| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: 12 Sarasvati, the mighty flood,- she with be light illuminates,
She brightens every pious thought.
HYMN IV. Indri
1 As a good cow to him who milks, we call the doer of fair
deeds,
To our assistance day by day.
2 Come thou to our libations, drink of Soma; Soma-drinker thou!
The rich One's rapture giveth kine.
The Rig Veda |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions
of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the
method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which
overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around--
above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement,
and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said,
(and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and
the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that
The Fall of the House of Usher |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: whisper up to him in a quick, panting voice. He
listened, amazed, eating slower and slower, till at
last his jaws stopped altogether. "That's his
game, is it?" he said, in a rising tone of scathing
contempt. An ungovernable movement of his arm
sent the plate flying out of her fingers. He shot
out a violent curse.
She shrank from him, putting her hand against
the wall.
"No!" he raged. "He expects! Expects ME
--for his rotten money! . . . . Who wants his
To-morrow |
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 Adventure by Jack London: returned Queenslanders there--a rough crowd. They planned to get
his head. The son of their chief, old One-Eyed Billy, had
recruited on Lunga and died of dysentery. That meant that a white
man's head was owing to Suu--any white man, it didn't matter who so
long as they got the head. And Young was only a lad, and they made
sure to get his easily. They decoyed his whale-boat ashore with a
promise of recruits, and killed all hands. At the same instant,
the Suu gang that was on board the Minerva jumped Young. He was
just preparing a dynamite stick for fish, and he lighted it and
tossed it in amongst them. One can't get him to talk about it, but
the fuse was short, the survivors leaped overboard, while he
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