| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: brutes, and when they found that we could fill their
stomachs and give them plenty of fighting, they were
nothing loath to march with us against the next Mahar
city and battle with men of their own race.
Thus we proceeded, swinging in a great half-circle
north and west and south again until we had come back
to the edge of the Lidi Plains north of Thuria. Here
we overcame the Mahar city that had ravaged the Land
of Awful Shadow for so many ages. When we marched
on to Thuria, Goork and his people went mad with joy
at the tidings we brought them.
Pellucidar |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: British Embassy, and the great Palace Square where I had
seen armoured cars flaunting about during the July rising,
soldiers camping during the hysterical days of the
Kornilov affair and, earlier, Kornilov himself reviewing the
Junkers. My mind went further back to the March
revolution, and saw once more the picket fire of the
revolutionaries at the corner that night when the remains of
the Tzar's Government were still frantically printing
proclamations ordering the people to go home, at the very
moment while they themselves were being besieged in the
Admiralty. Then it flung itself further back still, to the day
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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 A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: estate is in all things more worldly than the worldly estate
itself. Meanwhile Christendom must be ruined, and this
Commandment perish.
If there were a bishop who would zealously provide for all these
classes, supervise, make visitations and be faithful as he ought,
truly, one city would be too much for him. For in the time of the
Apostles, when Christendom was at its best estate, each city had
a bishop, although the smallest part of the inhabitants were
Christians. How may things go when one bishop wants to have so
much, another so much, this one the whole world, that one the
fourth of it.
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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 Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: room, striving, with the best energy of my imagination, to throw
a tinge of romance and historic grandeur over the realities of
the scene. But my nostrils snuffed up a scent of cigar smoke,
clouds of which the narrator had emitted by way of visible
emblem, I suppose, of the nebulous obscurity of his tale.
Moreover, my gorgeous fantasies were wofully disturbed by the
rattling of the spoon in a tumbler of whiskey punch, which Mr.
Thomas Waite was mingling for a customer. Nor did it add to the
picturesque appearance of the panelled walls that the slate of
the Brookline stage was suspended against them, instead of the
armorial escutcheon of some far-descended governor. A
Twice Told Tales |
