Lauren Good (6:28)

Can we expand on that a little bit before we delve further into the lives of these two fascinating men? This book is set in the 20s and 30s. What sort of society are we talking about here? What were the main anxieties that these acts perhaps played on?

Raphael Cormack (6:44)

It was subtly different in every place where they were. So the three main places that I'm looking at are the Arab world, the Middle East, Europe and America. So different in various ways in those places, but I think focused around a very similar concern, which is how to deal with modernity and the modern world and all the changes of the modern world. And if we take Europe first, right. It is very often said that these movements, particularly spiritualism, in which people summon the souls of the dead, are a reaction to the end of the First World War and perhaps also the Spanish Flu, in which lots of people have died and people are trying to communicate with the souls of their relatives in the afterworld who they can no longer talk to. And so they go to a kind of medium who promises to do this. And there is something to that. But I think what guys like Tahrabay show. So Tahrabey was not a spiritualist. He never claimed to be able to communicate with the souls of the dead. But he shows that there was something else going on too, on top of that, which was, at least in my interpretation of these things, the idea that civilization basically had collapsed. So also a result perhaps of the First World War, but a result of lots of other things too, of the coming materialism and this general sense that people were unmoored and didn't really know where to go and needed answers from somewhere. All these guys are responding to this moment of crisis, which is larger than just lots of people being dead, though, does include lots of people being dead.

Lauren Good (8:31)

And I'd like to start, as you do in the book, with Tahara Bey. He's a refugee who arrives in Paris in 1925, as you said. And, you know, you've talked a little bit about the act that he put on, but as soon as he arrives in Paris, people start talking of the phenomena that's arising around where he's living. What sort of things were happening at this point that put down to a supernatural presence?

Raphael Cormack (8:57)

There's various things and this happens everywhere he goes. So in Athens too, this happened. There are often these kind of mysterious letters sent to people in Athens. There's a good story about you had these guys who sold things called kulluri, which are like kind of sesame seed bagels almost in the streets. And every time the kuluri seller walked past the house where Tahara Bey was staying, his bag would be mysteriously emptied of things. And not only did these sort of strange things happen around him, he himself was clearly endowed with a lot of charisma, if you want to put it in sort of such low terms, or perhaps a sort of mystical aura, if you want to be more occultist about it. Deep, piercing eyes. He dressed in these kind of Arab robes, slightly pastiche of what people in the Middle east actually wore. But everyone said he looked like a Bible prophet. And he was sort of. He was playing up to their ideas of essentially what Jesus might look like.

Lauren Good (9:58)

I think it's easy to say that, you know, he was making this all up, as you said, that it was a bit more of an act and he was playing up to these things. But he is examined by medical professionals. What did they discover?

Raphael Cormack (10:12)

He's constantly examined by medical professionals and constantly they have the same answer, which is they can't actually explain how he is doing all of these things. So they can't explain. One of the things he appears to be able to do is control his pulse. So he'll get doctors to come up and sort of take his pulse and he will make it slower if they want it slower, or faster if they want it faster. He can even have different pulses in different arms. He can control his blood flow in some way, at least apparently. So sometimes he will pierce himself and the blood will flow out, but other times, if he sort of desires it, he will pierce himself and no blood will come out. And people can't really figure this out, at least at first, though within a few years, and this is a constant refrain in Tarabey's life, someone usually actually not a doctor, but a magician or something, will come and say that he knows how all of these things are done. The most famous person to do that is not actually doing that to Tahra Bey, but doing it to one of his kind of imitators. A guy called Rahman Bey is Harry Houdini. So when Rahman Bey, the sort of next in line to Tahra Bey, goes to New York, Houdini immediately gets him in his sights. And in particular, the big act that no one can quite explain is the burial alive or the one that really takes most of the attention in which people appear to be able to, like Tahra Bey, Rahman Bey, put themselves into a state similar to death, but which they can control. And it can last. They claim it can last, you know, days or even months in some cases, although they never actually do it for months. But Houdini basically says, well, if you seal yourself into a metal coffin, you could probably stay in there for about an hour to an hour and a half just on the air. That's inside it. And he. Houdini, in fact, replicates this stunt by submerging himself in a swimming pool and actually doing it, which somewhat takes the wind out of the sails of certainly Rahman Bey. And of course, and then they move in sort of slightly different directions.

Lauren Good (12:36)

We see this act being challenged. But there was an interesting point in the book where he takes away this tradition from his shows of being a fakir, like you talked about, and they simply become, as you describe, more of a magic act. And people lose interest more. At this point, this struck me as it seems quite different to today. I don't think necessarily modern audiences need that history to enjoy the show before them.

Raphael Cormack (13:04)

They definitely did seem to need at least some kind of philosophy. I mean, my argument, I suppose, is that the reason that they became popular was not just that they were doing these amazing things, but that it did appear to have some kind of new occult philosophy behind it. Basically, it's like some explanation which might allow people to think. Think there was a different way of looking at the world, which is what people at that time really needed, which is why, A, he became so popular. And then, B, when people started to have doubts about the genuineness of his Burial Alive act, say he struggles to recover, although he does find ways to recover. And actually, Interestingly, in the 1950s, he turns up in California staying with Aldous Huxley. And Aldous Huxley is something of a believer in the powers of Tara Bey, and even travels to Lebanon, where in the 1950s, Tahra Bey is living, in order to try and get him to help cure his wife from cancer.

Lauren Good (14:11)

Wow. That's a huge belief to have.

Raphael Cormack (14:15)

Yeah, well, Huxley was a big believer in all kinds of unusual things and was sort of mocked for it in his time, but I think quite. Perhaps either quite enjoyed the mockery or didn't really care about it because he was perhaps more like people in the 20s and 30s. He was a real searcher for things beyond the obvious, things that not everyone did believe in. And Tanhrope kind of represented that to him.

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Lauren Good (16:21)

And despite his ups and downs, we do see this downfall and happen. But to me, this shouldn't dictate his story, as you say in the book, from a position of powerlessness. He was a refugee. In experiencing poverty, he in quotes, harnessed the wonders of the world to become a celebrity. I mean, it is a success story.

Raphael Cormack (16:41)

It is. Well, it's a complex story. It really is. He's a fascinating guy beyond all of the occult stuff, which is extremely fascinating. Even if he didn't have that, you know, he is, yeah, like he's an Armenian refugee in the early 1920s at a time when, although he never really talks about it, a large number of his relatives, we presume were probably killed in the violence of the late 1910s. And he turns up in Paris with nothing really and manages to become a celebrity and, yeah, I mean, totally changed his life. I think probably you can never, although he always had this complex relationship to being Armenian, you can probably never separate this Armenianness, like his Armenianness from his act. And people, Armenians, at least in the 1920s, made kind of slightly dark jokes about it. But there is a kind of irony to the fact that this guy has become famous for being able to withstand pain, being able to withstand death, even at a time when a large number of his people have been killed in huge numbers. And that's a kind of dark undertone underneath all of his story and perhaps underneath all of the story of the occult in this period too. Right? It's a response to darkness, and a lot of it's quite fun and charismatic and even funny at times, but there's always a kind of suffering in a sense, that inspires it.

Lauren Good (18:20)

And is this response to darkness that I really felt in the second part of your book in Dr. Dahesh, where Tahereh Bay was appealing to the want for wanderer magic, I felt with Dr. Dahesh's work, it was more born out of a need to see beyond the veil in a society which had experienced so much loss. It's an interesting comparison, isn't it? This desperation versus childlike wonder.

Raphael Cormack (18:48)

Yeah, they need both. Everyone needs both. Dr. Dahish. So he comes sort of to become a celebrity in 1930s Palestine at a time when it's really. This is a time when inter communal violence between Jews and Arabs is really starting to pick up. And the background to all of what's going on is, you know, 1929 and the sort of violence around that date, and then 1936, which is the great Arab Revolt, another time of huge violence and repression, broadly from actually British at that point. And it's against this background that he starts doing his show. And so we can talk about that a little bit, because, as I said, it starts off pretty similar to what Tahribay is doing. So he's doing all of this burial alive and not feeling a pain and includes quite a lot of hypnotism. But Tahrabay, in his time had been known to do some hypnotism. It wasn't the focus of his act, but he had done some. But this is what Dr. Dahesh really leans into, both hypnotism and spiritualism. So he becomes part of what mandate Palestine's first spiritualist circle, this attempt to summon the ghosts of the dead. And then he himself studies the books of spiritualism and manages to find that he has the power also to talk to the dead, the throats of the dead, and harness them for the use of, largely speaking, his clients. So he would give stage shows partly of hypnotism, partly of kind of Spiritualism. But he would also. He had an office. People would come. People would come with their questions. Often it might have been, I've lost such and such a thing. Where is it? Or someone has stolen my ring from me. Can you help me find it? But also it'd be questions about the future, questions about things that were worrying them and anxiety and all this kind of. So he. In an anxious age, which is, I think 1930s in Mandate Palestine is the definition of an anxious age. Probably he was offering people these kind of solutions to their problems, but ones which were backed up by this interesting and kind of experimental new science which attracted people.

Lauren Good (21:13)

I also want to touch on, when he does make the stage performances, you make a note of the fact that, you know, to harabe, he's dress to appeal to a more western audience, where Dr. Dahesh comes out in a Western suit with a white shirt. Why is this difference important to touch on?

Raphael Cormack (21:33)

My view is that they're kind of. They're like the mirror image of each other in the. Okay. I mean, it's not gonna sort of appeal to an audience in the Middle east, this sort of slightly falsified Orientalist view of a sheikh. That's not gonna really affect them in the same way that it affects audiences in Paris or America. But what does give them a sort of glimpse of exoticism is in fact the opposite, which is bow tie, Western suit, degrees from European universities in kind of spiritual sciences. This is the kind of mirror image of this weird Orientalist exoticism. This is the kind of, as maybe you would call it, an Occidentalist exoticism, in a sense.

Lauren Good (22:17)

Another difference I really felt with Dr. Dahesh is that he ends up not needing to make the connection between being a fakir because his hypnotism was stated, as a journalist said at the time, to be a true science. This is pretty different to the situation with Tahereh Bey, isn't it?

Raphael Cormack (22:35)

Yeah, well, so in a sense, this is kind of what Tahereh Bey was wanting when he first came along, selling his act as kind of scientific, but it eventually came disintegrated into something else, and he moved into other kind of occult areas. Whereas Dr. Durhisch, rather than continuing to perform, which he didn't really do that much after the early 1930s, instead he went heavily into this idea of one something being a new science and it's sort of a new philosophy, he wrote quite a lot of poetry himself and turned himself more into a holy man figure than a sort of stage performer. And it Was at this time that this kind of new scientific stuff was really taken up. We've touched on it a little bit, but just to kind of maybe focus on it. I think it's very important that the 1920s and into the 1930s is the beginning of the popularization of radio and that technology. There are others that I can X rays and things like that, but I think radio is the most similar to spiritualism in a sense. So the idea is that there are these voices everywhere in the ether being sent out by whatever radio antennae or whatever sent them out. And you can get a device which you can then turn and manipulate and it will then pick up these voices that are all around us, everywhere. They're sort of going through us as we speak, but you need this little device to pick them up. And this is kind of exactly what spiritualism is, especially for Dr. Dahish. Right. And his device is his hypnotic medium who is also his sister, who he puts into this trance and then she is kind of able, like a radio, to pick up the voices of the dead, which are also in a similar way to radio waves surrounding us. And people use these kind of comparisons at the time too. I'm not just reading this into it. People talk about it and it's really, this is the time when this technology is coming and it makes spiritualism seem perhaps a little less far fetched and a little more scientific, which is what Dahish and the other hypnotists in the Arab world, which there are also many, are picking up on. So not just weird woo woo, but also proper science, if you want to call it that.

Lauren Good (25:06)

There's so much science playing into this, but there's also religion that I really wanted to touch on. Dr. Dahash also sparked a movement called Daheshism. When I was researching for this interview, I was in all honesty, fascinated by these men and went to have a little look and found that this movement still exists today. What does it involve and how does it play into this religious theme?

Raphael Cormack (25:31)

Yeah, religion does intersect with this thing in a whole lots of ways in the Middle East. I mean, so just as a very brief example, before we get to Daeshism, the very earliest spiritualists in the Middle east were not kind of these scientific guys, but they were Muslim shaykhs who were interested in the idea that the spirit lived after death and that you could somehow prove this scientifically. So it started off as a kind of religious scientific movement. So there's always religion involved in it. But what Dr. Dahish does in Lebanon, so to Catch us up very briefly. In the late 1930s, he's involved in a scandal with one of his hypnotic clients who accuses him of stealing money off her. And he goes then to Lebanon, where he sort of starts anew, but continues doing very similar things. He's doing these strange miracles. He's sort of summoning books from the other side of the world that people were thinking about. And he's summoning rocks from up in the hills of Lebanon and this kind of thing. He's doing these amazing things, but he doesn't just do that. He tries to start this. There's a question of whether it's a new religion or whether it's just a sort of religious movement that the followers debate this at some length. But basically, at least a movement that tries to unite all the religions, or at least all the Abrahamic religions. You know, the cross, the star of David and the crescent, all in one movement, which also has these slightly odd metaphysical levels, which kind of slightly ununderstandable. But the central part, and the central part that most people take up is this idea that he is trying to unite all of the three major religions, which in 1940s Beirut is like. All of these guys is an extremely popular thing to be doing. This is 1940s Beirut is a time when people are very worried about religious difference. Beirut, Lebanon, in general, one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. These 18 different sects, and they all sit in this very complex balance. And in the 1940s, the country is newly independent from colonial rule. So everyone is debating this kind of stuff. And Daeshism comes with this simple answer, which is, forget all of these religious differences. Let's all just unite under this one movement, which is, for obvious reasons, kind of appealing to people. My argument, in general, at least one of them, about all of these occult figures is that they kind of embody both the anxieties and the desires of the age, in some sense. So they become kind of almost radio transmitters for things that people need. So if it's in the 1920s in Paris and you're Tahrabey, you're at Eastern Fakir. If you're in 1930s Palestine, you're a hypnotist who can tell people about their future. And if you're in 1940s Lebanon, you're someone who can dissolve religious differences. Because these are the sort of hot topics of the age, which is one reason I think they're kind of interesting to look at. But it becomes, for various reasons, quite a controversial movement. And partly because the President's sister in law, the Lebanese president's sister in law becomes a member of this movement. So quite high profile, a number of high profile people are sort of followers of Dr. Daesh in 1940s Lebanon, and then he is expelled, as I said, from Lebanon and then returns to Lebanon and in the 1950s and 60s sort of keeps going. And as you say, it's unclear to me exactly how many people still are followers of Dr. Dahish, but there are certainly some. They do exist. And his message, I guess, yet continues because perhaps it continues to be sort of in some sense appealing.

Lauren Good (29:35)

This is a man of huge influence.

Raphael Cormack (29:38)

This is a man at least of huge influence in a certain circle of influential people. Right. It's very hard to put numerical values on it, but yeah, and a man who causes a huge scandal in the 1940s and to some extent later, but especially in the 1940s, everyone is talking about Dr. Dahesh in Lebanon at this time. He's kind of forgotten now. And it's interesting, you go to Lebanon now, go to Beirut. And my non scientific sort of anecdotal research would say people of a generation who are 60 and over, everyone knows his name at least, but people who are in their 30s and 40s, nobody's heard of him. He's slightly disappeared from the national consciousness, but there was a time when he was this huge figure.

Lauren Good (30:34)

It's interesting, you almost use these men as you touched on a little bit as a lens to see the societies that they were in at the time. Finally, Raf, you make a statement in the book that this interwar period doesn't feel too different to the society we're in now. What should we take from, from this book? I know that's a very complex question, but, you know, all this murky history of the occult and these men playing into the anxieties of the time, is there anything we can learn about the modern age from this history?

Raphael Cormack (31:09)

I would say a few things about it and sort of underneath this question lies this other sort of implicit question is, are we living through the 1920s and 1930s again, which is the thing that people sort of often gesture towards. And one thing I would definitely say was, and this is, I think one thing that underlies a lot of this book is it's in these slightly fringe kind of far out movements that we can see something of the spirit of the times embodied. And that appears to me to be just sort of anecdotally true both of then and of now. So there's a reason why people are so obsessed with the kind of New Age and wellness gurus and all of this kind of stuff. It's not necessarily that they are numerically hugely influential. Some of them might be, but they seem to embody something about the early 21st century, which is uncomfortable, maybe, but that feels important, which is why people are so interested in that. Someone says, yeah, like you say, these people are a kind of lens in which to view the time. Then the pessimistic interpretation of all of this, which is an interpretation people had in the 20s and 30s, is that their appeals to irrationality, to sort of something out beyond the logical world, chime very closely with the appeals of fascism and Nazism to a similar kind of irrationality. Although none of these people are fascists, they're not politically involved really at all. But there are people like. So Leonard Wolf and Adorno at the time were writing that there was an uncomfortable similarity between these two things. And so one answer that you could give, and maybe the answer that I'm going to give today, though ask me tomorrow, I might have a different answer, is that these appeals to irrationality, which I see the basis of, I can see why they're kind of exciting and fun, because the material world isn't that great, to be honest. But these kind of people who claim to give the answer to what is behind the material world lead you into quite dangerous territory, and maybe that's their message for today.

Podcast Host (33:41)

That was Raphael Cormack, assistant professor at Durham University, as well as the author of Holy Men of the Electromagnetic A Forgotten History of the Occult. He appeared on the podcast earlier to talk to me about his previous book, Midnight in Cairo. The Female Star Stars of Egypt's Roaring Twenties. You can search for the glamour and danger of Cairo's 1920s nightlife scene to bring that up. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.