| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: And still we climbed. I said to God, "I cannot breathe so high."
God said, "Because the air is pure?"
And my head grew dizzy, and as I climbed the blood burst from my finger-
tips.
Then we came out upon a lonely mountain-top.
No living being moved there; but far off on a solitary peak I saw a lonely
figure standing. Whether it were man or woman I could not tell; for partly
it seemed the figure of a woman, but its limbs were the mighty limbs of a
man. I asked God whether it was man or woman.
God said, "In the least Heaven sex reigns supreme; in the higher it is not
noticed; but in the highest it does not exist."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: the sphere was travelling.
The first blind I opened I shut at once, and hung for a time flattened and
blinded by the sunlight that had hit me. After thinking a little I started
upon the windows at right angles to this one, and got the huge crescent
moon and the little crescent earth behind it, the second time. I was
amazed to find how far I was from the moon. I had reckoned that not only
should I have little or none of the "kick-off" that the earth's atmosphere
had given us at our start, but that the tangential "fly off" of the moon's
spin would be at least twenty-eight times less than the earth's. I had
expected to discover myself hanging over our crater, and on the edge of
the night, but all that was now only a part of the outline of the white
The First Men In The Moon |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
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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 House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame
than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which
they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former
judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals,
brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin,
it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule,
should have trodden the martyr's path to the hill of execution
almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers. But,
in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided,
it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the
general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail
House of Seven Gables |
