The Great Allan Kardec: In Search of The Spirits

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, better known today under the pseudonym of ‘Allan Kardec, “was born in Lyon, France in 1804. His father, a distinguished lawyer and local judge, wanted to give the best education possible, so that at age 10 was sent to the Institute Yverdon in Switzerland, founded and led by JH Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the man who revolutionized European education.

Convinced that intuition is the source of all knowledge, Pestalozzi encouraged his disciples to develop as individuals, while they were subjected to a very extensive program that included 10 hours of lessons on all aspects of the arts and science. Those who, like Rivail, came from Catholic families also received religious instruction.

Rivail spent six years in this room Yverdon and profoundly influenced the course of his life. Soon decided to become a teacher, to disseminate the work of Pestalozzi in France, and opened his own school in Paris in 1826. By then he had already published the first of what would be a total of 22 textbooks on French grammar, mathematics and education reform. He also initiated a series of free courses on science, which lasted for 10 years.

Some Modest Beginnings

Forced to close his school in 1834 for economic reasons, Rivail had to work as an accountant to support his family, but continued to give free tutoring at home, and, in the early 1850’s, during which his career would suffer a radical change, was a famous educator, progressive and free thinking. Anna Blackwell, who translated some of his books into English, reminded him “more like a German to French.”

It was, he said, a man of great perseverance, but cold and cerebral, incredulous by nature and training, and a sharp and logical reasoning. His life was quiet and modest and hard working, no one saw in him the future founder of a new religious philosophy.

But in 1848, in the United States had occurred a few facts that would change the whole philosophy of Rivail and influence the millions of others. In the home of the Fox family in Hydesville, New York, moved the tables alone and mysterious tapping was heard, apparently coming from the “spirits” of the dead. This meant the rise of the Spiritualist movement, which was the rage in Paris and other European cities. After a short time, in the words of a journalist of the time, there was no table between Montmartre and the Champs Elysees had not been turned upside down.

Rivail, although it was interested in all subjects, was at first very skeptical. In one of his first books he had written: “If you have studied science, you have to laugh at the gullibility of the ignorant and superstitious is not possible to believe in ghosts,” and when, in 1854, a friend told him that the tables not just jumped, but they conveyed messages from the dead, Rivail replied: “I only believe it when I see it.”

Not appear that he was anxious to see him, because until the following year did not attend a meeting, where a demonstration of “writing in a basket”, a primitive form of automatic writing, in the hands of the attendees were placed into a basket, through which he was driving a pencil. “I could tell he recalled later,” that there was something serious behind this apparent triviality …, as the revelation of a new law, I decided to investigate thoroughly. “

He did not waste time, and soon found that while the messages received at the meetings were often frivolous, invariably took on a serious tone when they went to him personally. His friend, the playwright Victorien Sardou, asked to review some books of notes taken by the group that he had studied for five years spiritualistic phenomena. Rivail was impressed by “the wisdom and love emanating from serious communications,” and launched an intensive series of sessions with a psychic named Japhet, which proposed a series of questions to the spirits answered, which they did.

The following year, he published more than 500 questions, answers and personal comments under the title Le livre des esprits (The book of spirits), which reviewed and increased three years later. It was published under the name of Allan Kardec, a name taken from Rivail Breton descent, and apparently was chosen by the spirits themselves. Thus Rivail Kardec became, and when he died in 1869 had written or, as he preferred to say, was “compiled and ordered” five books and two monographs, insisting that the main content of his work did not come, but that of numerous spirits “advanced” that they communicated through different mediums.

His major works were: The Book of Spirits (1857 and 1860), The Book of mediums (1861), The Gospel According to Spiritism (1864), published in Spain in 1978 – Heaven and Hell (1865) and Genesis ( 1867). He also founded, edited and wrote much of the Revue Spirit, until his death in 1869.

Despite his unwavering faith in communication with the spirits of the dead, Kardec’s philosophy was not part of the current spiritualist but was, in his words, spiritualist. The difference was crucial for the followers of both philosophies, and led them in many different ways.

The Visible and the Invisible

The basic premise of spiritualism is that there are two worlds: the visible and invisible, which contain material beings and ‘disembodied’, respectively. The spirit is a substance of matter “quintessential” that is beyond our normal senses, which joins the physical body through an intermediate, semi-material, called “etheric body.”

At birth, took temporary shapes, materials, and when they are destroyed by physical death, the spirit remains, to reappear perhaps in another incarnation. Our purpose is to move towards perfection, and we reincarnate as often as necessary to achieve it. We are all the sum of what we are, what we have done or thought in previous lives, and the whole process, according to Kardec, is not miraculous or supernatural, but is the result of natural and immutable laws.

While spiritualism, as seen by Kardec, simply expressing a belief in something beyond the art, spiritualism was the “relationship of the material world with the spirits’ real entities that are always in touch with us. Kardec never intended it to be a new religion but a philosophy of evidence-based rational repeatedly recovering the original meaning of all religions.

Did not mean, as critics allege, to replace Christianity. “The moral of spiritualism is no different from that of Jesus,” he wrote, adding that, as the teaching of Jesus regained Moses, spiritualism was a recovery of basic Christian principles that had been abandoned by most of the established churches . “Why, he asked, is so little practice the moral teachings of Christ? And why do those who proclaim the sublimity of these are the first to break the first of its laws, that of universal love? “

Kardec’s books are the clearest and most comprehensive study of the invisible world written so far. It is interesting to compare with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Andrew Jackson Davies “the Poughkeepsie Seer,” whose principles of nature was published in 1847. Although the three deepened in the same field, is the only Kardec was not a medium or a mystic, but a collector of writings coming out of other hands. His own contribution to these books is limited to comments on the material received, and these are presented as a reasonable and intelligent man. As he said: “I studied the facts carefully and perseverance, the coordinators and their consequences deduced from them.”

Kardec was one of the first serious psychic investigators, and also found time to study paranormal phenomena of many kinds in France. Twenty years before the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, published detailed accounts in the Revue Spirit in the Book of mediums, several excellent cases often forgotten by historians. He wrote extensively on the medium Jean Hillaire, the healer Zouave Jacob, possession bulk of the city of Morzine and some examples of what is now called poltergeist activity. He corresponded with d.d. Home, the English psychic, whom he greatly admired, and witnessed many paranormal phenomena and came to see a table of 100 kg swinging at an angle of 45 degrees on one leg. But these phenomena interested him less than their implications.

Cause And Effect

Any intelligent effect, he argued, should have an intelligent cause, and there was ample evidence for the reality of communication with the “dead.” But this did not mean he had to accept everything they say or write. “There is no shortage writers in the invisible world, he said, but, as on Earth, a shortage of good.” Some spirits, said, “unless we know on Earth.” The researcher should be “critical and logical.”

Kardec died long before the golden age of French psychology and early psychiatry, where pioneers like Janet, Charcot and Bernheim provided a more clinical approach to study the hitherto unexplained abnormalities of human experience (many of which still remain a mystery.)

One can believe that, despite their honesty and intelligence, was simply deceived by clever fake mediums. But it seems unlikely, for two main reasons. First, the phenomena explained and the conclusions reached were essentially the same as those of other researchers, some of them great scientists such as Robert Hare in the United States and Alfred Russell Wallace and later Sir William Crookes in England who had to change their beliefs because of what they had witnessed.

Second, as Kardec himself insisted the important thing was what the messages said best of spirits, not the phenomenon itself. The message, in fact, not the medium was important. “They can laugh at the tables that move, but never laugh at philosophy, wisdom and love emanating from serious communications.”

As expected, Kardec was not appreciated by the Catholic Church, which included his work on the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1866, but still he often replied in detail to criticism. Once a priest thanked attacked him “politely and in a more or less correct French,” and when in 1861 burned a lot of his works in Barcelona, ​​said simply “can burn books, but no ideas.”

Practical Spiritualism

His books have continued to publish in several languages, and his ideas have had considerable influence in several countries, especially Brazil, where the spiritualist movement soon gained respectability, thanks mainly to support and statesman Dr. Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes. Today, statistics estimate that more than 20 million Brazilians practice spiritualism and, according to Kardec’s insistence on charity as its primary duty, have carried out some of social work in the world.

Brazil now has great hospitals that combine medical and spiritual, orphanages, schools for mediums and healers and public gathering places where it is free advice and care to anyone who requests it. In one of them, in downtown São Paulo, 200 volunteers serving each day mediums to 1000. It has sold several million copies of Kardec’s books and other inspired by them, and the portrait of Kardec has appeared three times in the Brazilian stamps.

This honor would probably upset the man who wrote in the “Conclusion” of The Book of Spirits:

What is special and distinctive work of modern spiritualism? To make a coherent whole of what until now has been scattered, to explain, in clear and precise, which until now has been obscured by the allegorical language: to remove the products of superstition and ignorance of human beliefs , leaving only what is real and true. This is your mission.

The facts of Spiritualism, he concluded, had been the final blow to materialism and “shown the inevitable results of evil and, consequently, the need for good” while in regard to the afterlife, and it was not “a vague imagination, a mere hope, but a fact. “