Two Strange Tales

"No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own—whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes..."

So speaks a character in Two Strange Tales, a pair of novellas in which Westerners are caught up in the uncanny realm of Eastern religion and magic. In "Nights at Serampore," three European scholars, traveling deep into the forests of Bengal, are inexplicably cast into another time and space where they witness the violent murder of a young Hindu wife. In "The Secret of Dr. Honingberger," a respectable Rumanian physician vanishes without a trace after experimenting with yogic techniques in his quest for the legendary invisible world called Shambhala.

In Two Strange Tales, author Mircea Eliade combined yogic folklore with the literary genre of the supernatural suspense tale so as to reveal dimensions of experience that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches. These well-crafted stories will appeal to both lovers of the supernatural and those fascinated by mysticism of the East.Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a native of Rumania, was a leading scholar of religion, widely known for his writings on the history of religion, the structure of myth, and spiritual symbolism, including Shamanism, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, and A History of Religious Ideas. He also wrote autobiographical works as well as numerous stories, novels, and plays. Fiction offered him a unique complementary way to explore some of the themes of his scholarly work, such as sacred time and space.