AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In times of great turmoil, we tend to look to the spiritual, perhaps even the mysterious, for comfort, for answers. And nearly a century ago, reeling from the first World War and in the grips of an economic depression, people around the world were hungry for that comfort. Enter two enigmatic figures - Tahra-Bey and Dr. Dahesh - both mysterious, both enrapturing audiences with their mystical stage acts. A new book, "Holy Men Of The Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History Of The Occult" looks at what they offered and what their popularity reveals about that period in history.
Raphael Cormack is assistant professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University in the U.K. and the author of this book. Welcome to the program.
RAPHAEL CORMACK: Hi, great. Thanks for having me on.
RASCOE: In this book, you follow the stories of two key figures in the global tradition of the occult. The first is a man of mysterious origins named Tahra-Bey, and the second is a guy named Dr. Dahesh. Tell us about them.
CORMACK: So Tahra-Bey - he really first appears in around 1925 in Paris, performing this act in which he says that he can kind of shut off his body. He can't feel pain. He uses the power of his spirit to control the physical world and particularly his body, so he can stab himself with some pins, change his pulse. He can also read people's minds.
But his big performance, the thing that everyone comes to see him for, is this burial alive thing. He claims that he puts himself into a sort of deathlike state, buries himself alive in a coffin for up to, you know, several hours and then emerges clean as day, just like nothing's happened before. He justifies all of this through what I'm kind of calling the occult.
RASCOE: And what about Dr. Dahesh?
CORMACK: And so Dr. Dahesh - he actually starts copying what Tahra-Bey was doing - piercing his body, sticking knives through it, burying himself alive - but in a very different situation, which is Jerusalem in 1929, another place where everyone feels like the world is slightly falling apart around them. He appears just after big events of violence between Jews and Arabs.
But whereas Tahra-Bey is claiming that he is Eastern from Egypt - Tahra-Bey, in fact, is an Armenian from Istanbul - but he's selling this kind of Eastern image, this exotic image. Dr. Dahesh can't do the same thing because people in the Middle East are not going to take up with that. So instead, he sells this exotic Western image. He tells people that he's giving them the secrets of Western science.
RASCOE: You know, these Holy men show up, like Tahra-Bey, but then there's an opposition. And the opposition is saying, rationally, that's not what they're doing. Let me tell you what the reality is. Is it a fight between rationality and the occult?
CORMACK: Yeah, it's a fight between skepticism and the occult. Every time these guys turn up, there is always someone to come along and offer their extremely rational, skeptical argument as to why what they're doing is, you know, either just a magic trick or that these people are not really mystics, they're charlatans. Someone always comes up to argue that. And sometimes their arguments are good, and sometimes their arguments are bad.
There was one guy in Greece who tried to challenge Tahra-Bey. One of Tahra-Bey's tricks is that he can pierce his arm and sometimes let blood come out of it and other times have no blood come out of it. And this guy in Greece came up with the explanation that, oh, well, he's injected one arm with adrenaline, and then rubbed a cocaine solution over the other arm, and that's how he does the trick, which, to be honest, seems just as far-fetched as the fact that it's a mystical solution.
I was fascinated in general by these skeptics, too, because they always come up, but they never quite succeed in their mission, you know? Just telling people how rationally something is done doesn't actually make the occult, the mystical, the irrational, disappear because actually, it's coming from a different place, where you want to dream something beyond the rational is possible, where you want to imagine that there are other worlds that you can look at and that we don't understand.
RASCOE: What commonalities do you see between these two men that you profiled and today's mystics and mediums?
CORMACK: I think the main commonality is, in the occult, we can see something of the spirit of our times embodied. We can see what people are dreaming about, what people want to be true. Tahra-Bey - in Paris, people want it to be true that there's this mystical Eastern religion that will come and solve everything. Dr. Dahesh, in Lebanon, started his own kind of religious movement in which he preached the unity of all religions at a time when Lebanon was in the midst of extreme religious strife.
When we look at the people of today, maybe the wellness gurus are sort of the most prominent among them. They also represent something that we want to be true. If we eat well and sort of think positive thoughts, everything's going to be OK, even though maybe it's not.
RASCOE: Dr. Dahesh and Tahra-Bey come up at these points, you know, after there had been a lot of violence, a lot of death. Do you think that the need for spiritual answers pops up when people are going through really challenging times? I mean, when people are trying to cope with upheaval, they look for answers in the great beyond.
CORMACK: I think that's definitely what's going on in the 1920s and 1930s. That's definitely the reason why they're doing it. And I think it probably is what's going on now. You know, we haven't only had the pandemic, we've had people getting very worried about climate change and the state of the world. And it's not a coincidence that we are kind of having another revival of the occult - people who are offering you these kind of solutions to things in a world that you can't quite see.
I think there are messages here that we can take, but they're not actually always good. So in the case of Tahra-Bey in Paris, he's this huge celebrity in the '20s, but in the '30s, he kind of falls away. And then in Europe, he is replaced by Mussolini and Hitler and Franco and all of these people. So the fact that people are looking for answers, the answers that we reach out for are sometimes very dangerous. And I think one of the messages of this book is be a little bit careful of where you go looking for your answers.
RASCOE: That's Raphael Cormack, author and assistant professor at Durham University. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
CORMACK: Thanks so much for having me on. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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