Hosted by Finbar Anderson
Featuring Raphael Cormack
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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In the early part of the 20th century, a group of men led a movement that at its height drew legions of devotees but has now been largely forgotten.
The movement’s practitioners largely hailed from — or in certain cases, claimed to hail from — the Middle East, which was seen in the West at that time as a place of mystery and wonder, Raphael Cormack, author of “Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult,” tells New Lines’ Finbar Anderson.
“They are the archetypes of mystical figures who could only exist in this period, when modernity has been thrust into the world in violent ways.”
Cormack’s book focuses on two of the movement’s leading practitioners, Tahra Bey — an ethnic Armenian originally from Istanbul who styled himself a “fakir,” and Dr. Dahesh, who was born in Jerusalem into an Assyrian family and who would eventually accrue many thousands of followers.
Both managed to fuse elements of the spiritual with the modern in a way that chimed with audiences across the Middle East, Europe and North America. “They’re answering the questions of modernity,” says Cormack. “They are the archetypes of mystical figures who could only exist in this period, when modernity has been thrust into the world in violent ways.”
“The more you go into these stories and the more you go into the way that these movements and ideas and performances bounce around the world, the more you see that this vision of the East and West, with one being mystical, spiritual and exotic, and the other being rational and scientific and so forth, these old stereotypes don’t work,” Cormack says.
The time was ripe for these men to make their mark, Cormack adds. “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.”
The geopolitical situation in Europe had many searching for answers from new sources, he adds. “It was a world that felt broken, a civilization that felt broken and felt that it was in some sense on its knees and it needed some kind of rebirth and change.”