Today's Stichomancy for Jim Jones

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac:

bankers, the gentry who take out a license for which they pay a thousand crowns, as the privateer takes out his letters of marque, hold these rare products of the incubations of virtue in such esteem that they confine them in cages in their counting-houses, much as governments procure and maintain specimens of strange beasts at their own charges.

If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone. Search the chronicles of the counting-house. You will not find

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon:

discover to his pupils his method of carrying out his own precepts, and this along with argumentative encouragement. Now I know that Socrates disclosed himself to his companions as a beautiful and noble being, who would reason and debate with them concerning virtue and other human interests in the noblest manner. And of these two I know that as long as they were companions of Socrates even they were temperate, not assuredly from fear of being fined or beaten by Socrates, but because they were persuaded for the nonce of the excellence of such conduct.

[6] {sophrosune} = "sound-mindedness," "temperence." See below, IV. iii. 1.

The Memorabilia

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche:

which Hegel systematised and Richard Wagner has in the end set to music). "Good-natured and spiteful"--such a juxtaposition, preposterous in the case of every other people, is unfortunately only too often justified in Germany one has only to live for a while among Swabians to know this! The clumsiness of the German scholar and his social distastefulness agree alarmingly well with his physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see the "German soul" demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at German taste, at German arts and manners what boorish indifference to "taste"! How the noblest and the commonest stand there in

Beyond Good and Evil

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 Apology by Xenophon:

[34] The commentators quote Libanius, "Apol." vol. iii. p. 39, {kai dia touto ekalei men Eurulokhos o Kharistios, ekalei de Skopas k Kranonios, oukh ekista lontes, upiskhnoumenoi}. Cf. Diog. Laert. ii. 31, {Kharmidou oiketas auto didontos, in' ap' auton prosodeuoito, oukh eileto}. Cf. id. 65, 74.

[35] See "Hell." II. ii. 10.

[36] {oikteirein eautous}. See L. Dind. ad loc. For an incident in point see "Mem." II. vii.

[37] Plat. "Rep." iii. 404 D, "refinements of Attic confectionery."

[38] {ek tes psukhes}, possibly "by a healthy appetite." Cf. "Symp." iv. 41. The same sentiment "ex ore Antisthenis." See Joel, op.

The Apology