History Hash Outs | Out of the Phoenix’s Ashes: Valentine de Saint-Point and the Eastern

Join Mariam Elashmawy, historian of esotericism and print culture in the modern Middle East and PhD fellow at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, for a talk on esotericism and print culture after World War I.

In the aftermath of World War I, a profound crisis of meaning gripped Europe, driving many of its thinkers, artists and spiritualists to seek philosophical refuge in non-Western traditions. This talk examines the figure of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), a French writer and esotericist. De Saint-Point, disillusioned with Western violence and materialism, converted to Islam, relocated to Cairo in 1924 and established her own periodical Le Phénix (1925). Elashmawy shows how de Saint-Point's disillusionment with Futurism, and her eventual turn to Theosophy and Eastern spiritualities, was a product of a globally entangled esoteric formation in which Western spirituality, Sufi thought and Theosophical networks mutually constituted one another across regions.

Drawing on print culture studies and the entangled history of esotericism, Elashmawy argues that de Saint-Point's contributions to Egyptian periodical culture was a deliberate epistemological project to call for the "renaissance of the East." The talk traces how her contributions positioned her, in the eyes of Egyptian editors and efendiyya readers, as an authentic bearer of Eastern spirituality, in which a Western woman had, paradoxically, become more "Eastern" than the East itself.