The early 20th century was a time for mystifying transformations. Sometime around 1900, a boy named Krikor Kalfayan was born an Armenian Christian in Istanbul, the capital of the six-century-old Ottoman Empire. By 1925, a white-robed Egyptian named Tahra Bey was onstage in Paris, astonishing crowds with his seemingly supernatural ability to puncture his skin without bleeding, to sink into a deathlike trance, and to be sealed in a coffin and buried alive, only to be unearthed unharmed.
With the empire of his birth gone and the Armenians slaughtered or scattered, Kalfayan had made his way west, via Greece and Rome, while “his persona slowly became more ‘Eastern,’” Raphael Cormack writes in Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult. As Tahra Bey, he presented himself as a fakir, the emissary of an ageless, transcendent foreign culture to a Europe in which, Cormack observes, “the potential for total civilizational collapse was very real” and “those who were disenchanted with the present were ready to consider more outlandish worldviews.”
