On Raphael Cormack’s Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult
“So many barriers were being broken down in the nineteenth century—social, scientific, economic—and, soon, the one between life and death was looking decidedly fragile too.”
“The material world was full of drudgery, suffering, and injustice; opening the door to a spiritual world could guide humanity to a brighter future.”
Raphael Cormack
In the interwar years, when modernity’s iron cage had begun to rattle with industrial slaughter and imperial decay, the ruins of one world gave rise to the magical thinking of another. The period teemed with spiritualists, hypnotists, yogis and self-anointed fakirs promising that the end of history was not bureaucratic rationalism but mystical liberation—albeit for a fee. Raphael Cormack’s Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age traces the lives of two such figures, Dr. Tahra Bey and Dr. Dahesh, in a narrative that oscillates between incredulity and sympathy. It is a tale of charlatans and dreamers, written with the wide-eyed wonder of a historian enchanted by his sources. But it is also, whether Cormack admits it or not, a book about capitalism’s losers, and the spiritual currencies they tried to mint as the gold standard of empire crumbled.
The “electromagnetic age” of the title refers to that uncanny moment in the early twentieth century when new technologies, radio, x-rays, cinema, telegraphy, seemed to confirm what mystics had always claimed: that invisible forces govern the world, and that the boundary between science and the spirit world was not a wall but a membrane.
Cormack organises the book into three parts. The first—Strange and Wondrous—follows the rise of Tahra Bey, born Krikor Kalfayan, an Armenian refugee who fled the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and rebranded himself as an “Egyptian fakir.” His repertoire of self-mutilation, trance-states, and apparent resurrection thrilled crowds in Athens, Rome and Paris, cities still shell-shocked from war and hungry for signs. The second part—Gharaʾib wa-ʿAjaʾib, or ‘Wonders and Marvels’—shifts to the Levant, chronicling the life and cult of Dr. Dahesh, a Palestinian-born mystic who used Spiritualist techniques and hypnotism to build a religious movement in Beirut. By the final section—Resurrection—the book tracks their legacies and afterlives, from stage shows to religious institutions, and from nationalist spiritualism to exile and decline. Along the way, we pass through “the cabarets of Montmartre and Cairo, the streets of golden-age Beirut… yoga retreats in Los Angeles… riots in Jerusalem and carnivals in Rio,” as Cormack writes, tracing a spiritual geography that shadows the circuits of capital and empire.
“A new world was forming on top of the wreckage of the past and almost anything felt possible.”
Raphael Cormack
Both Bey and Dahesh emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman world, in a moment dislocated by genocide, forced migration, and the vacuums left by failing states. Cormack describes Tahra Bey’s arrival in Athens as part of the broader human tide of the 1920s, a fugitive from catastrophe who transfigured his own bodily history into something at once mystical and macabre. In Paris, he made headlines by stopping his pulse and being buried alive, cheered on by cabaret audiences and watched closely by the police. “Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit,” Cormack notes, “Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.” His shows were not just entertainment, they were ritual enactments of bodily control and resurrection in an era defined by mass death and political rupture.
It is impossible to understand Tahra Bey’s performance of endurance outside the context of genocide. Born Krikor Kalfayan in Istanbul, he was part of a generation of Armenians marked by the collapse of empire and the attempted erasure of their people. As a teenager in the 1910s, he would have heard of relatives vanishing, of men marched into the desert, of mutilated bodies floating in the Euphrates. “His ability to withstand mutilation and to raise himself from the dead,” Cormack observes, “took on a deeper, more macabre symbolism.” This was not abstract mysticism, it was allegory made flesh. For a people already cast as dead, Tahra Bey’s burial and return were not only personal spectacle but national metaphor.
In this sense, the fakir was both refugee and revenant. His pain threshold was a politics. His invulnerability became a cultural counter-myth to the racialised narratives of Armenian fragility. The fact that he made money doing so, performing for Europeans who consumed his Oriental mystique without grasping its genocidal subtext, only sharpens the edge of the irony.
“Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.” His shows were not just entertainment, they were ritual enactments of bodily control and resurrection in an era defined by mass death and political rupture.
Dr. Dahesh, for his part, began life as Salim Moussa Achi in Mandate Palestine before launching a spiritual movement from Beirut, one which claimed to combine the marvels of modern science with the mysteries of the spirit world. Cormack describes his teachings as part of a Middle Eastern occult that “harnessed the powers of science and progress for their cause, guiding the region toward a new, modern, independent future.” Daheshism offered a kind of vernacular modernism, unburdened by the self-loathing of the European soul, but still bearing the mark of petit-bourgeois utopianism, a spiritual science for a traumatised intelligentsia.
Cormack rightly insists that theirs was not some isolated or niche counter-culture but an international reaction to modernity’s failure. By the 1920s, the spiritual and scientific imagination had not yet split cleanly: one might attend séances at Yale, observe parapsychology experiments at the Sorbonne, or read spirit messages from Napoleon III. Hypnotists and mediums promised not just contact with the dead but new methods of governance and new techniques of the self. “Across the planet,” Cormack writes, “the 1920s were a time of crisis and of rebirth. A new world was forming on top of the wreckage of the past and almost anything felt possible.” At its most utopian, the occult imagined another world, free from material drudgery, colonial humiliation, and the limitations of Newtonian time. It’s not hard to see why such promises resonated among refugees and minor professionals, the disenfranchised strata who had neither capital nor party.
Cormack is particularly attentive to the global circuits of mysticism, but less so to the class composition of its believers. The occult may have spoken in the language of rebellion, but it was just as often an exercise in bourgeois consolation. Spiritualism, particularly in its Anglo-American form, found fertile ground not among the dispossessed but in the drawing rooms of the dominant class. This was not a mystery cult of the poor, it was a séance for the bereaved landowner, a telegraph to the trench. “So many barriers were being broken down in the nineteenth century—social, scientific, economic—and, soon, the one between life and death was looking decidedly fragile too,” Cormack writes. The First World War had vaporised over ten million human beings, many of them young, many of them unburied. The bourgeoisie, who had sent their sons and brothers into the maw of modern mechanised death, turned to mediums not to overturn the social order, but to re-establish contact with the lost. In this, spiritualism functioned like all bourgeois mystification: it promised personal healing, not structural change.
The First World War had vaporised over ten million human beings, many of them young, many of them unburied. The bourgeoisie, who had sent their sons and brothers into the maw of modern mechanised death, turned to mediums not to overturn the social order, but to re-establish contact with the lost.
It is no coincidence that some of the most enthusiastic dabblers in the occult were figures of immense social and political power—Queen Victoria, Arthur Conan Doyle, even Calvin Coolidge, whose White House was rumoured to host séances. Cormack notes how, in 1926, “one Spiritualist medium testified before Congress that she knew ‘for a fact that there had been spiritual séances held at the White House…’” Others among the elite looked to the East, projecting onto fakirs and mystics a fantasy of transcendence that Western modernity had seemingly foreclosed. The language was often one of enlightenment and spiritual science, but the desire was fundamentally reactionary: to believe that death could be cheated, the past restored, and order made legible again.
From a Marxist perspective, Holy Men is best read as a study of spiritual labour in the age of monopoly capital. The fakir and the medium are not just relics of pre-modern irrationality, but subjects reinventing themselves in the circuits of global commodification, offering new services—miracles, visions, magnetised water—to publics eager for transcendence. That Cormack’s protagonists operated in both colonial and metropolitan contexts is telling: they found audiences in Cairo and Paris, in Jerusalem and Montmartre. Their success depended on what one might call the libidinal economy of empire, in which Western audiences could indulge orientalist fantasy while the colonised consumed the dream of self-mastery.
Their success depended on what one might call the libidinal economy of empire, in which Western audiences could indulge orientalist fantasy while the colonised consumed the dream of self-mastery.
At times Cormack comes close to naming this dialectic. “The material world was full of drudgery, suffering, and injustice,” he writes; “opening the door to a spiritual world could guide humanity to a brighter future.” Yet what goes largely unexamined is how this metaphysical longing functioned alongside, rather than in the absence of, political mobilisation. The mass party had not yet faltered. On the contrary: the 1920s were an age of mass affiliation, whether to socialism, nationalism, or nascent fascism. But the appeal of the occult was that it required no programme, no party, no comradeship beyond the séance circle. It offered transcendence without responsibility, mysticism without militancy. The fakir’s unbreakable body became a kind of perverse class fantasy: to withstand pain, to survive trauma, to cheat death. As Cormack remarks of Tahra Bey, “his ability to withstand mutilation and to raise himself from the dead took on a deeper, more macabre symbolism”. For Armenian refugees and stateless migrants, the body was the last remaining property, an object to be disciplined, exhibited, and ultimately monetised.
the 1920s were an age of mass affiliation, whether to socialism, nationalism, or nascent fascism. But the appeal of the occult was that it required no programme, no party, no comradeship beyond the séance circle. It offered transcendence without responsibility, mysticism without militancy.
Dr. Dahesh, too, was a virtuoso of spiritual entrepreneurship. His movement thrived in Cold War Lebanon, combining charismatic authority with a modernising rhetoric of science, order, and revelation. “Were they brave visionaries or unscrupulous con men?” Cormack asks. “Did they have a noble dream or a dangerous fantasy?” But the dichotomy is a false one. The holy men of the electromagnetic age were both: simultaneously prophets and salesmen, mystics and marketers. They inhabited the unstable position Marx describes in The Eighteenth Brumaire representatives of the past who serve, unwittingly, as precursors to the future.
Cormack gestures towards this ambiguity but seems reluctant to draw out its structural causes. The question is not whether the miracles were real, but why they were necessary, what conditions made them plausible, even desirable. “The occult’s belief in the existence of other worlds beyond our own was literal,” he writes, “but it also had a metaphorical aspect.” Exactly so: the fakirs and spiritualists were not just conjurers but cosmologists, proposing a new metaphysics in which bourgeois rationalism no longer reigned supreme. “The logic of the nineteenth century had been discredited by the events of the twentieth,” Cormack notes. “Tahra Bey and Dr. Dahesh were offering a new kind of logic for the new age.”
The question is not whether the miracles were real, but why they were necessary, what conditions made them plausible, even desirable.
The tragedy, of course, is that these movements were not emancipatory. They were hierarchical, patriarchal, and often built on deceit. But they were also expressions of a deeper longing, for control in a world that had spun off its axis. Cormack’s holy men offered not salvation, but survival. And in doing so, they prefigured the figure that would come to dominate neoliberal modernity: the self-made, self-disciplined subject, selling their story to an atomised crowd. Their miracles, like those of the market, were always just out of reach.
You may not read another book that explores this particular interwar occult subculture with such global sweep and archival flair. For that reason alone, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age is worth your time. But more than that, Cormack captures the volatile energy of the period, its dreams, its displacements, its drift towards both liberation and catastrophe, with a rare sensitivity. He may not always ask the historical or political questions a Marxist reader might want, but what he does offer is a shimmering portrait of an age when the rational order cracked, and something strange and holy slipped through.
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