The Spirits' Book

Rivail came to the seance table a sceptic of standing: a disciple of Pestalozzi, author of school textbooks, member of learned societies. Invited in 1855 to observe the table-turning phenomena then fashionable in Paris, he judged that behind the parlour effects lay something worth methodical study, and he proceeded like the educator he was, drafting ordered questions on God, the universe, the spirits and human destiny, and putting them through mediums, chiefly young women writing in trance, while comparing answers across different mediums and circles for consistency.

The Spirits' Book presents the harvest. Its four parts move from first causes, God, creation, the vital principle, through the spirit world, the nature and origin of spirits, reincarnation, the return to the body, and the occupations of the spirit life, to moral laws, worship, labour, justice, love of neighbour, and finally to hopes and consolations, the future life and the nature of suffering. The doctrine that emerges is optimistic and progressive: no eternal damnation, but education of the spirit across as many lives as improvement requires; inequalities of birth explained as differences of a soul's age and past choices; charity, in the formula the movement made its motto, as the condition of salvation. Kardec signed the work with a Gallic pen name, taken, he said, from a prior incarnation, to separate the codifier's task from the schoolmaster's reputation.

The first edition of April 1857 was recast in 1860 into the definitive arrangement of 1,019 questions, and around it Kardec built the rest of the codification: The Mediums' Book on practice, The Gospel According to Spiritism on ethics, Heaven and Hell on justice after death, and Genesis on miracles and creation, together with the Revue Spirite he edited until his death in 1869. He insisted the result was neither a religion of his founding nor a science of his invention but a doctrine dictated by the spirits and organised by method, and the anonymity of its true authorship is part of its self-understanding, the title page crediting the spirits themselves. The book's fortunes were contested from the start: church condemnation placed Spiritist works on the Index, and in 1861 a bishop in Barcelona had a consignment of Kardec's books publicly burned, an event the movement remembers as the auto-da-fe of Barcelona. Its deepest reception came across the Atlantic.

In Brazil, where Spiritism arrived within a decade, the doctrine joined with a culture already dense with mediumship, and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation, founded in 1884, made Kardec's five books its canon; today Brazil counts millions of declared Spiritists and many more sympathisers, with The Spirits' Book in continuous print, studied chapter by chapter in weekly centre meetings, and its teachings of charity expressed in the movement's vast network of hospitals, schools and social works.