| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: branches that the air might keep them cool. Sancho counted more than
sixty wine skins of over six gallons each, and all filled, as it
proved afterwards, with generous wines. There were, besides, piles
of the whitest bread, like the heaps of corn one sees on the
threshing-floors. There was a wall made of cheeses arranged like
open brick-work, and two cauldrons full of oil, bigger than those of a
dyer's shop, served for cooking fritters, which when fried were
taken out with two mighty shovels, and plunged into another cauldron
of prepared honey that stood close by. Of cooks and cook-maids there
were over fifty, all clean, brisk, and blithe. In the capacious
belly of the ox were a dozen soft little sucking-pigs, which, sewn
Don Quixote |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: the tree where the victim was bound, they found him gone. And they cried
one to another, 'She, only she, has done this, who has always said, 'I like
not the taste of man-flesh; men are too like me; I cannot eat them.' 'She
is mad,' they cried; 'let us kill her!' So, in those dim, misty times that
men reck not of now, that they hardly believe in, that woman died. But in
the heads of certain men and women a new thought had taken root; they said,
'We also will not eat of her. There is something evil in the taste of
human flesh.' And ever after, when the fleshpots were filled with man-
flesh, these stood aside, and half the tribe ate human flesh and half not;
then, as the years passed, none ate.
"Even in those days, which men reck not of now, when men fell easily open
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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 Othello by William Shakespeare: Bauble, and falls me thus about my neck
Oth. Crying oh deere Cassio, as it were: his iesture imports
it
Cassio. So hangs, and lolls, and weepes vpon me:
So shakes, and pulls me. Ha, ha, ha
Oth. Now he tells how she pluckt him to my Chamber:
oh, I see that nose of yours, but not that dogge, I
shall throw it to
Cassio. Well, I must leaue her companie
Iago. Before me: looke where she comes.
Enter Bianca.
Othello |
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 Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: months, but Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so
much that he shrank from the further expense of living in it. His
vanity had led him to transgress the wise laws by which he governed
his life. He felt, with the good sense of a business man, that the
interior of the house ought to correspond with the character of the
outside. The furniture, silver-ware, and other needful accessories to
the life he would have to lead in his new mansion would, he estimated,
cost him nearly as much as the original building. In spite, therefore,
of the gossip of tongues and the charitable suppositions of his
neighbors, he continued to live on in the damp, old, and dirty ground-
floor apartment in the rue Montantmanigne where his fortune had been
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