Ancient Sorceries

📘 About This Book

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath—and looks the other way! And it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the widespread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest. Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things—and to release a suffering human soul in the process— was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed, after passing strange. The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can attach credence—something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed. “Such a thing happened to that man!” it cries—”a commonplace person like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!” Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the purious nature he described to Dr. Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.” But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit. John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure. He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn’t want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth. So that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton. And when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting “en voiture” and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag.

📖 Summary

Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood, published in 2020 and spanning seventy pages, plunges readers into a mesmerizing and unsettling fictional realm where the ordinary boundaries of human existence dissolve. The narrative explores the strange and profound experiences that can occasionally befall otherwise entirely unremarkable individuals, pulling them out of their smooth, predictable lives and into bizarre phenomena that cause the wider world to catch its breath and look the other way. At the center of these complex and fantastic matters is John Silence, a psychic doctor whose deep humanity, immense patience, and profound spiritual sympathy uniquely equip him to handle such baffling occurrences. Silence is drawn to cases where the soul of things is tangled in mystery, dedicating his expertise to tracing curious and seemingly unbelievable events back to their hidden sources. Through his empathetic interventions, he seeks to unravel deep psychological and metaphysical knots and to release those suffering from burdens too strange for ordinary comprehension. The book showcases Blackwood's talent for atmospheric storytelling, blending the uncanny with a genuine exploration of human vulnerability and spiritual complexity. Readers are invited to contemplate the thin veil separating the rational, everyday world from ancient, hidden forces that linger just out of sight, waiting to test the boundaries of human sanity and belief. Ultimately, Ancient Sorceries serves as a compelling entry point into supernatural fiction, highlighting the intricate interplay between mundane lives and extraordinary, otherworldly intrusions.

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