| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: my gun and go and see."
"It sounds to me like the cry of no jackal," said the woman; and when he
was gone she woke her daughter.
"Come, let us go and make a fire, I can sleep no more," she said; "I have
heard a strange thing tonight. Your father said it was a jackal's cry, but
no jackal cries so. It was a child's voice, and it cried, 'Master, master,
wake!'"
The women looked at each other; then they went to the kitchen, and made a
great fire; and they sang psalms all the while.
At last the man came back; and they asked him, "What have you seen?"
"Nothing," he said, "but the sheep asleep in their kraals, and the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: sea stood between him and all these ships at the anchor-
age. His own was sold, and he had been asking him-
self, What next?
From the feeling of loneliness, of inward emptiness,
--and of loss too, as if his very soul had been taken
out of him forcibly,--there had sprung at first a desire
to start right off and join his daughter. "Here are the
last pence," he would say to her; "take them, my dear.
And here's your old father: you must take him too."
His soul recoiled, as if afraid of what lay hidden at
the bottom of this impulse. Give up! Never! When
End of the Tether |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: "Quite harmless, I assure you. Hark, he's singing!
Its his favorite amusement."
And once more those shrill discordant tones rang out:--
"He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus:
'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be mutch for us!'"
Throwing away the spade, he broke into a frantic jig, snapping his
fingers, and repeating, again and again,
Sylvie and Bruno |
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 Phaedo by Plato: following? 'Have we not found,' they will say, 'a path of thought which
seems to bring us and our argument to the conclusion, that while we are in
the body, and while the soul is infected with the evils of the body, our
desire will not be satisfied? and our desire is of the truth. For the body
is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of
food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the
search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears,
and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say,
takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and
fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the
body? wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be
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