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Book Cover for: Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult, Raphael Cormack

Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult

Raphael Cormack

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, 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 guiding esoteric apprenticeships among miracle-working mystics in Egypt and Istanbul, these men reflected the desires and anxieties of a troubled age. As Cormack demonstrates, these forgotten holy men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained in a world of dramatic change, intuitively speak to our unsettling world today

Book Details

  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • Publish Date: Mar 11st, 2025
  • Pages: 304
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.00in - 1.40in - 1.10lb
  • EAN: 9780393881103
  • Categories: Modern - 20th Century - GeneralMiddle East - GeneralOccultism

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About the Author

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

More books by Raphael Cormack

Book Cover for: Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s, Raphael Cormack

Praise for this book

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.--Nile Green, author of Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah
Extraordinary. A delightfully engaging and highly original chronicle of our willingness to believe six impossible things before breakfast.--Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading
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?--Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine