| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: Hippias, like Protagoras and Gorgias, though civil, is vain and boastful:
he knows all things; he can make anything, including his own clothes; he is
a manufacturer of poems and declamations, and also of seal-rings, shoes,
strigils; his girdle, which he has woven himself, is of a finer than
Persian quality. He is a vainer, lighter nature than the two great
Sophists (compare Protag.), but of the same character with them, and
equally impatient of the short cut-and-thrust method of Socrates, whom he
endeavours to draw into a long oration. At last, he gets tired of being
defeated at every point by Socrates, and is with difficulty induced to
proceed (compare Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Callicles, and others, to whom
the same reluctance is ascribed).
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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 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in
England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him
of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion,
are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in
ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to
fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at
large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians
cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except
by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and
thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They
The Communist Manifesto |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: little round eyes were very sharp and seemed to see everything. "It
runs up one side and down the other, and across the top and the bottom."
"What does?"
"Why, the crack. So I think it must be a door of rock, although I do
not see any hinges."
"Oh, yes," said Dorothy, now observing for the first time the crack in
the rock. "And isn't this a key-hole, Billina?" pointing to a round,
deep hole at one side of the door.
"Of course. If we only had the key, now, we could unlock it and see
what is there," replied the yellow hen. "May be it's a treasure
chamber full of diamonds and rubies, or heaps of shining gold, or--"
Ozma of Oz |
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 Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: Firmin, it was decided to 'nail down Easter.' . . . In these
matters, as in so many matters, the new civilisation came as a
simplification of ancient complications; the history of the
calendar throughout the world is a history of inadequate
adjustments, of attempts to fix seed-time and midwinter that go
back into the very beginning of human society; and this final
rectification had a symbolic value quite beyond its practical
convenience. But the council would have no rash nor harsh
innovations, no strange names for the months, and no alteration
in the numbering of the years.
The world had already been put upon one universal monetary basis.
The Last War: A World Set Free |
