| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Othello by William Shakespeare: The Rites for why I loue him, are bereft me:
And I a heauie interim shall support
By his deere absence. Let me go with him
Othe. Let her haue your voice.
Vouch with me Heauen, I therefore beg it not
To please the pallate of my Appetite:
Nor to comply with heat the yong affects
In my defunct, and proper satisfaction.
But to be free, and bounteous to her minde:
And Heauen defend your good soules, that you thinke
I will your serious and great businesse scant
Othello |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: that, dressing herself hastily, she ran downstairs, and having
seen, in the scuffle, Westburnflat's vizard drop off, imprudently
named him by his name, and besought him for mercy; that the
ruffian instantly stopped her mouth, dragged her from the house,
and placed her on horseback, behind one of his associates.
"I'll break the accursed neck of him," said Hobbie, "if there
werena another Graeme in the land but himsell!"
She proceeded to say, that she was carried southward along with
the party, and the spoil which they drove before them, until they
had crossed the Border. Suddenly a person, known to her as a
kinsman of Westburnflat, came riding very fast after the
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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 Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and
has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and
wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men,
involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert?
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an
universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man,
that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also? At
least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this
direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which
yawned between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by
reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Daemonology
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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 Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: body of the army, whilst Olivain, with his rifle upon his
knee and his eyes upon the watch, protected the rear.
They had observed for some time before them, on the horizon,
a rather thick wood; and when they had arrived at a distance
of a hundred steps from it, Monsieur d'Arminges took his
usual precautions and sent on in advance the count's two
grooms. The servants had just disappeared under the trees,
followed by the tutor, and the young men were laughing and
talking about a hundred yards off. Olivain was at the same
distance in the rear, when suddenly there resounded five or
six musket-shots. The tutor cried halt; the young men
Twenty Years After |
