Today's Stichomancy for Lee Harvey Oswald
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as
disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their
mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end,
however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad
conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the
breast of the very VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their
own secret; it has been for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a
new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always
disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and
self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most
venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was
 Beyond Good and Evil |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: a step dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far as my tail-coat
permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally inventive,
as you know.
`Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have
escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange,
as for me it was a most fortunate thing. Yet, oddly enough, I
found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor. I found
it in a sealed jar, that by chance, I suppose, had been really
hermetically sealed. I fancied at first that it was paraffin
wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor
was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance
 The Time Machine |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: the University; and the professors were very kind and attentive,
possibly to Ruffini's PROTEGE, perhaps also to the first Protestant
student. It was no joke for Signor Flaminio at first; certificates
had to be got from Paris and from Rector Williams; the classics
must be furbished up at home that he might follow Latin lectures;
examinations bristled in the path, the entrance examination with
Latin and English essay, and oral trials (much softened for the
foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the first University
examination only three months later, in Italian eloquence, no less,
and other wider subjects. On one point the first Protestant
student was moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek
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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 Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: their house,'and so on, but there was nothing tangible. The
authorities were morally certain the man met his death in some
way or another in the house and was thrown out by the kitchen
door, but they couldn't prove it, and the absence of any
indications of violence or poisoning left them helpless. An odd
case, wasn't it? But curiously enough, there's something more
that I haven't told you. I happened to know one of the doctors
who was consulted as to the cause of death, and some time after
the inquest I met him, and asked him about it. 'Do you really
mean to tell me,' I said, 'that you were baffled by the case,
that you actually don't know what the man died of?' 'Pardon me,'
 The Great God Pan |
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