Spiritual showmen: the 1920s occult

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Between the two world wars, Tara Bey became a celebrity through his apparent ability to control his pulse, stab himself without pain, and even bury himself alive. Meanwhile, a man called Dr De Hesch was a spiritualist who sparked an entire religious movement. These two enigmatic figures are at the center of Raphael Cormac's new book, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age, and in discussion with Laurengood, he explores the occult scene of the 1920s and how it reflected the anxieties of the time.

Raf, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about your new book, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age. It's difficult to know where to start with this book. It contains so much. Could you please give a brief overview of what it's actually about? Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.

The impetus for writing this book really came through a quite long sort of 10-year interest in the idea of the occult in the modern age and what people were doing. It's so spiritualism, but also all of the bits around spiritualism, like kind of hypnotism and in the Middle East jinn summoning and all of these kind of different things. I've always been sort of interested in them. but never known quite how to throw them all together. Because I feel it's a really important part of 1920s and 1930s history.

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