Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Between the two world wars, Tara Bay 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 Hesh was a spiritualist who sparked

an entire religious movement. These two enigmatic figures are at the centre of Raphael Cormack's new book, Holy Men of the

Electromagnetic Age. And in discussion with Lauren Good, 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 gin 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 really important part of

1920s and 1930s history. but I didn't quite know how.

And this book gave me the way in, which was to focus on two particular lives of two

particular men, and just to see where all of the trails took me, basically.

And it starts with Tahrabe. He is the sort of prime mover in all of this,

the first mover, an Armenian refugee who ended up in Athens in 1923 and constructed for himself

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