Today's Stichomancy for J. Edgar Hoover
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: or quietism still prevails.
My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been
carried so far as to react injuriously on the Male Sex.
For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead
a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence.
With Women, we speak of "love", "duty", "right", "wrong", "pity",
"hope", and other irrational and emotional conceptions,
which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object
except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves,
and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary
and I may almost say, idiom. "Love" then becomes "the anticipation
 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: red house, on the evening of the day when Harney had
overtaken her on her way to the Mountain, she had lived
at North Dormer as if she were suspended in the void.
She had come back there because Harney, after appearing
to agree to the impossibility of her doing so, had
ended by persuading her that any other course would be
madness. She had nothing further to fear from Mr.
Royall. Of this she had declared herself sure, though
she had failed to add, in his exoneration, that he had
twice offered to make her his wife. Her hatred of him
made it impossible, at the moment, for her to say
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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 Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: stained with blood by the sectaries of the goddess Kali. Not far off
rose Ellora, with its graceful pagodas, and the famous Aurungabad,
capital of the ferocious Aureng-Zeb, now the chief town of one of the
detached provinces of the kingdom of the Nizam. It was thereabouts
that Feringhea, the Thuggee chief, king of the stranglers, held his sway.
These ruffians, united by a secret bond, strangled victims of every age
in honour of the goddess Death, without ever shedding blood; there was
a period when this part of the country could scarcely be travelled over
without corpses being found in every direction. The English Government
has succeeded in greatly diminishing these murders, though the Thuggees
still exist, and pursue the exercise of their horrible rites.
 Around the World in 80 Days |
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 A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: black.
The count wore a long blue overcoat, buttoned in military fashion to
the throat, a white cravat around his neck, cotton wool in his ears,
and a shirt-collar high enough to make a large square patch of white
on each cheek. His black trousers covered his boots, the toes of
which were barely seen. He wore no decoration in his button-hole, and
doeskin gloves concealed his hands. Nothing about him betrayed to the
eyes of youth a peer of France, and one of the most useful statesmen
in the kingdom.
Pere Leger had never seen the count, who, on his side, knew the former
only by name. When the count, as he got into the carriage, cast the
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