Spiritism or Kardecism is a philosophy and religion of spirit communication. After being inspired by the Spiritualist movement, the French Allan Kardec developed the loose movement of seances, mediums and communicating with the dead into something people still practice today.
There is a debate about whether or not we should call the spiritism movement a religion or not, but it certainly was a movement together with Spiritualism that impacted the western world and how they view death, the afterlife and ghosts and the paranormal.
The Spiritism Movement was started by the French author and teacher Allan Kardec and is also called Kardecist spiritism or Kardecism. A simple way of explaining the difference between Spiritualism that grew in popularity in North America was that Spiritism was mainly in Europe and although much alike was much more organized and had a stricter doctrine. Today, the word spiritism is used for most of the religious and doctrines believing that the spirits go on after the body dies.
He believed in physical reality and that alongside that, there was another spirit world. This world, he believed, could be accessed through mediums and that spirits exist separately from human bodies.
Most of the practice of Spiritism is around the mediumship and communicating with the dead. It can manifest in automatic writing or drawing among other psychographic ways.
Read More: Spiritualism and the Occult: Automatic Writing and When Ghosts Slide Into Your DMs
The spiritists also believe in reincarnation and that the spirit is constantly trying to achieve intellectual and moral perfection.
The Spiritism Movement as we know it today started in Europe in the 1850s, but soon spread, becoming very popular in the USA, Brazil and in the French colonies.
Allan Kardec and the Founding of Spiritism
Allan Kardec’s real name was Léon-Dénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail and was really the one that organized the loose movement in Europe to a path with a certain doctrine and way of thinking. He was born in 1804 in Lyon in France and studied in Switzerland. When coming back to Paris he purchased a school for boys in 1928 and was a teacher.
Read More: Check out the story of the haunted Paris’ Haunted Père Lachaise Cemetery, were Kardec is buried.
He was in his 50s when he became interested in séances and started researching them and compiling the consistent things the mediums talked about into a philosophy he called Spiritism. The name Allan Kardec was a name picked out by a spirit called Truth.
Table Tipping and Communicating with the Dead
A very popular pastime in Europe at the time was animal magnetism, mesmerising and what would eventually be called Table Tipping. This was equally seen as pure fun as well as a séance. Although a skeptic at first, Kardec became interested in the phenomenon and started to explore it as well.
Kardec studied the phenomenon and concluded in The Book on Mediums that some communications were caused by an outside intelligence, as the message contained information that was not known to the group.
Read More: Table Turning: When Spirits Spill the Tea Through Furniture
Skeptics and those exposing the truth behind the table turning chucks it up to the ideomotor effect, not ghosts trying to communicate through furniture. The movement experienced in the seances was due to involuntary and unconscious muscular reactions. This scientific explanation was published in the Medical Times and Gazette in 1853, but that didn’t stop its popularity or people believing in it, it only made the hoaxes more elaborate.
Spiritualism and the Fox Sisters
In addition to European dabbling in the occult already, Kardec became increasingly more interested in Spiritualism from the USA. It was a popular movement that had started with communication with the dead’s spirits. This movement is often connected with the popularity of Margaret and Catherine Fox who kicked off the Spiritualism movement in the USA with their table rapping.
Since childhood they had been famous ever since they communicated with spirits in 1848 with the spirit haunting their home in New York. They later came to Europe to hold public séances.
Read More: The Spiritualist Movement: The Fox Sisters Who Started a Ghostly Revolution as a Prank
Allan Kardec was definitely directly inspired by this, but narrowed the belief system down to one doctrine. For example, Spiritualists do not necessarily believe in reincarnation but this part was important for the Spiritists. He worked to distance himself from fortune-tellers, mediums and magicians from the movement of the time, many of those often ending in trouble when discovered as a fraud.
The Spiritist Codification
Kardec’s first of five foundational Spiritist texts was 1857’s The Spirits’ Book. More than a book on ghosts, it’s a collection of philosophical questions Kardec asked mediums around in Europe. This was also an effort to bridge both religion, science and philosophy to one thing that he himself called a “Positive Faith”. More books followed and collectively, they are called the Spiritist Codification.
Spiritists believe all humans are spirits, and the body is only a temporary vessel. After you die, the spirit crosses into the spirit world where it resided around the same time it was alive last before being reincarnated.
It also adheres a lot to the Christian belief in one god as well as the rules science dictates. When Kardec developed his idea, it was definitely through the lens of a christian. Spiritists often cite biblical events to make their claim of how spirits exist, like how Moses consulted the dead, how Saul heard the spirit of Samuel.
After Kardec died in 1869, medium and writer Léon Denis who had met Kardec many times, continued with his legacy and furthered its popularity.
Backlash Against the Movement of Spiritism
Although the Spiritism Movement became popular and came from a place of Christianity, it wasn’t without controversy. Critics saw the movement as evil and devil worship. Many of the mediums were also accused of being frauds and charlatans, profiting on people’s grief and fear of the afterworld.
Read More: Spiritualism and the Occult: The History of Ectoplasm and Gooey Ghosts
In Europe, this type of mediating and communication with spirits have been prosecuted since the middle ages, mostly because it was seen as blasphemous behavior. British witchcraft laws used against mediums were not repealed until the 1950s when the last woman was convicted for witchcraft.
Also scientists attacked the movement, calling it madness, hysteria and fanciful without root in science and the real world. The Roman church condemned it, Brazil even banned it. Counter-movement to expose mediums, like Harry Houdini did for years, started as well.
What Happened to Spiritism?
With so much hype and popularity that only seemed to be growing at the turn of the century, it begs the question of why Spiritism isn’t a bigger movement today as before. The answer to that might be as boring as timing.
Two big factors happened at the time that fought against the Spiritism Movement of Spiritualism. One of them was the discipline of psychology that started to take hold of people, especially modern and well read people in Europe. The very same group that a couple of decades ago would probably have turned to Spiritism or some sort of Spiritualism.
Sigmund Freud, who denied all existence of ghosts, was a leading voice going forward, and although some of the earlier psychologists played around with the idea of a spirit world, their voices weren’t strong enough. Although his official stance on ghosts have been to not believe in them, he had some interesting musings and discussions of the concept of ghosts and the supernatural.
The other thing happening in Europe at the time was World War 1 and had a big impact on culture. The war and fear of war stopped a lot of new ideas and thinking that flourished in more peaceful times. Who knows how the movement would have progressed if not for the European wars that century?
Were are the Spiritists Today?
But did Spiritism completely die? Through French colonialism the texts and ideas spread to the colonies in the 19th century to the mid-20th century, especially in Vietnam. Here, the movement and idea was crucial for the Cao Dai religion that started in Vietnam in 1926. The age-old traditions was a mix of Asian divination and mediumship from Vietnamese folk religion with ancestor worship, Confucianism, occult practices from Taoism, theories of karma and rebirth from Buddhism.
French Spiritists Mediums travelled to Saigon, which today is Ho Chi Minh City and interacted with the Cao Dai mediums. They then began to mix with the new traditions of European Spiritism with the old. Some of them even claimed they had been visited by the spirit of Kardec.
In addition to the French Colonies, the Spiritism Movement spread to Latin America as well, where it had a big impact on Brazil, even though they banned it in 1890. Today it is the third most popular religion in Brazil.
The mediums also channel spirits for healing purposes and in Brazil they had around 13000 Spiritists centers that are a sort of physical or mental aid facility in 2022. This can be various ways, often a “laying of hands” much like they do with Reiki to heal energy.
Although the Spiritism Movement didn’t have the hold of people as it used to, there are definitely still practitioners today throughout the world. Today, the International Spiritist Council claim that they have over 13 million followers in 36 countries.
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References:
Séance | Spiritualism, Mediumship & Clairvoyance | Britannica
