Talks & Lectures Raphael Cormack – Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age

‘Extraordinary. A delightfully engaging and highly original chronicle of our willingness to believe six impossible things before breakfast.’

Exploring death, religion and science, the acclaimed author of Midnight In Cairo presents a startling history of the occult between the wars, when Spiritualism was an international obsession. This was a golden age of the uncanny, when clairvoyants, fakirs and mind-readers 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.

Following two of the age’s most charismatic figures – Tahra Bey, the ‘Oriental’ missionary who took 1920s Paris by storm, and Dr Dahesh, who harnessed Western science to create a pan-religious faith – Cormack shows how these forgotten ‘holy’ men, who embodied the allure of the unexplained, speak to our own unstable world today.

Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator and writer. He is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Durham University.