Like once-famous music hall acts, yesterday’s charlatans are generally forgotten. For every Cagliostro or Gurdjieff, legions more disappear into richly deserved oblivion. Raphael Cormack, a lecturer in Arabic, has disinterred two such characters from the 20th-century Middle East in this impressively researched book: Dr Dahesh (‘Dr Astonishing’ in Arabic, making him sound like a third-rate Marvel character) and Tahra Bey, an Armenian cousin of Charles Aznavour, who not only dispensed Eastern wisdom but also hypnotised rabbits, stuck needles through his cheeks and thrived on being buried alive.

Born Krikor Kalfayan in Istanbul around 1900, Tahra Bey washed up in Athens in 1923. He was one of a million or so refugees created by the Greco-Turkish War, when Greeks and Armenians were forced to flee Turkey. He arrived dressed like an Arab sheikh and claiming supernatural powers, predicting the future and lying on a bed of nails in a style recognisable as fakirism, more properly the domain of wonder-working Muslim ascetics. He quickly became a sensation in Paris, performing sell-out shows at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in front of riotously excited audiences, particularly women. Like a forerunner of Uri Geller, he seemed to bend the laws of nature, and Marie Curie was among those who came to see him.

Tahra Bey spearheaded an orientalist vogue for fakirism between the wars, and Cormack touches on lesser-known performers and imitators such as Rahman Bey, Saro Bey and Hamid Bey. Their acts were in tune with the times: this was the era when Kahlil Gibran was dispensing mystic platitudes in The Prophet