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

After the mass carnage of WWI, a swiftly growing number of “palm readers, clairvoyants, hypnotists, mind readers, and jinn summoners” found receptive audiences, notes Arabic studies scholar Cormack (Midnight in Cairo) in this illuminating if stodgy account. Drawing on little-studied Arabic sources regarding those who plied their supernatural trade during the interwar period, Cormack contends that the “occult movement” was not merely a new twist on the long-standing Western “orientalist” obsession with the East but was also a worldwide “religio-philosophical movement” inspired by 20th-century advancements like electricity and magnetism (as well as horrified by the era’s mass destruction). “Occultists promised that they were the midwives of a new modern age... that would bring untold miracles,” Cormack writes, recounting the parallel stories of two little-remembered “mystics” with inverse paths. Salim Mousa al-Ashi, a Palestinian raised in Beirut who went by Dr. Dahesh, presented himself as a Western-trained scientist and traveled the Levant performing miracles that “defied nature,” like making objects appear and healing the sick; meanwhile, Tahra Bey (born Krikor Kalfayan in Armenia) fashioned himself as a Sufi “missionary” to Paris and caused a sensation with his demonstrations of mind reading and communicating with the dead. Cormack’s narrative is a bit dry, with the exception of a chapter about Harry Houdini trying to debunk the two mystics’ miracles as magic tricks. Still, patient readers will find plenty of insight. (Mar.)