| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: If they are, then they must be snakes who have all one head; for
see, they are joined together at their larger ends; and snakes
which are branched, too, which no snake ever was.
Yes. I suppose they are not snakes. And they grow out of a
flower, too; and it has a stalk, jointed, too, as plants sometimes
are; and as fishes' backbones are too. Is it a petrified plant or
flower?
No; though I do not deny that it looks like one. The creature
most akin to it which you ever saw is a star-fish.
What! one of the red star-fishes which one finds on the beach?
Its arms are not branched.
|
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 Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: ties was quite different. Villa, indomitable lord of the
sierra, the eternal victim of all governments . . . Villa
tracked, hunted down like a wild beast . . . Villa the rein-
carnation of the old legend; Villa as Providence, the ban-
dit, that passes through the world armed with the blazing
torch of an ideal: to rob the rich and give to the poor. It
was the poor who built up and imposed a legend about
him which Time itself was to increase and embellish as a
shining example from generation to generation.
"Look here, friend," one of Natera's men told Anas-
tasio, "if General Villa takes a fancy to you, he'll give you
 The Underdogs |