Extraordinary. A delightfully engaging and highly original chronicle of our willingness to believe six impossible things before breakfast.--Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

From Athens and Cairo to Montmartre and Manhattan, Raphael Cormack reconstructs the careers of four occult impresarios through interlinked circles of artists, immigrants, politicians, and theatergoers. Rarely is cultural history presented with such mesmerizing legerdemain.--Nile Green, author of Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah

Raphael Cormack is a brilliant archival sleuth and a riveting storyteller. In lives full of violent glamour, mystical illusions, and often hilarious twists set against the inhumanity of the two World Wars, Cormack's madcap prophets reveal how modern politics and the occult are in fact propelled by the same question: do we dare to imagine another world?--Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

Raphael Cormack revisits the early-20th-century golden age of spiritualism to uncover the stories of two little-remembered Arab mystics who combined science and esoteric faith to explain a world in flux.-- "Publishers Weekly"

A fascinating, detail-laden history of a time when occultism ran rampant.-- "Kirkus"

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.--Tom Scocca "Airmail"

Raphael Cormack's enthralling Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age makes clear the connections not merely between science and magic but also, more ambitiously, between science, magic and celebrity... Although his characters deal--often in the service of their own personal branding--in stereotype, Mr. Cormack writes with nuance about the cultural and social fluidity of their era.

--Tara Isabella Burton "Wall Street Journal"

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2025-03-11

Length: 304 pages