Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult, Raphael Cormack, C Hurst & Co, 2025, £25.
This wondrous book tells the troubled history of the 20th century in Europe and the Middle East through the original device of describing the lives of two men who would now be called ‘Fake Sheikhs.’ Dr Tahra Bey, who claimed to be able to stop his own heart and the ‘Miracle-working mystic known as Dr Dahesh’, were self-styled magicians (neither had medical qualifications) who led a ‘transnational movement’ in a ‘once-thriving global subculture that tried to change the world’. That world had just cracked apart; they flourished in sophisticated European capitals after World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as desperate, deracinated people, who had flocked to safety in Western Europe and America. At the same time, the Middle East began a long struggle for a new identity to replace colonialism. From those convulsions came Theosophy, Spiritualism, Rosicrucianism and parapsychology, spread by a panoply of men like Bey and Dahesh, fake prophets and sages. Suddenly, rational France was full of fakirs. According to one commentator, they arrived in ‘swarms’. In 1919, writer Paul Valéry noted ‘An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe.’ An American journalist in Paris in 1920 noted that ‘Magic is again in vogue. More books on necromancy are being published than on chemistry.’ However, some sections of the public became uneasy at how attractive these swarthy men with dark beards were to susceptible French women.
Magic, of course, represents desperate fear but also optimism. After 1918, thousands of bereaved people started consulting mediums in an attempt to contact their recent dead. Cormack describes how that yearning became almost institutionalised in the 1920s as traditional religion and science failed as sources of hope and solace. There was also an increased belief in the ‘occult’ (which comes from the Latin for ‘hidden’) with its offer of life beyond this world. The author, like his mother Mary Beard, displays delightful erudition.
The two men performed different acts; both sported a bed of nails and ended their shows by being ‘buried alive’, but Tahra Bey, dressed as an Arab, was keen on having seventy-six-kilogram rocks smashed on his chest, lying across blades, stabbing himself without feeling pain, and going into rigid, cataleptic states. Dahesh – the name means ‘wonder’ – dressed in smart European clothes, focussed on hypnosis, or what his Arab audience called ‘magnetic sleep’. Unlike Bey, he emphasised the paranormal, welcoming people into a dark room where he would demonstrate powers given by the spirit world, such as conjuring objects out of the ether, mind reading, telling the future and communicating with the souls of the dead. He was perhaps Doris Stokes to Bey’s David Blaine. What the two tricksters shared, with millions of others, were shattered childhoods. Bey, born Krikor Kalfayan in Istanbul around 1900, was an Armenian. His mother died shortly after his birth and as a child he roamed streets thick with ‘jugglers, dervishes and magicians’. Istanbul had a ‘burgeoning occult scene’ and a fascination with ‘spiritism, fakirism and hypnotism’. None foretold the horror to come. When the Ottomans entered the First World War, Armenians became a mistrusted minority and the Turkish authorities decided to remove them by expulsion or worse. Around a million Armenians were murdered. Bey, an itinerant bookseller, fled to Smyrna and two years later as a stateless refugee reached Athens along with 120,000 Armenian refugees. Cormack describes vividly the impact of this mass migration, when, between 1920 and 1928, the population of Athens grew by 54 per cent. Even the national theatre was taken over, and with brilliant detail, Cormack writes that ‘private boxes became home to entire families’. Among all this desperation lurked the young, self-styled ‘fakir’ Tahra Bey in robes and Bedouin headdress. He appeared in Rome in 1924, where he was welcomed by ‘scholars of the occult’, particularly Arturo Reghini, a well-educated Italian who later supported Mussolini and wanted to bring about the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church. He thought Bey, who seemed to be able to mirror people’s deepest hopes, might ‘revive the ancient beliefs of the East’.
Cormack writes amusingly of Bey’s rise to what would now be called ‘celebrity’ status. He took his bed of nails to ‘the most exclusive salons in Rome’, stabbing himself without apparent pain and burying himself alive before ‘the government and diplomatic corps’. He told a newspaper that the body was divided into spirit, astral body and material body. His ‘mastery of pain’ was due to ‘the control he had over the spirit’. Mussolini saw him at the house of a duchess and begged him to visit his home. He may also have visited George V, who was holidaying in Sicily. Then he reached Paris, describing himself as a ‘representative for the study of the psychic sciences of the East’. He was able to make contact with his cousin, who became the famous singer, Charles Aznavour. The Armenian Aznavour family were also refugees. Aznavour’s father was also on the run from the police after a scam when they were in Greece. Within a few weeks, he held audiences captive, including ‘Parisian icon’ Josephine Baker, and on 22 September 1925, even Marie Curie was in the audience. Although this is a book about fantasy, it is replete with authenticated facts.
After his first Parisian show, Bey began ‘his inexorable rise to stardom’. Rapidly rich and partial to gambling in Deauville, he successfully spread his spiritual message in Krakow, Budapest, Vienna and London, although there was an unforeseen problem there when audiences objected to his hypnotising rabbits. He not only hypnotised Paris and pets; his message spread to the Arab world, attracting imitators among devout Muslims and modernisers. Dr Dahesh – real name Salim Mousa – surfaced in Beirut, then the playground of the East. Like Bey, he had experienced some of the worst cruelty of the early 20th century. His family were Assyrian Christians from southeast Turkey. During the Armenian Massacres, they were also targeted. His family fled to Lebanon, where they lived in poverty. After his father died, he spent a short time in an orphanage where he showed a talent for maths, but when sent to live with an uncle, he lost any chance of an education. From an early age he was called ‘Salim the Magician’, saving his family by performing magic tricks. By 1927, he was touring the Middle East, spreading ‘Daheshism’ and ‘climbing the ladder of paranormal fame’. In 1929, the Arab Israeli conflict began and provided him with the perfect audience – people ‘infected with anxiety and fear, buffeted by uncertainty and worry’. In its anguish, Palestine became ‘a breeding ground for the supernatural’.
Dahesh later predicted that Hitler’s son would return to avenge his father. He didn’t get that right or see his own violent death coming. Things didn’t end well for either man, but between them they created what the author calls ‘a new kind of folklore’ mirroring the desires and neurosis of the 20th century. The interest is not about whether what they said was true, but why they said it, when they did, and why they were so successful. The author has produced a book worthy of Aldous Huxley, who entertained Tahra Bey at his home in California in 1953 because he believed that ‘No manifestations connected to the human spirit were too unusual or far-fetched for consideration.’
