The Sorcerers

In Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[FN#4] and come
across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of
the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women full
of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the earth,
moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling about
us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and that we
do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of magic
have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very few
persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the few
I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. "Come to us," said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
"and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own."

[FN#4] I know better now. We have the dark powers much more than I
thought, but not as much as the Scottish, and yet I think the
imagination of the people does dwell chiefly upon the fantastic and
capricious.

I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of
the twilight--and he had been contending that we should only believe
in what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of
mind. "Yes," I said, "I will come to you," or some such words; "but I
will not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know
whether these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and
felt by the ordinary senses than are those I talk of." I was not
denying the power of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of
mortal substance, but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke
of, seemed unlikely