| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: would have driven a romanticist out of the neighborhood, had he
happened to take lodgings over the way.
When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which hung
from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the servant-woman,
coming from within, had admitted him through the side of the double-
door in which was a small grated loop-hole, that half of the door
escaped from her hand and swung back by its own weight with a solemn,
ponderous sound that echoed along the roof of a wide paved archway and
through the depths of the house, as though the door had been of iron.
This archway, painted to resemble marble, always clean and daily
sprinkled with fresh sand, led into a large court-yard paved with
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort
of mist rises before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely
only a neatly brushed head of white hair (which is exceptional in
the case of the B. family, where it is the rule for men to go
bald in a becoming manner, before thirty) and a thin, curved,
dignified nose, a feature in strict accordance with the physical
tradition of the B. family. But it is not by these fragmentary
remains of perishable mortality that he lives in my memory. I
knew, at a very early age, that my grand-uncle Nicholas B. was a
Knight of the Legion of Honour and that he had also the Polish
Cross for valour Virtuti Militari. The knowledge of these
Some Reminiscences |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Anthem by Ayn Rand: all beneath it, and that which is white
and that which is black are lost equally
in the grey of it. It is the word by
which the depraved steal the virtue of
the good, by which the weak steal the
might of the strong, by which the fools
steal the wisdom of the sages.
What is my joy if all hands, even the
unclean, can reach into it? What is my
wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to
me? What is my freedom, if all creatures,
Anthem |
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 Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: subliminal influences play the decisive part in these abrupt
changes of heart, just as they do in hypnotism.[150] Suggestive
therapeutics abound in records of cure, after a few sittings, of
inveterate bad habits with which the patient, left to ordinary
moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain. Both
drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action
through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have
the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If the
grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through
the subliminal door, then. But just HOW anything operates in
this region is still unexplained, and we shall do well now to say
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