The Mediums' Book

The book's two parts mirror its double purpose, to explain and to train. The first part answers the theoretical sceptic: the action of spirits on matter, the perispirit as the semi-material envelope through which a spirit moves tables or guides a writing hand, and the classification of manifestations, physical effects, noises and movements, apparitions, and the intelligent communications that matter most to the doctrine. The second part is the working manual.

Kardec catalogues the mediums themselves, of physical effects, hearing, seeing, speaking, and the writing mediums he considered most useful, distinguishing mechanical from intuitive writing; he prescribes the conduct of seances, regular in composition, serious in purpose, free of curiosity-seeking and of any commerce, Spiritism holding mediumship a faculty to be exercised gratuitously; and he devotes his most careful chapters to obsession and fascination, the states in which a deceiving spirit gains ascendancy over a medium, with their remedies in humility and study. The rule the book made famous is its test of messages: a communication signed with an illustrious name has no authority beyond its content, for frivolous spirits borrow great names freely, and everything received must be weighed by reason and by agreement with the teaching received through many mediums, the control of universal concordance. The final chapters print a dictionary of Spiritist terms and dissertations from the spirits themselves.

Kardec published the work in January 1861, consolidating an earlier practical instruction of 1858, and it completed the codification's working pair: doctrine in the first book, method in the second, with the Revue Spirite serving as the movement's continuing laboratory of cases. His concern throughout is order. The Paris society he presided over ran its sessions on the book's rules, and the model travelled with the doctrine: a Spiritist centre is recognisable anywhere by the practices this book fixed, study preceding practice, mediumship exercised without payment, communications received soberly and examined collectively, and physical phenomena subordinated to moral instruction.

The chapters on fraud and self-deception gave the movement an internal critical vocabulary that its defenders have pointed to ever since, Kardec having catalogued the tricks of false mediumship and the subtler traps of a medium's own imagination with a schoolmaster's patience. The book's deepest influence, like the doctrine's, has been in Brazil, where federation guidelines for the mediumistic meeting descend directly from its prescriptions and where courses on it remain a standard stage in a Spiritist worker's formation; the practice of psychography, the receiving of written messages from the departed, made famous in the twentieth century by the medium Chico Xavier, whose hundreds of volumes were produced under its disciplines, kept the manual's categories in daily use. It remains in print in many languages, still formatted as Kardec left it, a handbook meant to lie open beside the practice it governs.