Spiritism

If you already know the history of Spiritism, feel free to skip this chapter. In the next chapter I present Spiritism's view of our essence and bring a curious and interesting passage by Kardec in the Spiritist Review on the subject.

The Turning Tables#

On March 31, 1848, in a wooden house in Hydesville, in upstate New York, two girls of the Fox family announced that they could talk with the knocks that came from the walls. They would ask a question, and the knocks would answer.

The news crossed the United States, and then the ocean.

In 1853, in the salons of Paris, the fashion was something nobody could explain: tables that moved, tilted and tapped a leg on the floor. And which, when questioned, answered. One rap for yes, two for no. Then the whole alphabet, letter by letter.

For almost everyone, it was an after-dinner pastime.

For a fifty-year-old teacher, it turned out to be the question of his life.

The Teacher from Lyon#

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail was born in Lyon, France, on October 3, 1804.

He studied in Switzerland, at Yverdon, in the institute of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, one of the most influential educators of the time, who held that a child learns by observing and reasoning, not by memorizing. The pupil carried the method with him for the rest of his life.

In Paris, Rivail was an educator. He founded a school, gave free courses, wrote textbooks on grammar, arithmetic and pedagogy. In 1832 he married Amélie Gabrielle Boudet, also a teacher, who would be at his side in everything that came after.

He was a man of method. And, like every man of method, he distrusted what he could not examine.

In 1854, an acquaintance, the magnetizer Fortier, told him that the tables, besides turning, talked. Rivail's reaction was that of someone who had spent his life teaching people to reason: he would believe it when he saw it. And when it was proved to him that a table had a brain to think with and nerves to feel with.

Questions and Answers#

In May 1855, Rivail saw the phenomena for the first time, at the house of Madame de Plainemaison, in Paris. The tables moved. But what interested him was something else: the answers had content.

Soon after, he began to attend the meetings of the Baudin family, where the two daughters of the house, Caroline and Julie, still teenagers, served as mediums. The communications came through a basket with a pencil attached, which wrote on the paper.

Until then, the meetings had been about curiosity: questions about the future, family matters and amusement. Rivail began to bring something else. He brought written questions, prepared at home, about God, the soul, life after death, the origin of evil. And he wrote down the answers.

At the same time, friends who knew of his interest handed him some fifty notebooks of communications received in other groups, gathered over the years.

The teacher did with that material what he knew how to do: he organized it, compared it, separated what was repeated from what was contradicted. And he realized that, through different mediums, in different places, who did not know one another, the answers on the fundamental questions agreed.

This cross-checking became the criterion of all the work that came after. An isolated communication, however beautiful, was not enough. What counted was the teaching repeated in many places, through many mediums. He would call it the universal control of the teaching of the Spirits.

Allan Kardec#

At one of those meetings, according to the account that has come down to us, a Spirit told Rivail that the two of them had known each other in a previous life, in the Gaul of the druids, when he had been called Allan Kardec.

Rivail adopted the name.

The reason was practical, and it was also a choice of substance. Professor Rivail had a well-known body of educational work, and he did not want it to lend authority to the new book, nor did he want the new book to be read as a teacher's opinion. A new name for a work that, as he saw it, was not his.

This book, signed with a pen name, has a special sympathy for that choice.

The Spirits' Book#

On April 18, 1857, The Spirits' Book reached the bookshops of Paris.

The title page already said how it should be read: the principles of the doctrine, according to the teachings of spirits of high degree, transmitted through various mediums, collected and set in order by Allan Kardec.

Collected and set in order. Not written.

The format was that of the meetings: question and answer. The first edition had 501 questions. The second, of 1860, revised and enlarged, reached 1,019, and it is on this one that today's editions are based.

Between the answers, Kardec inserts comments of his own. It is worth keeping this distinction in mind, because it will matter: what the book attributes to the Spirits is one thing; the codifier's remark is another.

In the introduction, he coined a word to name what he was presenting. "Spiritualism" already existed, and meant only the opposite of materialism. For the doctrine based on communication with the Spirits, he proposed a new name: Spiritism.

The Codification#

The book sold out. Kardec did not stop.

On January 1, 1858, he launched the Spiritist Review, which he would edit every month for eleven years, as a public diary of the research. In April of the same year, he founded the Parisian Society for Spiritist Studies.

Then came the other four books that, together with the first, make up what is called the codification:

• The Mediums' Book, in 1861, on the phenomena and the practice of mediumship;
• The Gospel According to Spiritism, in 1864, on the moral teaching of Jesus;
• Heaven and Hell, in 1865, on divine justice and life after death;
• Genesis, in 1868, on creation, miracles and predictions.

Kardec died in Paris on March 31, 1869, at sixty-four, in the middle of preparations for a move. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, under a stone dolmen, in the manner of the druids whose name he adopted.

On the stone, one sentence sums up the whole doctrine:

"To be born, to die, to be reborn again and to progress unceasingly: such is the law."

Across the Ocean#

In France, Spiritism lost strength in the following decades. It was on the other side of the Atlantic that it put down roots.

It reached Brazil while Kardec was still incarnate. In 1865, in Bahia, the country's first Spiritist group was founded. In 1884, in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian Spiritist Federation.

Brazil became the country with the most Spiritists in the world, and gave the doctrine a trait it had carried since Kardec, but which here became its hallmark: charity. Spiritist centers all over the country run day-care centers, shelters, food distribution and free care. The maxim that sustains all of this is in The Gospel According to Spiritism: without charity there is no salvation.

And it was Brazil that gave Spiritism its best-known figure. Francisco Cândido Xavier, Chico Xavier, born in Pedro Leopoldo, Minas Gerais, in 1910, wrote more than four hundred books through mediumship over seventy years, and kept nothing of the royalties: he gave them all away.

The sentence that opens this book is his.

What Spiritism Proposes#

Kardec describes Spiritism as a science of observation and, at the same time, a philosophical doctrine, with moral consequences.

Its pillars fit in a short list:

• God, the supreme intelligence, first cause of all things;
• the immortality of the spirit, which survives the body and keeps its individuality;
• reincarnation, the many lives through which the spirit learns and progresses;
• communication between the living and those who have already gone;
• the plurality of inhabited worlds;
• the law of cause and effect, by which each one reaps what they sow;
• progress, as the destiny of all, without exception.

And there is an attitude that runs through the whole work and is perhaps Kardec's most precious legacy: faith that is not afraid to think. He did not ask anyone to believe. He asked them to examine.

It is in that spirit that we will now open the codification and look in it for the answer to the question of this book.