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Liber XXXIII · Theosophy

Liber XXXIII · Theosophy · Chapter IX: Spiritualism

Allan Kardec and Spiritism: The Spirits' Book and Its Legacy

Allan Kardec and Spiritism: how The Spirits' Book of 1857 codified a doctrine of spirits, reincarnation and moral progress that flourished in Brazil.

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Allan Kardec (1804–1869) was the pen name of the French educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who in 1857 published The Spirits' Book (Le Livre des Esprits), the founding text of Spiritism. Compiled from answers that mediums attributed to spirits of the dead, it set out a rational, moralising doctrine in which souls progress through successive reincarnations. Spiritism faded in France after Kardec's death but became one of the most widespread religious movements in Brazil, where millions still read his books.

Hippolyte Rivail: From Schoolteacher to Codifier§

Rivail was born in Lyon on 3 October 1804 into a Catholic family of lawyers. As a boy he studied at Yverdon in Switzerland under Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the pioneer of child-centred education. Settling in Paris, he ran a school, gave free public courses and wrote textbooks on arithmetic and grammar. In 1832 he married Amélie Gabrielle Boudet, a teacher who supported his work.

Like many educated Parisians, Rivail was also interested in animal magnetism. When the craze for turning tables reached France from America in 1853, he was at first sceptical. In 1855, however, he began attending séances in Paris, notably at the home of the Baudin family, whose daughters acted as mediums by means of a small basket or planchette fitted with a pencil. Friends who had been collecting such communications for years handed him their notebooks, and Rivail set about putting questions to the spirits systematically and arranging the answers by subject. For the background to these practices, see our articles on mesmerism and animal magnetism and on automatic writing and spirit writing.

He chose to publish under the name Allan Kardec. According to Spiritist tradition, a spirit communication told him that he had borne this name in a former life as a Druid in ancient Gaul; whatever its origin, the pseudonym also separated his new work from his reputation as an author of school books.

The Spirits' Book of 1857 and the Codification§

Le Livre des Esprits appeared on 18 April 1857. It is laid out as a catechism: numbered questions put by Kardec, short answers attributed to the spirits, and Kardec's own commentary. The first edition contained 501 questions; the revised second edition of 1860, which became the standard text, runs to 1,019. It is divided into four books:

  1. First causes — God, the elements of the universe, creation and the vital principle.
  2. The spirit world — the nature of spirits, their incarnation, life between lives, and their influence on the living.
  3. Moral laws — divine or natural law, worship, work, reproduction, society, progress, equality, liberty and justice.
  4. Hopes and consolations — earthly happiness and suffering, and future joys and pains.

Kardec followed it with a series of works that Spiritists collectively call the Codification, or the Kardecian "Pentateuch": The Mediums' Book (1861), a practical treatise on mediumship and its pitfalls; The Gospel According to Spiritism (1864), a moral reading of the Gospels; Heaven and Hell (1865), on divine justice and the afterlife; and Genesis (1868), on miracles, prophecy and creation. In January 1858 he launched the monthly Revue Spirite, and in April of the same year he founded the Parisian Society for Spiritist Studies.

Kardec insisted on a method he called the universal control of the spirits' teaching: no single message was to be trusted, and only principles confirmed by many mediums in different places, independently, were to be accepted as doctrine. He coined the word spiritisme partly because the French spiritualisme already meant a philosophical position opposed to materialism.

The Teachings of Spiritism: Spirits, Reincarnation and Moral Progress§

Spiritism presents itself as at once a science of observation, a philosophy and a moral teaching with religious consequences. Its main tenets, as laid down in the Codification, are:

  • God is the supreme intelligence and first cause of all things, eternal, just and good.
  • Spirits are the intelligent beings of creation. They are created "simple and ignorant" and equal, and progress by their own effort.
  • Reincarnation is the means of that progress. A spirit lives many lives, on this earth and on other inhabited worlds, each life offering trials and the chance to repair past faults.
  • The perispirit is a semi-material envelope that links spirit to body and allows spirits to act on matter and to communicate through mediums.
  • Moral law and charity are the heart of the doctrine. Suffering is understood as the consequence of past actions and an opportunity for growth, not as arbitrary punishment, and there is no eternal hell. Kardec's motto was "Without charity there is no salvation."

Jesus is regarded as the highest moral model given to humanity, though not as God incarnate, and the Spiritist reading of the Gospels stresses ethics over dogma. The epitaph on Kardec's dolmen-shaped tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery sums up the core idea: "To be born, to die, to be reborn again and to progress unceasingly: such is the law." For the broader history of the belief in rebirth, see our guide to reincarnation and the afterlife.

Spiritism and Spiritualism compared§

Kardec's movement grew out of the same table-turning wave as the Spiritualism that began with the Fox sisters in 1848, and both believe that the dead communicate through mediums. The main difference is doctrinal: most Anglo-American Spiritualists of the period rejected reincarnation, describing instead a progression through higher spheres after death, whereas for Kardec it was essential. Spiritism was also centred on one author's books and valued written communications and moral instruction above spectacular physical phenomena. Anna Blackwell's English translation of The Spirits' Book appeared in 1875.

Opposition, Trials and Successors in France§

Spiritism provoked hostility from the Catholic Church, which condemned communication with the dead. In October 1861 several hundred Spiritist books sent to a bookseller in Barcelona were publicly burned on the bishop's orders, an event Spiritists remember as the "auto-da-fé of Barcelona".

Kardec died suddenly in Paris on 31 March 1869, apparently of a ruptured aneurysm. Leadership passed to Pierre-Gaëtan Leymarie, editor of the Revue Spirite, but the movement suffered a heavy blow in 1875 when Leymarie was convicted alongside the spirit photographer Édouard Buguet, who had confessed to faking his pictures. Later French leaders, such as the lecturer Léon Denis and Gabriel Delanne, kept Spiritism alive into the twentieth century, but in its homeland it was gradually overshadowed by psychical research and by the new occultism of Papus and his circle, discussed in our article on French occultism in the Belle Époque.

Spiritism in Brazil§

Brazil took up Kardec's books within a few years of publication. A Spiritist group was formed in Salvador da Bahia in the 1860s, and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1884. The physician and politician Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes (1831–1900), sometimes called "the Brazilian Kardec", gave the movement a strongly Christian, charitable character, and it appealed especially to an urban middle class seeking a faith that reconciled science and Christianity.

Brazilian Spiritism developed distinctive practices: the passe, a laying-on of hands to transmit beneficial spiritual "fluids"; water blessed or "fluidified" for the sick; "disobsession" sessions intended to free people from troubling spirits; and an extensive network of schools, orphanages and hospitals, including psychiatric hospitals run on Spiritist principles. Spiritist centres generally hold free public lectures and do not charge for healing.

The towering figure of the twentieth century was Francisco Cândido "Chico" Xavier (1910–2002), a medium from Minas Gerais credited with several hundred books produced by psychography, or automatic writing. The best known, Nosso Lar (1944), attributed to a spirit called André Luiz, describes a spirit city above Rio de Janeiro and was filmed in 2010. Xavier gave the proceeds of his books to charity and became a national celebrity.

In recent Brazilian censuses around two per cent of the population have declared themselves Spiritists, but sociologists note that many more attend Spiritist centres or share its beliefs while identifying as Catholic. Kardec's ideas also helped shape Umbanda, which combines Spiritist mediumship and the language of spiritual evolution with Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous elements.

Spiritism in the Caribbean, Latin America and Beyond§

Outside Brazil, Kardec's books circulated widely in the Spanish-speaking world. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, espiritismo took root among educated reformers in the late nineteenth century and then blended with popular healing. Forms such as Puerto Rican mesa blanca and the Cuban espiritismo de cordón mixed Kardecian séances with folk Catholicism and, in some settings, with the orisha traditions described in our article on Santería and the orishas. Spiritist groups also spread in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and the Philippines. Today the International Spiritist Council, founded in 1992, links national federations, and Brazilian emigration has carried Spiritist centres to Europe, North America and Japan.

Assessing Kardec's Legacy§

Historians such as Lynn Sharp and John Warne Monroe read Spiritism as a product of mid-nineteenth-century French culture: an attempt to give religion the authority of science, to answer the materialism of the age, and to offer a democratic, self-improving picture of the afterlife. Critics have pointed out that the "universal control" of messages was in practice exercised by Kardec, who selected and edited the communications, and scientific opinion holds that there is no reliable evidence that mediums communicate with the dead. Anthropologists such as David Hess have studied Brazilian Spiritism as a living tradition with its own intellectual culture and system of care. For believers, Kardec remains the codifier of a revelation given by the spirits.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Allan Kardec?§

Allan Kardec was the pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), a French teacher and author of school textbooks. From 1855 he studied communications obtained by mediums and arranged them into The Spirits' Book (1857) and later works, which together form the doctrine known as Spiritism.

What is the difference between Spiritism and Spiritualism?§

Both hold that the spirits of the dead can communicate through mediums. Spiritism, codified by Kardec in France, teaches reincarnation as the path of moral progress and is centred on his books, while nineteenth-century Anglo-American Spiritualism mostly described progress through spirit spheres without rebirth.

Kardec's books reached Brazil in the 1860s and appealed to an urban middle class seeking a faith compatible with science and Christianity. Strong leaders, an organised federation, extensive charitable work and the fame of the medium Chico Xavier helped Spiritism grow far beyond its numbers in France.

Is Spiritism a religion?§

Kardec described it as a science and philosophy with moral consequences rather than a church, and Spiritist centres have no clergy or sacraments. In practice many adherents treat it as their religion, and scholars usually classify it as a new religious movement of Christian inspiration.

Sources and further reading§