Today's Stichomancy for Joseph Stalin
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: his great laughs.
"My witchcraft is done," he said. "A poor tale, was it not? Well, hunt
for those stones to-morrow and read the rest of it if you can. Why did
you not ask me to tell you everything while I was about it, White Man?
It would have interested you more, but now it has all gone from me back
into your spirit with the stones. Saduko, get you to sleep.
Macumazahn, you who are a Watcher-by-Night, come and sit with me awhile
in my hut, and we will talk of other things. All this business of the
stones is nothing more than a Kafir trick, is it, Macumazahn? When you
meet the buffalo with the split horn in the pool of a dried river,
remember it is but a cheating trick, and now come into my hut and drink
Child of Storm |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "It is done, Vas Kor," he said, handing a small metal
key to the tall noble who had just risen from his sleeping
silks and furs.
"Good!" exclaimed the latter. "You must have worked
upon it all during the night, Larok."
The warrior nodded.
"Now fetch me the Heliumetic metal you wrought some
days since," commanded Vas Kor.
This done, the warrior assisted his master to replace
the handsome jewelled metal of his harness with the
plainer ornaments of an ordinary fighting man of Helium,
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: to prepare the ground for his conversion. They
could not, however, break him of his habit of cross-
ing himself, but he went so far as to take off the
string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of
scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung
them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was
still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's
Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow,
fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at
the head of all the kneeling family, big and little,
Amy Foster |
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 Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: I.
For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike
that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer
noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and
insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one
looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast
shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-
lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like
the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious,
bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and
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