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 can communicate with the living through mediums. It is sometimes 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.

“Allan Kardec” was the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, a French educator who came to the séance table in the 1850s, at the height of the European craze for spirit-rapping and turning tables that had spread from the American movement begun with the Fox sisters in 1848. Rivail’s method, as he described it, was not to summon wonders but to interrogate: he put ordered questions to the spirits through mediums and collated their answers into a system. The result was The Spirits’ Book of 1857, followed by works on mediumship, on the Gospel read through Spiritist eyes, and on heaven and hell. Kardec presented the whole as a single thing with three faces — a science of the survival of the soul, a philosophy of its destiny, and a moral teaching drawn from both.

The doctrine’s distinctive claim is reincarnation. Where most spiritualists in Britain and America pictured a single life followed by ascent through spirit spheres, Kardec taught that each soul lives many embodied lives, and that the hardships of any one of them are the just working-out of conduct in those before. Communication with the dead, in this frame, was less a marvel than evidence: proof that the soul endures, and instruction in the law by which it advances. The ethic that follows is one of patient self-improvement and charity, summed up in a phrase the movement made its own — “to be born, die, be reborn again, and progress without ceasing.”

In Catholic France the teaching was met with suspicion and, in time, condemnation. Across the border the hostility was sharper still: in Barcelona in 1861, on order of the Church, hundreds of Spiritist books — Kardec’s among them — were publicly burned. Its largest and most lasting home proved to be Brazil, where Spiritism arrived in the later nineteenth century and took root as an organized religion now counting millions of adherents, with its own federations, charitable hospitals, and revered mediums — Francisco “Chico” Xavier the most famous among them, credited with hundreds of dictated books. There the current also met Afro-Brazilian traditions, and the boundary between Kardecist Spiritism and the wider field of Brazilian spirit religion is, in practice, porous.

Scholarship places Spiritism squarely within the nineteenth century’s effort to meet the crisis of religious belief on what looked like empirical ground — to answer doubt about the soul with something that could be tested at a table. Whether the communications were what they claimed has never been the historian’s question; that so many found in them a coherent account of why a life turns out as it does, and a reason to bear it, is the part that can be documented. The movement Kardec assembled from answers outlived the séance vogue that produced it.

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