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.”
The appetite for miracles was such that Tahra Bey could rake in years’ worth of pay in a few nights of performances and live ensconced in luxury and celebrity. An entire industry sprang up to exploit the market. “You could have seen the fakir Witry in Algeria, the fakir Ben Kuro in Krakow, the fakir Thawara Rey in Budapest, Blacaman in Berlin, or the unusual female fakir Laila Hanoum in Vienna,” Cormack writes. “In Stuttgart, the fakir To Kha was allegedly buried alive for 120 hours.”
Beneath all the talk of ancient wisdom, Cormack presents the craze for the occult—“a vague and slippery term but the best one there is”—as a fully modern phenomenon. The book juxtaposes the story of Tahra Bey with that of his younger fellow spiritual celebrity, Dr. Dahesh (“‘Dr. Astonishing,’ in Arabic”), born Salim Mousa al-Ashi to Assyrian Christian parents in Jerusalem. Where Tahra Bey delivered fakirism to the West, Dr. Dahesh presented the Western science of hypnotism to the East: a similar bill of entrancement, divination, and other sensational feats, packaged under a different kind of exoticism.
Whether running west to east or vice versa, the mystic path tended to carry its practitioners to the finest hotels or apartments and champagne-drenched late nights at the cabarets. It also brought them from mere show business into broader spiritual projects—the “Institute of Tahraism” and a full-fledged “message,” if not quite religion, called Daheshism, complete with disciples—and eventually into accusations of, or prosecution for, charlatanry, fraud, and other misconduct.
The elegant and charismatic Tahra Bey descended to scams with less and less panache, was expelled from France, and then returned during the Second World War to swindle people through “a service trying to help free some of the many prisoners in German custody, for a fee ranging from 50,000 to 500,000 francs.” Despite Dr. Dahesh’s preaching of “the fundamental unity of all creeds,” the Lebanese Establishment deemed him a Rasputin-like threat to social order and the police abducted him, beat him, and dumped him over the border in Aleppo.
What did these performers and their adventures add up to? Cormack argues that they are two of the more illustrious participants in a “great showdown between rational and mystical worldviews”—the representatives of the “the losing side.” He is telling a forgotten history but not a secret one; Tahra Bey and Dr. Dahesh were creatures of publicity, discussed and debated and marveled at—or disparaged—across multiple continents.
The book clatters along from city to city, darting in and out of other lives and careers and controversies. After Tahra Bey challenges an upstart fakir called Rahman Bey (born Antinesco Gemmi in Italy) on the British stage—where they both find British audiences more appalled by the spectacle of flesh piercing and interment than the Continental crowds had been—Cormack follows Rahman Bey to America, “where, as his manager told the press, ‘you can cut your head off on stage … and nobody minds.’”
On this side of the Atlantic, Rahman Bey recruited the paranormal scholar Dr. Hereward Carrington as a hype man—but with him drew the attention of Carrington’s skeptical arch-nemesis, Harry Houdini. Rahman Bey, clutching his face and swooning for photographers, had himself sealed in a coffin and dunked into the Hudson River, only to ring a bell for rescue after 20 minutes; a month later, Houdini summoned the press to watch him do some deep breathing and then spend an hour and 31 minutes in a sealed casket submerged in a hotel swimming pool, with no need for supernatural aid.
The mystical acts attracted impassioned debunkers as powerfully as they did imitators. Even in his early days in Greece, Tahra Bey was dismissed as a fraud by a dentist named Georgios Maichos. His opponent in Paris was the journalist Paul Heuzé, who published a 211-page book called Fakirs, Fumistes & Cie (Fakirs, Fakes & Co.), a comprehensive effort to debunk every single one of Tahra Bey’s “miracles.” In a public showdown, Heuzé ambushed him with a stage magician called Karmah, who “repeated his entire act” for the crowd. When Tahra Bey went to Brazil for relief, he ran afoul there of “Waldemar, an illusionist and member of the Brazilian Society of Magic, who had enlisted the help of another magician, called the Earl of Richmond.”
Dr. Dahesh, in turn, was dogged by a “group of opponents calling themselves the Anti-Charlatan Front.” A baffled Egyptian reviewer of one accusatory work, Cormack writes, declared that “supporters [of Daheshism] seem insane in their exaggerations, while its opponents seem like extremists in theirs.”
The skeptics had logic and factual truth on their side. When Tahra Bey sued Heuzé, in a losing effort, the defendant’s lawyer argued, as Cormack puts it, “If Tahra Bey had simply presented himself as a stage act—a magician, or a man with an unusual ability to withstand pain—there would have been no problem. But he had made bigger claims.”
Yet those bigger claims were what the public yearned for, in the spiritual and historical chaos of the era. In a side plot to a side plot, Cormack catches up with Rahman Bey’s former assistant, the fakir Hamid Bey (“born Naldino Bombacci”), who “became more of a freak-show performer than a prophet” on the United States circuit—only to turn his fortunes around by joining with a self-help-preaching guru named Paramahansa Yogananda. From there, re-invented as a yogi, he connected with the “applied psychologist” Harriet Luella McCollum, who was “teaching people how to use the power of their mind to gain money and success.” Eventually, Hamid Bey “was dressed in the garb of Tahra Bey but was now giving lectures on self-improvement, nutrition, and psychology, with titles such as ‘Mental Science and Personal Success (How to Make Your Own Destiny).’”
The boundaries between the rational and irrational were remarkably porous, and Cormack follows the reciprocating movement of ideas and enthusiasms through lively, focused digression, filling in the milieu around the conjurers with a giddy collage. When McCollum wasn’t telling people they could change their eye color “by thinking very hard,” she was advising them to “sunbathe nude to absorb the health-giving qualities of the sun”; meanwhile, “Harriet’s brother Elmer McCollum was an important member of the team that discovered vitamin D and the person to give the vitamin its name.”
It may not be strictly necessary, as a matter of narrative efficiency, for the reader to know that after Tahra Bey yielded the stage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to Josephine Baker’s Revue Nègre, the owner of a Parisian nightspot named Harem “changed its name to Harlem and turned it into an American jazz club,” but from a different angle it feels essential. The fashion for foreignness and secret wisdom was, above all, a form of cosmopolitanism: the realm of unseen, unknowable forces suddenly made manifest by the holy men was really the globe itself, brought into ever more immediate contact and exchange.
Late in the book, the discursive and chaotic travels of Tahra Bay and Dr. Dahesh converge, neatly and hauntingly, in postwar Beirut—a city where the potential of a new world seemed to be realized, a flourishing, pluralistic metropolis “unburdened by the shackles of the past,” where various peoples and creeds lived in what could pass for harmony. In 1975, this turned out to be a work of illusion. “The sectarianism that Dr. Dahesh had preached against since the early 1940s erupted into violence,” Cormack writes. “Rapidly Lebanon descended into a civil war, which would last fifteen years.”
The stateless prophets were citizens of the planet, and their performances, however phony and mercenary they might have been, gestured at the universal, unrealized yearning for a higher and holier way of being. Early in Kalfayan’s career, in Greece, an Armenian journalist “observed that ‘if every Armenian were Tahra Bey and could endure swords and knives and emerge unharmed, the Eastern Question would look entirely different.’”
Tom Scocca is the editor of Indignity and a member of Flaming Hydra
