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Podcast: New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episode: Raphael Cormack, "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult" (Norton, 2025)
Description: An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s.
The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind readers, and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential
Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic in addition to European ones, Raphael Cormack follows two of the most unusual and charismatic figures of this age: Tahra Bey, who took 1920s Paris by storm...