Raphael Cormack, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult (W.W. Norton, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Raphael Cormack (RC): The occult in the modern Arab world is an endlessly rich topic. It brings together questions of modernity, religion, science, performance, and identity in an unusual but compelling sub-culture, populated with some fascinating and eccentric—if not always endearing—personalities. I have been collecting material on it for a long time but was never quite sure how to pull it together into a book. The first draft of this project contained long chapters on Valentine de Saint Point (a futurist theosophist who came to Cairo and started her own anti-colonial journal before converting to Islam and settling in Egypt) and the beginnings of Arabic Spiritualism with Mohammed Farid Wagdy and Tantawi Jawhari, but they mostly ended up on the cutting room floor. Instead, I focused on the lives of two occult celebrities: Tahra Bey, an Armenian born in Istanbul in 1900 who took the West by storm as an “Egyptian Fakir”; and Dr Dahesh, a fakir-hypnotist-spiritualist who started his own religious movement in the 1930s and 1940s, first in Palestine then in Beirut. Through them, I have tried to tell a different version of the history of the early twentieth century.
Following their trails allowed me to deconstruct ideas about East and West which were prevalent in the literature of the early twentieth century.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RC: Although there is a good amount of work on the pre-modern occult in the Middle East (see recent Brill collection by Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Farouk Yahya, and Matthew Melvin-Koushki) there is relatively little on the modern Middle East, particularly the Arab world. (In the Arab world, Marwa Elshakry, On Barak, and Majid Daneshgar have all touched on the subject but not made it their central focus.) I wanted to give it this central focus because not only is it a fascinating topic in its own right, but the occult also gives us fresh ways to look at some perennial topics in a transnational way. Both of the occult stars who form the narrative center of the book moved around frequently—though they both ended up in Beirut in the 1960s. Following their trails allowed me to deconstruct ideas about East and West which were prevalent in the literature of the early twentieth century. Their lives show that questions of cultural influence between “East” and “West” are, in practice, much messier than I ever thought.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RC: On the face of it, there might be little to connect these fakirs and hypnotists with the female singers, actors, film-makers, and dancers of Midnight in Cairo, beyond the early twentieth century time frame. However, this book has many similarities with my last book. It is focused on popular performance (if a slightly unusual kind); it charts the growth of a sub-culture / counter-cultural movement; and most of all, it mines the little used popular press of the early twentieth century (some of which is online and other parts of which can only be accessed in places like AUB or Dar El Kotob). The press of this time is a rich but very difficult source. It gives us insight into parts of the 1920s and 1930s that are not represented in many other places and gives a sense of what people wanted to read about at the time (or at least what they editors thought they wanted to read about). However, we should not be too rosy eyed about the sources. They are often simultaneously conservative, sensationalist, and prejudiced in a variety of ways (around race, gender, and so forth). At a time when archives are particularly hard to access, I have been thinking through ways to use the press as a kind of archive, which may necessitate reading against the grain but at least allow interesting new way of reading the history of the modern Middle East. I see my work in dialogue with people like Ziad Fahmy, Samah Selim (who completed a somewhat similar project with the novels of Musamarat al-Shaab), and Diana Abbani (who has made use of the Beiruti popular press in productive ways).
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RC: I have tried to write this book for both an academic and a popular audience, something that I have been working on for some years now with my other work. It is something that academics are increasingly interested in at the moment and I have given it a lot of thought. The key difference between an “academic” book and a “trade” book is not in the amount of rigor, the level of accuracy, or the sophistication of thinking; it is in the way the argument is put across. Academic books are written with many direct references to secondary literature and with finely structured argumentation put to the forefront. Trade books make their argument through the narrative. They do still make an argument, but it is one dictated by narrative and therefore more accepting of the contradictions and difficulties of life. It can leave certain questions deliberately unanswered in the way that academic writing cannot. There are, of course, good and bad examples of each type of writing but the good ones always have some kind of argument (maybe “point” is a better word) behind them. They are just putting it across in different ways.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RC: I have actually been bouncing around between lots of potential projects for around a year but think I have settled on two. The first is a collection of translations of life writing by and about women from the Arabic popular press of the 1920s and 1930s. This is inspired, in part, by my teaching and the lack of English translations of primary material from the period. However, I also think that the texts are interesting enough and the stories are good enough to find broader interest. It is one of the first times that we have a large and interconnected body of women’s life writing in the Arab world (albeit one filtered through the demands of the popular press), and I would love to collect it together in one place. I am also starting work on a bigger biographical project, but am too early in the process to talk much about it!
J: Your first book was about the lives of female entertainers; this book is concerned with holy men. Is there a difference between writing about men and writing about women in this period?
RC: It has been interesting to shift the focus of my work from women to men, but questions of gender remain significant. I have been toying with the idea that the hypnotist-spiritualists of the early twentieth century Arab world were a kind of mirror image version of the female stars of the same period, at least in terms of public opinion. The stereotypical complaint in the press and in literature of the period about female performers was that they were casting a spell over the youth of the nation and were bleeding money from the rising generation of men. This is, perhaps, most clearly demonstrated with the nightclub dancer in Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Hadith Isa ibn Hisham, but it existed in many places too. The hypnotist-spiritualists, like Dr Salomon Bey, Dr Dahesh Bey, and others, were often criticized for preying on vulnerable older women, holding them in their thrall to steal their money (there is a case involving Farida Kattan that I discuss in more length in my book). Obviously, the dynamics of these criticisms are different—since, simply put, people of different genders were treated differently—but I think there are interesting comparisons to be drawn between the two archetypal figures of the nightclub singer-dancer and the stage hypnotist-spiritualist. And there were times, in the 1920s and 1930s, when the two would share the same bill.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction to Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age)
Telling the comprehensive story of something as vast and obscure as the occult is an impossible task. It is a deep and murky ocean of interconnected ideas, whose adherents plucked philosophies from different sources and stitched them together in their own idiosyncratic ways. Instead, this book will follow the lives of two men who rode this tide of wonders to play their own small but important part in the transnational tale of the early twentieth-century occult. Their stories are now largely forgotten, but they will guide us through the modern world and capture the hopes, anxieties, and neuroses of this troubled age. The miracle men of the 1920s and 1930s talk about hope and progress, but their stories were often tinged with that darkness, which hung heavily over so much of the twentieth century.
The first, Dr. Tahra Bey, born in Istanbul, traveled across Europe out of the ruins of the Eastern Mediterranean until he reached France as a refugee in 1925. In Paris, advertising himself as an “Egyptian fakir” from a long line of mystics, his ability to manipulate his physical body in inexplicable ways using the power of his mind made him a summer sensation. This stranger from the East could control his heart rate, pierce himself with sharp blades without feeling pain, and even shut his body down completely, entering a death-like state that could last hours or even days, then have himself buried alive before a stunned audience. In the years after his awe-inspiring Parisian debut, he became a fixture of the European stages, and crowds lined up to see his strange marvels in the flesh. He had come to a Europe unmoored by the catastrophic events of the First World War and searching for answers in new places. Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit, Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear. In doing so, he became not only famous but also very wealthy. His demonstrations were so popular that innumerable copycat “Egyptian fakirs” appeared across the Western world as fakir fever spread from Warsaw all the way to Los Angeles. Many of these imitation fakirs adopted the Ottoman honorific Bey (a title similar to “Sir”) in emulation of Tahra Bey. There was a Rahman Bey, a Tatar Bey, and a Thawara Rey, who had obviously slightly misunderstood the significance of the word Bey. Some of them lasted only for a few months, but others stuck around for several decades. One of these many copycats, Hamid Bey, toured America in the late 1920s and early 1930s before establishing his own spiritual movement, from a house in the Hollywood Hills, known as the Coptic Fellowship of America, which survives to this day, long after its founder’s death.
The second part of this book tells the parallel story of Dr. Dahesh and the Middle Eastern occult. At the same time that Tahra Bey was astounding the European public with his spiritual mastery over his body, Dr. Dahesh was spreading his own form of occult knowledge through the Arab world. From his first appearance in Jerusalem in 1929, Dr. Dahesh embraced the doctrine of Spiritualism and the science of hypnotism to become one of the most well-known proponents of an Arabic-speaking occult. When he finally settled in Beirut to launch his eponymous religious movement, he had managed to shape a persona that was the unmistakable product of the twentieth century Arab world. There were no appeals to the “mystical secrets of the East,” which did not hold the same allure here as they did in Paris or New York. Instead, Middle Eastern occultists harnessed the powers of science and progress for their cause, guiding the region toward a new, modern, independent future.
The story of the occult in the 1920s is a truly global tale, and the spiritual movements of East and West interacted in unexpected ways. The action will pass through six continents, touring the cabarets of Montmartre and Cairo, walking the streets of golden-age Beirut, passing through yoga retreats in Los Angeles, seeing riots in Jerusalem and carnivals in Rio, before finally returning to Dr. Dahesh’s museum in Manhattan. Along the way, we witness some of the most devastating events of the twentieth century: the fire of Smyrna, the Great Revolt in Palestine, the Nazi occupation of Paris, and the Lebanese Civil War. The narrative is based on historical material from across the world that was written in many different languages—among them Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, and English. The cast of characters includes stateless migrants, a Palestinian nationalist poet, an Anglo-American psychic scientist, a Lebanese artist, a Midwestern psychologist, and a celebrity Indian yogi.
The interwar period was the setting for a great showdown between rational and mystical worldviews—the clash that the historian James Webb called “one of the greatest battles fought in the twentieth century.” This book tells the history of this conflict from the perspective of the losing side. The occult was based on promises about the metaphysical world beyond the veil, where laws of nature and logic did not necessarily apply. In the fragile and ever-changing world of the early twentieth century, this made the esoteric a perfect breeding ground for grifters. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a battalion of charlatans, fantasists, and swindlers, armed with little more than their charisma and some larger-than-life claims, managed to inspire cultlike devotion in their followers. Neither Tahra Bey nor Dr. Dahesh escaped accusations of fraud or quackery; both had serious run-ins with the authorities. Were they brave visionaries or unscrupulous con men? Did they have a noble dream or a dangerous fantasy? Devoted adepts vigorously defended their prophets, saying that everything new and unexplained always faced opposition at first. Skeptical members of the public were less sure and some were actively hostile: just because something was new did not mean it was good.
These battles between the occult and its doubters were the central battles of the 1920s and 1930s, decades when many were trying to cast aside the corrupted relics of the past to reach a brighter future. The logic of the nineteenth century had been discredited by the events of the twentieth. Tahra Bey and Dr. Dahesh were offering a new kind of logic for the new age, which would be built on different foundations. Like the Surrealists, who were their contemporaries, they revolted against bourgeois rationalism to create something different. Bizarre and unconventional as these holy men might have been, they were at the cutting edge of modern debates. The central question of the occult was also the central question of the twentieth century: Is another world possible?
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