Spiritism

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Spiritism is the doctrine codified in mid-nineteenth-century France by Allan Kardec, who held that the spirits of the dead survive, progress, and communicate with the living through mediums — and who arranged what they said into a system with a science, a philosophy, and a moral law at its three faces. It is often called Kardecism, after its founder, to mark it off from the broader Anglo-American spiritualism out of which it grew and from which it diverged on one decisive point: Spiritism teaches that the soul returns, life after life, climbing toward perfection. The single law that organizes the whole was set as a watchword the movement made its own — to be born, die, be reborn again, and progress without ceasing.

Rivail, and the turn to the table

“Allan Kardec” was the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (3 October 1804 – 31 March 1869), a French educator from Lyon trained in the Pestalozzian pedagogy at Yverdon in Switzerland. His first career was an ordinary and respectable one: textbook author and grammarian, translator of German educational works, member of several Parisian learned societies, a man of the schoolroom rather than the séance. He came late to the work that made his second name. In May 1855, at the height of a European craze for table-turning and spirit-rapping that had spread from the American movement begun with the Fox sisters at Hydesville in 1848, the magnetist Fortier introduced him to the phenomena then circulating in Parisian salons. Through the mediumship of Mlle Japhet (Céline Bequet) and the Baudin sisters, Rivail accumulated and sorted the question-and-answer transcripts that became his foundational corpus.

His method, as he described it, was not to summon wonders but to interrogate. He put ordered questions to the spirits through many independent mediums and collated their answers, taking consistency across separate channels as the criterion of truth: where unconnected mediums agreed, he counted the agreement as evidence of a fact obtained, not invented. This is the inheritance of mesmerism and somnambulist trance reworked into a research program — the magnetic culture of Puységur and the magnetizers turned toward the dead. The styling was deliberately that of a science. Kardec coined the very word spiritisme, a neologism, precisely to separate his doctrine from the looser spiritualisme already in the air, and he presented his project as an inquiry into a class of facts rather than the founding of a church.

The codification: five books and a journal

What Kardec himself called the codification comprises five books and a monthly review, published in Paris across eleven years. Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits’ Book) appeared first, on 18 April 1857, from the publisher E. Dentu; its 501 questions were substantially revised and expanded for the canonical 1860 Didier edition, which carried 1,019 — the textual instability between the two versions is itself a matter for the editors of Kardec. Le Livre des Médiums (The Mediums’ Book) followed in January 1861, a manual of the kinds and governance of mediumship. L’Évangile selon le spiritisme (The Gospel According to Spiritism) came in 1864, a rereading of the canonical Gospels; Le Ciel et l’Enfer (Heaven and Hell, on divine justice) in 1865; and La Genèse (Genesis, on creation, miracles, and prediction) in January 1868. Binding the five together was the Revue Spirite: Journal d’études psychologiques, founded by Kardec in January 1858 and edited by him until his death — the running organ in which doctrine was argued, communications published, and the movement’s identity month by month maintained.

Kardec was buried at Père Lachaise beneath a dolmen-shaped monument that remains a place of pilgrimage; he left the copyright in his works to a joint-stock publishing society constituted by his widow, Amélie-Gabrielle Boudet, an arrangement that shaped French Spiritist publishing for decades. The English of the first three volumes was carried into the Anglophone world by Anna Blackwell, the Bristol-born journalist and translator long resident in Paris, whose 1875 The Spirits’ Book and 1876 The Mediums’ Book became the standard English Kardec — and who took up, with limited success in Britain, the labor of pressing reincarnation upon resistant Anglo-American spiritualists.

The doctrine: plurality of existences, the perispirit, the third revelation

At the center stands one supreme intelligence, God, first cause of a universe composed of two correlated principles — the spiritual and the material — joined by a fluidic intermediary. That intermediary is the perispirit, a semi-material envelope that clothes the incarnate spirit, mediates its action on the body, and survives the body’s death as the spirit’s persisting vehicle. The perispirit is Spiritism’s version of the long Western lineage of subtle bodies: the magnetic fluid of the mesmerists given a moral and survivalist function.

The doctrine’s distinctive and load-bearing claim is the plurality of existences — reincarnation. Where the mainstream of spiritualists in Britain and America, following Andrew Jackson Davis, pictured a single life followed by ascent through spirit spheres, Kardec made repeated embodiment the engine of the whole system. Each soul lives many lives, across worlds of differing degrees of perfection, and the hardships of any one of them are the just working-out of conduct in those before. The mechanism is a law of moral cause and effect close in spirit to karma, though arrived at independently and clothed in Christian rather than Indic vocabulary: earthly suffering is read as the expiation of past faults or as a trial freely chosen for the sake of advancement. Spirits are graded in a hierarchy from the imperfect to the pure, and they rise by intellectual cultivation, moral effort, and above all charity — material, intellectual, and moral — under a law of work and a law of love.

Communication with the dead, in this frame, was less a marvel than evidence and instruction: proof that the soul endures, and a lesson in the law by which it advances. Kardec read Jesus as the most evolved spirit known to humanity and as the moral exemplar, and reread the Gospels through that lens while setting aside the orthodox doctrines of substitutionary atonement, the Trinity, and eternal damnation. He positioned the doctrine, in his own texts and not as a later gloss, as a third revelation in a single sequence — Mosaic, Christian, Spiritist — the rational, evidence-tested completion of religious history. The metaphor of a scientific religion is internal to the corpus. It set Spiritism at an angle to the Christianity of its surroundings and, later, made it legible to professional and medical men who wanted faith on what looked like empirical ground; it also placed it within the same nineteenth-century positivist moment that produced its sharpest critics, who found in Kardec hundreds of pages of assertion with scarcely a fact to anchor them.

Condemnation: the Barcelona burning

In Catholic France the teaching was met with suspicion and, in time, condemnation; communication with the dead carried, for the Church, the old odor of necromancy, and the rejection of hell and atonement made the doctrine doubly suspect. Across the border the hostility was sharper. On 9 October 1861, on the order of the bishop of Barcelona, some three hundred Spiritist books — Kardec’s foremost among them — were carried to the customs ground and publicly burned, an auto-da-fé of the printed word that Spiritists afterward remembered as a kind of consecration. Kardec himself, far from suppressed, reprinted accounts of the burning in the Revue Spirite and treated the persecution as confirmation that the doctrine touched something live. The movement’s quarrel with Rome over the survival and traffic of the dead belongs to the longer Christian argument over eschatology — the fate of the soul after death — into which Spiritism inserted a graduated, lawful, and endlessly repeatable afterlife in place of a single judgment.

Brazil: the largest home

Spiritism’s most lasting territory proved to be neither France nor Spain but Brazil, where it arrived in the 1860s through francophone elites and took root as something its homeland never quite produced: an organized, federated, mass religion. The decisive institutional moment came on 1 January 1884, with the founding of the Federação Espírita Brasileira (FEB) in Rio de Janeiro, under its first president, Marechal Ewerton Quadros. The FEB became the dominant national body and remains so, its journal Reformador the longest-running Spiritist periodical in the country.

The pivotal nineteenth-century Brazilian figure was Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Cavalcanti (1831–1900), physician, abolitionist, and politician, known popularly as the doctor of the poor. He came to formal adherence late, in 1886, but as FEB president — briefly from 1889, then decisively from 1895 until his death in 1900 — he tilted the federation toward its religious and evangelical pole over its parapsychological one, instituting the systematic public study of The Spirits’ Book and, in 1890, creating the charitable assistance service that became the prototype of the FEB’s vast philanthropic apparatus. The pattern he set is the distinguishing mark of Brazilian Kardecism: the centro espírita combining doctrinal study, healing, and large-scale charity — orphanages, schools, and the Spiritist hospital network in which physicians and psychiatrists hold a prominent place, a configuration with no close parallel in French Spiritism.

The twentieth-century inflection belongs above all to Francisco Cândido “Chico” Xavier (1910–2002), a clerk from Pedro Leopoldo in Minas Gerais, who from his 1932 debut — a volume of poems attributed to fifty-six deceased Brazilian and Portuguese poets — until his death produced hundreds of books credited to discarnate authors, the best known being Nosso Lar (1944) and the long Paulo e Estêvão. He assigned the royalties to the FEB and to charitable institutions; by the close of the century an estimated fifty million Spiritist books were in circulation in Brazil, with a large share attributed to Xavier and to Kardec. 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 hybrid that is in large measure responsible for the doctrine’s mass diffusion.

There the current also met the African-diaspora religions of Brazil. Umbanda, emerging in the 1920s and 1930s, combined the Kardecist organizational frame — mediums, sessions, reincarnation, moral progress, charity — with a ritual repertoire drawn from the Afro-Brazilian inheritance, and the boundary between “pure” Kardecist Spiritism and the wider field of Brazilian spirit religion is, in practice, porous, crossed freely by lay practitioners even where the federations insist on the separation. That broader regional field — Spiritism braided with Afro-diasporic religion, Theosophy, and folk practice across the continent and the Caribbean — is the subject of Latin American esotericism; the Spanish-speaking espiritismos of Cuba and Puerto Rico took Kardec’s text into a working-class register far more closely entangled with African-diaspora ritual than the Brazilian middle-class form.

Spiritism and its neighbors

Spiritism shares a common seed with Anglo-American spiritualism — the 1848 Hydesville rappings and the trans-Atlantic magnetist culture of the 1840s and 1850s — and the two are genuine siblings, not the same movement. Reincarnation is the dividing line: where Kardec made the plurality of existences his hinge, the Anglo-American mainstream rejected it and held to single-life ascent, a divergence the National Spiritualist Association would formally inscribe in the twentieth century. Second-order differences follow from the first. Kardec privileged psychographic and intelligent mediumship and was skeptical of the physical phenomena — apports, materializations — on which much British and American practice fixed; Brazilian Spiritism is more text-centered and tightly federated than the looser Anglophone fabric; and the Brazilian interweaving of doctrine with healing and philanthropy has no Anglo-American counterpart.

Other neighbors stand at measured distances. The visionary cartography of the afterlife that fed Davis, and through him the whole spiritualist current, descends from Swedenborgianism, the New Church built on Emanuel Swedenborg’s reports of heaven and hell — a precursor to the séance-room afterlife rather than a branch of it. Theosophy and its founder Helena Blavatsky also taught reincarnation, and Blackwell pressed Kardec’s version on British audiences years before Blavatsky’s rise; but Theosophy folded its rebirth into an Indic, karma-and-rounds cosmology and an esoteric lineage of masters, where Spiritism kept its rebirth Christian, moral, and conversational. To consult the dead for knowledge is the old work of necromancy and a species of divination; Spiritism recast that traffic as a school of moral law rather than an oracle of fortunes.

Research, texts, and contested questions

The primary corpus is unambiguously public domain and widely scanned. The canonical French texts — the 1857 and revised 1860 Le Livre des Esprits, the 1861 Le Livre des Médiums, and the remaining three codification volumes, with the complete Kardec-era run of the Revue Spirite (1858–1869) — are cataloged in the digital collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Anna Blackwell’s English translations of The Spirits’ Book (1875) and The Mediums’ Book (1876), the Anglophone anchor of the corpus, are held in open collections such as the Online Books Page, with W. J. Colville’s 1883 Genesis completing the public-domain English codification. A standing editorial caution attaches to all of it: Kardec’s positivist self-presentation, the textual divergence between the 1857 and 1860 editions, and Blackwell’s role as a partisan exponent rather than a neutral conduit.

The academic study of Kardecist Spiritism is concentrated in the anthropology and history of religions, and most densely in Brazil. David J. Hess, Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 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. Emerson Giumbelli’s O cuidado dos mortos (Arquivo Nacional, 1997) traces its legal and medical regulation from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, when Brazilian psychiatry was constituted partly through its engagement with — and partial suppression of — Spiritist healing. Bernardo Lewgoy’s O grande mediador: Chico Xavier e a cultura brasileira (Edusc, 2004) is the standard interpretive frame for the twentieth century. On the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Stephan Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists (Duke University Press, 2002) and Diana Espírito Santo’s Developing the Dead (University Press of Florida, 2015) read espiritismo not as a degraded mixing of pure Kardecism with African religion but as a constitutively modern Atlantic formation, co-produced with the very positivist science it is often opposed to.

Two questions recur as scholarly contests rather than settled matters. The first is Spiritism’s scientific claim. Kardec advanced his doctrine as inductive science, and mainstream scientific reception has been negative since the nineteenth century; a specialized parapsychological literature continues to defend non-reductive readings — for instance the case study by Alexandre Caroli Rocha and colleagues on the verifiable content of letters psychographed by Chico Xavier, published as Investigating the fit and accuracy of alleged mediumistic writing (EXPLORE, 2014) — while cognitive science and psychiatry read the same phenomena through dissociation and cultural-script theories of trance. The second is the status of mediumistic literature: whether Xavier’s corpus is best read as authored by Xavier, by collective Spiritist convention, or by the named discarnate writers is a question Brazilian courts touched as early as the 1944 Humberto de Campos copyright dispute and that anthropology has since reframed as a culturally productive system without ruling on its metaphysics. Both questions stay open among scholars; the doctrine itself answers them from within its own frame, and its critics answer them from without.

What the codification made

What Rivail assembled was not a séance but a canon. The séance vogue of the 1850s passed, as fashions do; what replaced the fashion was the architecture Kardec built on top of it — five books fixed in a defined order, a journal that ran for a decade under his hand, a copyright society to keep the texts in print, and a single governing law of return and progress. That architecture is what crossed the Atlantic and found, in Brazil, the institutions a doctrine needs to become a religion: a federation dated to the first day of 1884, a periodical that has never ceased publishing, a hospital and charity network staffed by physicians, and a library of dictated books counted in the tens of millions. The table-turning was the occasion; the codified doctrine was the result. A century and a half from the first edition, a Spiritist in Rio sits down not to a marvel but to a reading — the same five books, the same ordered questions, the same law of return that Rivail set as a watchword: to be born, die, be reborn again, and progress without ceasing.

→ Related: Necromancy · Theosophy · Eschatology · Divination · Spiritualism · Reincarnation · Karma · Mesmerism · Latin American Esotericism · Swedenborgianism · Positivism · Soul