Allan Kardec

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In April 1857 a Paris publisher named Dentu issued a quarto bound in plain wrappers, its title page bearing a name no Parisian directory could place: Le Livre des Esprits, “collected and set in order by Allan Kardec.” The man behind the name was fifty-two years old, well known in the city’s schoolrooms, and called something else entirely. Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail had spent three decades writing grammars and arithmetic primers and translating German textbooks; the pseudonym on the new book was, by his own account, the name he had carried in an earlier life as a Druid in ancient Gaul. The pedagogue had become a codifier of the dead, and he had taken a Celtic name to do it.

Rivail the schoolmaster

The first life is the better documented. Rivail was born in Lyon on 3 October 1804 into a family of magistrates and jurists, and was sent young into Switzerland to be schooled at the institute of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi at Yverdon. Pestalozzi’s method — learning through observation and the child’s own activity rather than rote and the rod — was the great reforming pedagogy of the age, and Rivail absorbed it as a disciple rather than a tourist; he became, in the standard accounts, a colleague of the master and a propagandist for the system in France and Germany. He settled in Paris, opened and ran schools, lectured for free on chemistry, physics, anatomy, and astronomy, and produced a steady shelf of practical books: a plan for improving public instruction, a French grammar, a course of arithmetic, manuals for the calculation and the examination of pupils. He held memberships in several Parisian learned societies. None of it was the work of a mystic. It was the career of a methodical, secular, improving man of the textbook — and the method is the thread that runs unbroken from the primers into the séance.

That career met the spirit-craze almost by accident. By the mid-1850s the “talking tables” had crossed from America into the salons of Europe: companies of people would lay hands on a small table and wait for it to tip, rock, and rap out answers to questions, one knock for a letter of the alphabet, the rappings credited to spirits of the dead. The wave had a precise origin in the Hydesville rappings of 1848 and the Fox sisters, and it spread through a Europe already steeped in mesmerism and the somnambulist trance. In May 1855 a magnetizer named Fortier introduced Rivail to the phenomenon, and he watched tables jump and run. His response was not wonder but the reflex of the examiner. If something was speaking, it could be questioned; and if it could be questioned, it could be cross-examined, collated, and checked.

Allan Kardec, engraving after a painting by A. Gilbert, published in 1869, the year of his death. — Charles-Jules Robert, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The method, and the name

What Rivail did with the talking tables was treat them as a body of evidence requiring an editor. Working through several mediums — chiefly the young somnambulist Céline Bequet, who under the name Céline Japhet delivered communications attributed to the spirits of Mesmer and of the homeopath Hahnemann, and through the Baudin sisters — he put ordered lists of questions to the spirits and wrote down the answers. The discipline he imposed was comparative. He did not credit a single medium or a single message; he posed the same questions through unconnected channels and took agreement across them as the criterion of fact. Where mediums who could not have colluded returned the same doctrine, the doctrine was, in his reasoning, established — a fact obtained rather than a fancy invented. This was the schoolmaster’s instinct for cross-checking turned upon the invisible, and it is the procedural core of what he came to call Spiritisme, a word he coined for the occasion to mark his system — Spiritism — off from the looser spiritualisme already in the air.

The pseudonym belonged to the same logic of separation. By the tradition of the movement, the name Allan Kardec was given to Rivail through a medium by a spirit — in some accounts the spirit Zefir — who told him that he had borne it long before, as a Druid living in Gaul. Whatever weight one gives the revelation, the name did public work. It walled off the codifier of the spirits from Professor Rivail of the arithmetic primers, lending the new doctrine an antique and Celtic lineage while sparing the schoolmaster’s professional reputation. He signed the doctrinal books “Allan Kardec” and kept “Rivail” for the schoolroom to the end.

The codification

What he built on the séance was not a séance but a canon. Across eleven years Kardec issued five books in a fixed order and a journal to bind them, and he was careful to call the whole a codification — the word implies a body of law, set down and arranged, not a record of marvels. Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits’ Book) came first, on 18 April 1857, a catechism of some five hundred questions and the spirits’ answers; Kardec revised and enlarged it for the canonical 1860 edition, where the questions swell past a thousand, so that the two versions stand at a textual distance that still occupies his editors. Le Livre des Médiums (The Mediums’ Book) followed in 1861, a manual sorting the kinds of mediumship and warning against the domination of a medium by lower spirits. L’Évangile selon le spiritisme (The Gospel According to Spiritism) appeared in 1864, rereading the canonical Gospels through the doctrine; Le Ciel et l’Enfer (Heaven and Hell) in 1865, on divine justice; and La Genèse (Genesis) in 1868, on creation and miracles. Underneath ran the Revue Spirite, the monthly review Kardec founded in January 1858 and edited until his death — the working organ where communications were published, doctrine argued, and the movement’s identity kept up month by month.

The teaching the codification fixed rests on a small set of load-bearing claims. There is one supreme intelligence, God; a universe of two correlated principles, spiritual and material, joined by a fluidic intermediary called the périsprit, a semi-material envelope that clothes the incarnate spirit and survives the body — the séance-room heir of the mesmerists’ magnetic fluid. The soul, or spirit, is immortal. And the engine that drives the whole system is reincarnation — the plurality of existences. A single spirit lives many lives, and the inequalities and sufferings of any one of them are the lawful working-out of conduct in the lives before. The mechanism is a moral cause and effect close in spirit to karma though reached independently and dressed in Christian rather than Indic terms: earthly hardship is read as the expiation of past faults or as a trial freely chosen for the sake of advancement, and spirits climb a graded hierarchy from the imperfect toward the pure by intellectual cultivation, moral effort, and charity above all.

Reincarnation does not stand alone. Kardec set it inside a cosmos of inhabited worlds — the plurality of worlds — in which Earth is one station among many, a world of trial and expiation low on the scale, with more advanced and more wretched worlds strung out across the universe, each suited to the moral degree of the spirits who incarnate there. The long journey of any spirit runs not through one life but through many lives on many worlds. Communication with the dead, in this frame, is neither a fortune-teller’s trick nor a forbidden traffic but an instrument of proof and a school of law: the spirits return to demonstrate that the soul endures and to teach the rule by which it advances. Kardec read Jesus as the most evolved spirit known to humanity and the moral exemplar, and he positioned his doctrine — in the texts themselves, not as a later gloss — as a third revelation in a single sequence, Mosaic, Christian, Spiritist, the rational and evidence-tested completion of religious history.

The break from Spiritualism

This is the point on which Kardec parted from the Anglo-American current that shared his origin. Both Spiritualism and Spiritism grew from the Hydesville rappings and the magnetist culture of the 1840s, and the two remain genuine siblings; but on reincarnation they split. The mainstream of British and American Spiritualists, following the visionary Andrew Jackson Davis, held to a single life followed by ascent through spheres, and largely rejected rebirth; Kardec made the plurality of existences the hinge of his entire system. The most important attempt to press the Kardecist view on Anglophone audiences fell to Anna Blackwell, the Bristol-born translator long resident in Paris, whose 1875 The Spirits’ Book and 1876 The Mediums’ Book became the standard English Kardec. Blackwell argued the case for reincarnation among British Spiritualists years before Helena Blavatsky’s rise made rebirth fashionable in esoteric London, and with limited success in her lifetime. Second-order differences followed from the first. Kardec trusted the intelligent, writing mediumship that yields doctrine over the physical phenomena — apports and materializations — on which much Anglo-American practice fixed; he wanted, always, a message that could be transcribed and collated rather than a marvel that could only be witnessed.

Theosophy, arriving later, also taught reincarnation, and the resemblance to Kardec is easy to overstate. Blavatsky folded rebirth into an Indic cosmology of karma and rounds and an esoteric hierarchy of masters; Kardec kept his rebirth Christian, moral, and conversational, arrived at by questioning ordinary spirits through ordinary mediums rather than by initiation into a secret lineage. The older suspicion that consulting the dead is the work of necromancy and a species of divination shadowed the movement from the start; Kardec recast the traffic as a moral science rather than an oracle of fortunes, but the Church was unpersuaded, and his books were among the three hundred Spiritist volumes publicly burned at Barcelona in October 1861 on a bishop’s order.

A doctrine looking for a home

Kardec died in Paris on 31 March 1869, struck down by an aneurysm at his desk, and was buried at Père Lachaise beneath a low dolmen of rough stone — a Druid’s monument for the bearer of a Druid’s name — which became, and remains, one of the most visited and most heavily flowered graves in the cemetery. He left the copyright in his works to a joint-stock publishing society constituted around his widow, Amélie-Gabrielle Boudet, an arrangement that kept the texts in print and shaped French Spiritist publishing for decades. In France itself the movement crested with its founder and then slowly ebbed, absorbed into the wider occult ferment of the century’s end and overtaken in public attention by Theosophy and the psychical researchers.

The dolmen-shaped tomb of Allan Kardec at Père Lachaise, Paris, one of the cemetery’s most visited graves. — Pierre André Leclercq, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Its lasting territory proved to be the one place Kardec never saw. Spiritism reached Brazil through francophone elites in the 1860s and there became what it never quite managed at home: an organized, federated, mass religion. The decisive institutional moment came on 1 January 1884, with the founding of the Federação Espírita Brasileira in Rio de Janeiro, soon the dominant national body, its journal Reformador the country’s longest-running Spiritist periodical. The pivotal nineteenth-century Brazilian figure was the physician and abolitionist Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Cavalcanti, the “doctor of the poor,” who as president of the federation tilted it toward its religious and charitable pole and instituted the public, systematic study of The Spirits’ Book. The pattern he set is the distinguishing mark of Brazilian Kardecism: the centro espírita that joins doctrinal study to healing and to large-scale philanthropy — the orphanages, schools, and Spiritist hospitals in which physicians and psychiatrists hold a prominent place, with no close parallel in the French original.

The twentieth-century inflection belongs above all to Francisco Cândido “Chico” Xavier, a clerk from Pedro Leopoldo in Minas Gerais, who from his 1932 debut until his death in 2002 produced hundreds of books credited to discarnate authors — the best known Nosso Lar of 1944 — and assigned the royalties to the federation and to charity. By the close of the century an estimated fifty million Spiritist books were in circulation in Brazil, a large share attributed to Xavier and to Kardec himself. The anthropologist Bernardo Lewgoy reads Xavier as a great cultural mediator who refigured Kardec’s literate, bourgeois doctrine in a register continuous with popular Brazilian Catholicism, a refiguring in large measure responsible for the doctrine’s mass diffusion. There the current also met the African-diaspora religions of Brazil: Umbanda, taking shape in the 1920s and 1930s, fused the Kardecist organizational frame with an Afro-Brazilian ritual repertoire, and the boundary between “pure” Spiritism and the wider field of Brazilian spirit religion runs porous in practice however firmly the federations draw it. That broader continental field is the subject of Latin American esotericism; the Spanish-speaking espiritismos of Cuba and Puerto Rico carried Kardec’s text into a working-class register far more closely braided with African-diaspora ritual than the Brazilian middle-class form.

The reading and the contest

The scholarship on Kardecist Spiritism is concentrated in the anthropology and history of religions and is densest in Brazil, though the documentary outline of the founder’s own life — the Lyon birth, the Pestalozzian schooling, the 1855 turn to the tables — is well attested and uncontested. David J. Hess, in Spirits and Scientists (1991), reads Brazilian Spiritism as a middle-class intellectual movement constituted in an arena of Catholic, medical, parapsychological, and Afro-Brazilian interlocutors, against the older view of it as elite false consciousness; Lynn L. Sharp’s Secular Spirituality (2006) sets Kardec’s reincarnationism within the religious and political currents of nineteenth-century France, where rebirth offered a doctrine of progress acceptable to anticlericals who could not return to the Church. Around the founder’s own claim, two questions persist as scholarly contests rather than settled matters. The first is Spiritism’s standing as science: Kardec advanced his doctrine as inductive inquiry into a class of facts, and mainstream scientific reception has been hostile since his own day, while a specialized parapsychological literature continues to defend non-reductive readings and the cognitive sciences read the same phenomena through dissociation and the cultural scripting of trance. The second is the authorship of the mediumistic literature — whether the dictated books are the work of their named discarnate authors, of the mediums, or of a collective convention of attribution — a question Brazilian courts touched as early as a 1944 copyright dispute and that anthropology has reframed as a productive cultural system without ruling on its metaphysics. The doctrine answers both from inside its own frame; its critics answer from outside; and the schoolmaster’s old criterion, agreement across many independent witnesses, remains the ground on which the two parties cannot meet.

Rivail himself would have recognized the shape of the argument. He had spent his first career persuading children that knowledge is built by observation, comparison, and patient correction, and he carried that conviction unchanged into his second, applying it to a subject his teachers at Yverdon would never have countenanced. What he left was not a cult of personality but a library in a fixed order and a single governing law of return and progress — five books, a journal, a publishing society, and a sentence the movement adopted as its watchword: to be born, to die, to be reborn again, and to advance without ceasing. The séance vogue that occasioned it passed within a generation. The codification it produced crossed an ocean and became the faith of millions, the codifier’s borrowed Celtic name carved into a Paris dolmen that the living still bank with flowers.

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