Spiritism

Allan Kardec was the pen name of Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, a French teacher and author of school textbooks who had studied under the educational reformer Pestalozzi. He was in his fifties and rationalist by temperament when in 1854 he was persuaded to look at the table-turning craze then sweeping Paris. He concluded that something was happening and set out to investigate it as a subject rather than a diversion.

His method was a questionnaire. He put more than a thousand ordered questions to a number of mediums working separately, and treated as reliable only those answers that agreed across independent sources, a procedure he called the control of universal teaching. The result was The Spirits Book in 1857, which remains the foundational text.

Four more books completed the system: The Mediums Book (1861) on practice, The Gospel According to Spiritism (1864) on ethics, Heaven and Hell (1865) and Genesis (1868). Together they are known as the codification.

The doctrine holds that God is one, and that spirits are created simple and ignorant and progress through many successive lives, always forward and never into animal bodies. There is no eternal damnation and no hell as a place; suffering is the natural consequence of one's own state and is corrective. The spirit is joined to the body through an intermediate envelope, the perispirit. Other inhabited worlds exist at differing stages of moral advancement.

There is no clergy, no sacrament, no ritual and no payment. Mediumship must be exercised free of charge, and Spiritist centres run on study, unpaid mediumistic sessions and charitable work. Kardec insisted that Spiritism was a science and a philosophy with moral consequences rather than a church, and its institutions still make that claim.

Spiritism faded in France within a generation of Kardec's death in 1869, and grew instead in Brazil, where it is now a substantial religion.

It arrived with the French-reading professional classes in the 1860s, and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1884. Two features fitted local conditions. The first was charity: from early on Spiritist centres ran free clinics, orphanages, schools and psychiatric hospitals, which gave the movement real social weight in a country with thin public provision. The second was familiarity: mediumship and contact with the dead were already established in Afro-Brazilian religion, although Spiritists have generally kept a firm and sometimes uncomfortable distance from Umbanda and Candomble.

The decisive figure was Chico Xavier, Francisco Candido Xavier (1910-2002), a barely schooled man from Minas Gerais who published more than four hundred books said to be dictated by spirits, including poetry attributed to dead Brazilian writers and consoling letters written to bereaved parents in the handwriting of their children. He assigned the royalties to charity and lived in poverty. He became a national figure, appeared on television, and in a 2012 television poll was voted the greatest Brazilian of all time, a result driven in part by organised campaigning among Spiritist centres.

The 2010 national census recorded 3.8 million Brazilians identifying as Spiritist, about two per cent of the population and an increase of sixty-five per cent over 2000, making it the third largest religious identification in the country. Spiritists are on average markedly wealthier and better educated than the national mean. The movement's own estimates of those who attend centres or read the books without declaring the identity run far higher and cannot be verified.

Spiritism holds that mediums transmit information from the dead. The claim is testable in principle and has been examined, with results that Spiritists and their critics read very differently.

Two Brazilian episodes show what is at stake. Letters psychographed by Chico Xavier have been submitted as evidence in homicide trials, most famously at Goiania in 1979, where a letter purporting to come from the victim said the shooting had been accidental and the jury acquitted the defendant. Brazilian legal scholars still argue over whether such documents are admissible at all. Separately, the healer Joao Teixeira de Faria, known as John of God, ran a spiritist-influenced centre at Abadiania visited by hundreds of thousands of people, helped by international television publicity. From 2018 hundreds of women accused him of sexual abuse; he was convicted of rape in 2019 and again in 2020 and sentenced to decades in prison. The Spiritist federations had no authority over him and did not endorse him, but the case did real damage.

Academic study has produced no result accepted outside the movement. Analyses of Xavier's letters published in parapsychology journals have argued for accuracy beyond chance; mainstream psychology attributes the phenomena to cryptomnesia, cold reading and generous interpretation, and no controlled demonstration of mediumistic information transfer has been replicated to an accepted standard.

One distinction is worth keeping clear. Spiritism is not the same thing as Anglo-American Spiritualism, out of which it grew. The dividing line is reincarnation, which Kardec's spirits taught and which most English-speaking Spiritualist bodies rejected, and the split has held for more than a century and a half.