The turn to being re-enchanted with spiritualism (rūḥiyya)--the occupation with “spirit phenomena” through “mediums” and experiments–was an existential matter within a world-wide trend in the post-Great War moment. The disenchantment with materialism, democracy, and man-kind violence resulted in individuals rethinking their position in the world, not only in Europe and the Americas, but also in Egypt. At the forefront of this Egyptian preoccupation with spiritualism and its usefulness for the reform of the community was the Islamic scholar, philosopher, and periodical editor Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954). Wajdī was known for his advocacy for engaging with spiritualism as a scientific and philosophical study–an initiative, he bemoans, that was inherent in Islamic history but seems to have been lost with the penetration of Western modernity and materialism. This paper looks at the history of spiritualism in fin-de-siècle Egypt to challenge the assumption that modernity and the enculturation of the efendi in colonial Egypt, led to a break with esoteric discourse. When in fact, an inclination towards the esoteric began to manifest in print initiative, where scholars, intellectuals, efendis, and print editors aimed at actively transforming the public’s perception of spiritualism. I take Wajdi’s foray into the world of Egyptian journalism as the space within which he “experimented” with the Egyptian public’s interest in such topics through his editorship of periodicals such as al-Ḥayāh and al-Azhar, as well as periodicals he was a regular contributor to such as al-Ma’rifa. I take these periodicals as “laboratories” (Monroe, p. 9) that mark the gradual emergence of Egyptian spiritualism–not as counter culture or underground attempts on the fringe of society but rather as an integral part of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Egypt. In this paper, I set out to complicate the reading of esotericism as a Western conception, where the entire Islamic world has been treated as a ‘carrier civilization’ of mostly Greek (and hence, one assumes, ‘properly Western’) material. Instead, I present Wajdī’s periodicals as an engagement with spiritualism that is part of the Islamicate tradition and a continuity from the past that is utilized to reflect on contemporary political and social immiserations.