormous importance attached by everybody to this question of individual or collegiate control, may bejudged from the fact that at every conference I attended, and every discussion to which

I listened, this point, which might seem of minor importance, completely overshadowed the question of industrial conscription which, at least inside the Communist Party, seemed generally

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 King James Bible:

KI1 4:13 The son of Geber, in Ramothgilead; to him pertained the towns of Jair the son of Manasseh, which are in Gilead; to him also pertained the region of Argob, which is in Bashan, threescore great cities with walls and brasen bars:

KI1 4:14 Ahinadab the son of Iddo had Mahanaim:

KI1 4:15 Ahimaaz was in Naphtali; he also took Basmath the daughter of Solomon to wife:

KI1 4:16 Baanah the son of Hushai was in Asher and in Aloth:

KI1 4:17 Jehoshaphat the son of Paruah, in Issachar:

KI1 4:18 Shimei the son of Elah, in Benjamin:

KI1 4:19 Geber the son of Uri was in the country of Gilead, in the

King James Bible