| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: "If apparitions are not impossible," said Lambert, "they must be due
to a faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest
essence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses,
though they may become perceptible to the inner being when it has
reached a high degree of ecstasy, or a great perfection of vision."
I know--though my remembrance is now vague--that Lambert, by following
the results of Mind and Will step by step, after he had established
their laws, accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then,
had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible. Thus wizards, men
possessed with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree--the
victims of the Middle Ages--became the subject of explanations so
 Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: A tribe, that came along the hollow vale,
In silence weeping: such their step as walk
Quires chanting solemn litanies on earth.
As on them more direct mine eye descends,
Each wondrously seem'd to be revers'd
At the neck-bone, so that the countenance
Was from the reins averted: and because
None might before him look, they were compell'd
To' advance with backward gait. Thus one perhaps
Hath been by force of palsy clean transpos'd,
But I ne'er saw it nor believe it so.
 The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |