Raphael Cormack

Exploring death, religion, science and social crisis, a startling history of the occult between the world wars, when Spiritualism was truly an international obsession.

The interwar period was a golden age of the uncanny. Clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind-readers, miracle-workers and jinn-summoners—all assured the masses that, just like the newly discovered invisible forces of electricity, radiation and magnetism, unseen spiritual powers commanded a realm of hidden human potential. This was a transnational movement of eccentrics, gurus and prophets, with East and West interacting in unexpected ways.

Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic as well as European records, Raphael Cormack follows two of the most unusual and charismatic figures of this age: Tahra Bey, who took 1920s Paris by storm as an ‘Oriental’ missionary; and Dr Dahesh, who harnessed Western science to create a pan-religious faith in Lebanon. Travelling between Cairo, New York and Jerusalem, Paris, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, the two mystics reflected the desires and anxieties of a troubled age. These forgotten holy men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained at a time of dramatic change, speak to our own unstable world today.

A Forgotten History of the Occult

Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age

Quite the paragraph, and as applicable to 2025 as 1925.

Doug Belshaw

Faced with these ubiquitous feelings of collapse, some retreated into conservatism, trying to reclaim the continent's lost greatness. Others gravitated toward extreme right-wing groups, which promised to rebuild their wounded egos. Still others found solace in universalist and utopian movements, which were emerging to champion values like socialism, world peace, and global cooperation as an antidote to the failures of the past.

In 1935, the writer Leonard Woolf, ignoring warnings for his safety, traveled through Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. After he returned, he put his thoughts on the rise of dictators into a book that he called Quack, Quack! In it, he ascribed the birth of fascism to the general retreat of civilization and rejection of reason that he saw around him. Logic had been replaced by primordial fears of the unknown, belief in the power of magic, and barbarism. Woolf saw a world where the fruits of the Enlightenment had not been shared equally among everyone. Modern capitalism had created winners and losers and now the losers were in revolt, intent on destroying the civilization that had never cared about them. This backlash against the establishment could be channeled in different directions. For some people, it took the form of a "political reaction against reason, intelligence, and humanity" that led them to Mussolini and Hitler. For others, it took the shape of a "reversion to the primitive psychology of magic and superstition."" Woolf believed that the root cause of both was the same: a failure of civilization caused by the unwillingness of the elites to share their privileges.

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