Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Categories

HOLY MEN OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC AGE

Raphael Cormack

A Forgotten History of the Occult

An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s.
The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind readers, and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, so unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential.

Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic in addition to European ones, Raphael Cormack follows two of the most unusual and charismatic figures of this age: Tahra Bey, who took 1920s Paris by storm in the role of a missionary from the mystical East, and Dr Dahesh, who transformed Western science to create a panreligious faith of his own in Lebanon. Traveling between Paris, New York, and Beirut while claiming esoteric apprenticeships among miracle-working mystics in Egypt and Istanbul, these men reflected the desires and anxieties of a troubled age. These forgotten holy men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained in a world of dramatic change, intuitively speak to our unsettling world today.

Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator, and writer. The author of Midnight in Cairo, Cormack is assistant professor of modern languages at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
Read more
Available products
Book

Published 2025-03-11 by Norton (NA)/Hurst (UK)

Comments

UK: Hurst Publications Russian: Atticus-Azbooka

Raphael Cormack revisits the early-20th-century golden age of spiritualism to uncover the stories of two little-remembered Arab mystics who combined science and esoteric faith to explain a world in flux.

A fascinating, detail-laden history of a time when occultism ran rampant.

The boundaries between the rational and irrational were remarkably porous, and Cormack follows the reciprocating movement of ideas and enthusiasms through lively, focused digression, filling in the milieu around the conjurers with a giddy collage.

From Athens and Cairo to Montmartre and Manhattan, Raphael Cormack reconstructs the careers of four occult impresarios through interlinked circles of artists, immigrants, politicians, and theatergoers. Rarely is cultural history presented with such mesmerizing legerdemain.

Extraordinary. A delightfully engaging and highly original chronicle of our willingness to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Raphael Cormack is a brilliant archival sleuth and a riveting storyteller. In lives full of violent glamour, mystical illusions, and often hilarious twists, set against the inhumanity of the two world wars, Cormack's madcap prophets reveal how modern politics and the occult are in fact propelled by the same question: do we dare to imagine another world?

Raphael Cormack's enthralling Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age makes clear the connections not merely between science and magic but also, more ambitiously, between science, magic and celebrity. Although his characters deal?often in the service of their own personal branding?in stereotype, Mr. Cormack writes with nuance about the cultural and social fluidity of their era.