Today's Stichomancy for Jane Seymour
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues;
it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured
him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a
theatre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of
religious revival. He watched Lincoln going daily to his
work; he studied and fraternised with young soldiery passing
to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the
Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a
patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read.
From one point of view they seem those of a district visitor;
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: their own will. A few willows, rooted in the stream, have grown up
quickly like an enclosing fence, and half hide the house. The wild
plants we call weeds have clothed the bank with their beautiful
luxuriance. The fruit-trees, neglected for these ten years past, no
longer bear a crop, and their suckers have formed a thicket. The
espaliers are like a copse. The paths, once graveled, are overgrown
with purslane; but, to be accurate there is no trace of a path.
"Looking down from the hilltop, to which cling the ruins of the old
castle of the Dukes of Vendome, the only spot whence the eye can see
into this enclosure, we think that at a time, difficult now to
determine, this spot of earth must have been the joy of some country
La Grande Breteche |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: first place, gave to man alone of living creatures his erect posture,
enabling him to see farther in front of him and to contemplate more
freely the height above, and to be less subject to distress than other
creatures [endowed like himself with eyes and ears and mouth].[12]
Consider next how they gave to the beast of the field[13] feet as a
means of progression only, but to man they gave in addition hands--
those hands which have achieved so much to raise us in the scale of
happiness above all animals. Did they not make the tongue also? which
belongs indeed alike to man and beast, but in man they fashioned it so
as to play on different parts of the mouth at different times, whereby
we can produce articulate speech, and have a code of signals to
The Memorabilia |
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 Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of
things.
Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions,
which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless,
for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections,
adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their
protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not
only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form,
the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and
the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the
|
|
|
