// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did Kardecist spiritism say to the ghost? "You're possessed with knowledge.

Kardecist spiritism, also known as Kardecism or Spiritism, is a religious and philosophical movement developed in France in the 1850s by the educator and writer Allan Kardec, the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. It arose from the mid-19th-century European interest in Spiritualism, séances, mesmerism, and other attempts to investigate alleged communication with the dead.^[2]^[3]

Spiritism teaches that human beings are immortal spirits who repeatedly incarnate in material bodies and gradually develop intellectually and morally. It also teaches that communication between incarnate and discarnate spirits is possible through mediums. Kardec presented these ideas as compatible with reason, observation, and Christian morality, and described Spiritism as having philosophical, moral, and experimental dimensions.^[4]^[5] Scholars generally treat it as a new religious movement or modern religious tradition, while also examining its historical claims to scientific status.^[6]^[7]

Kardec set out the principal doctrines of Spiritism in five books published between 1857 and 1868, beginning with The Spirits' Book. Although the movement originated in France, it became particularly influential in Brazil, where it developed a large institutional network and a character strongly associated with Christian ethics, mediumship, charitable work, and spiritual healing practices.^[8]^[9] Brazil subsequently became an important centre for the international diffusion of Kardecist Spiritism.^[10]

Terminology

Kardec used the French term spiritisme in The Spirits' Book in 1857 to distinguish his doctrine from the more general concepts of spiritualisme and spirituality.^[11] In Kardec's terminology, a person could be a spiritualist—that is, believe that reality was not exclusively material—without accepting communication with spirits or the other doctrines that he associated with Spiritism.

The distinction between Spiritism and Spiritualism varies by language and historical context. In much English-language scholarship, Spiritism refers specifically to the system associated with Kardec, whereas Spiritualism usually denotes the broader 19th-century movement that developed primarily in the United States and Britain around séances and communication with the dead.^[12] In Portuguese and Spanish, forms of the word espiritismo have also been applied more broadly to traditions involving spirits or mediumship.

The term Kardecism is therefore often used by scholars and in Brazilian public discourse to distinguish the tradition derived from Kardec's writings from other forms of mediumistic religion. Some adherents reject the term, maintaining that Spiritism already designates Kardec's doctrine and requires no qualifier.^[7]^[13]

History

Origins in France

Spiritism developed during a period of widespread European interest in mesmerism, table-turning, séances, and reports of apparently paranormal phenomena. The American Spiritualist movement associated with the Fox sisters attracted substantial attention in Europe after 1848. In France, table-turning became a fashionable practice in the early 1850s, occurring both as entertainment and as an activity that some participants regarded as experimental investigation.^[14]^[12]

Rivail, who had worked as an educator, became involved with groups investigating such phenomena in Paris. He later wrote under the name Allan Kardec. Rather than regarding individual séances as sufficient evidence, Kardec sought to compare messages attributed to spirits that were obtained through different mediums. He organized these materials into a doctrine combining reincarnation, moral progress, spirit communication, and a providential conception of the universe.^[5]

In 1857 Kardec published the first edition of Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits' Book). A substantially expanded edition appeared in 1860. He founded the periodical Revue Spirite in 1858 and was also involved in establishing the Société parisienne des études spirites (Parisian Society for Spiritist Studies). These institutions helped turn what had been a loose interest in séances into an organized intellectual and religious movement.^[5]

Kardec's ideas reflected several currents of 19th-century French culture. Historians have identified connections with mesmerism, contemporary debates about mind and matter, religious liberalism, and theories of individual and social progress. Reincarnation was particularly important in differentiating Kardec's system from much Anglo-American Spiritualism.^[15]^[2]

The Spiritist Codification

The principal books written by Kardec are conventionally known among Spiritists as the Spiritist Codification:

Year	Work	Main subject
1857	The Spirits' Book (Le Livre des Esprits)	General doctrine concerning God, spirits, reincarnation, moral law, and the afterlife
1861	The Mediums' Book (Le Livre des Médiums)	Mediumship, séances, and methods Kardec proposed for evaluating alleged spirit communications
1864	The Gospel According to Spiritism (L'Évangile selon le Spiritisme)	Interpretation of the ethical teachings of the canonical Gospels
1865	Heaven and Hell (Le Ciel et l'Enfer)	Divine justice, death, punishment, moral responsibility, and the afterlife
1868	The Genesis (La Genèse)	Cosmology, miracles, creation, and the relationship Kardec proposed between Spiritism and science

Kardec also published the introductory book What Is Spiritism? in 1859 and continued editing Revue Spirite until his death in 1869.^[5]

Development in Brazil

Kardec's books reached Brazil during the second half of the 19th century, initially circulating particularly among educated urban groups and French-speaking intellectual networks. Translations and periodicals soon made the doctrine available to a wider Portuguese-speaking readership.^[8]^[16]

Brazilian Spiritism developed differently from its French predecessor. Competing interpretations emphasized, to varying degrees, scientific investigation, philosophical speculation, religious devotion, healing, and social assistance. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a more explicitly religious and Christian interpretation had become highly influential.^[7]^[9]

The Brazilian Spiritist Federation (Federação Espírita Brasileira, FEB) was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1884 and became an important institution in the organization and standardization of Brazilian Spiritism. Its history was also shaped by disputes over religious freedom, medicine, and public order. The Brazilian Penal Code of 1890 criminalized some activities described as espiritismo, magic, or the fraudulent practice of healing. In practice, distinctions between supposedly legitimate and illegitimate forms of mediumistic religion were influenced by relations among Spiritist organizations, physicians, journalists, police authorities, and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions.^[17]

During the 20th century, the medium and author Chico Xavier became one of the most prominent figures in Brazilian Spiritism. Books attributed by Xavier to discarnate authors through psychography, together with his public reputation for charity, contributed to a popular form of Spiritism in which mediumship, Christian morality, and philanthropy were closely linked.^[9]

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Brazilian institutions and migrants also played a major role in spreading Spiritism internationally. This process sometimes involved the transmission abroad of practices and interpretations that had developed in Brazil rather than in Kardec's original French milieu.^[10]

Beliefs

Spiritism has no single creed enforced by a centralized religious authority, but organizations that identify with Kardec generally regard his principal books as the basic doctrinal reference.^[4] Its central teachings include the existence of God, the immortality and individuality of spirits, reincarnation, moral progress, free will, and the possibility of communication between spirits and living human beings.

God and spirits

Kardec described God as the supreme intelligence and primary cause of all things. Spirits, in his system, are individual intelligences created by God. They are neither divine nor eternally fixed in a particular moral state. Instead, they are understood to advance over time from ignorance toward greater intellectual and ethical perfection.^[4]

Spiritism distinguishes the spirit from the physical body and also posits a subtle intermediary known as the perispirit, through which the spirit is said to act upon matter. This concept drew partly on the vocabulary of 19th-century mesmerism and theories of invisible fluids.^[18]^[5]

Reincarnation and moral progress

Unlike most 19th-century Anglo-American Spiritualists, Kardec made reincarnation a central part of his system. Spirits are believed to undergo successive incarnations that provide opportunities for learning and moral development. Differences in human circumstances are consequently interpreted within a much longer process extending over multiple lives.^[3]^[4]

Spiritist teaching generally rejects eternal damnation. Moral consequences are instead understood as corrective and educational: spirits experience the consequences of their actions but remain capable of further progress. Individual responsibility, free will, and a moral law of cause and consequence are therefore central themes.^[4]

Mediumship

Spiritism holds that communication between living people and discarnate spirits can occur through mediumship. Forms described in Spiritist literature include speech, automatic writing or psychography, and other subjective or physical phenomena.

Kardec argued that purported communications should not be accepted solely because they were attributed to spirits. His books proposed comparing messages, examining their consistency, and judging them by their intellectual and moral content. Historians place this method within a broader 19th-century effort by some Spiritualists and occultists to describe supernatural claims using the language and practices of experimental science.^[5]

Christian ethics

Kardec understood Spiritism as compatible with what he regarded as the moral core of Christianity. Spiritist literature gives particular importance to charity, forgiveness, humility, and love of one's neighbour, and regards Jesus as the highest moral example for humanity.^[4]

Spiritist theology nevertheless differs substantially from Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant forms of Christianity. Its teachings on repeated reincarnation and progressive spiritual development, for example, differ from conventional Christian doctrines of a single earthly life, resurrection, and final judgment. In Brazil, however, the use of Christian language and imagery became an important feature of the movement's public identity.^[9]^[7]

Practice and organization

The usual local institution is the Spiritist centre, generally a voluntary association rather than a church with an ordained clergy. Brazilian centres commonly combine religious meetings, study of Spiritist literature, mediumistic activities, and charitable or social-assistance work. Practices differ among institutions.^[8]^[9]

Common activities in Brazilian Kardecist centres include lectures and study groups, prayer, mediumistic meetings, psychography, and the passe, in which practitioners make movements of the hands near a recipient and understand the practice in terms of spiritual or magnetic influence. Some centres also conduct meetings intended to assist spirits believed to be confused or harmful, a practice often called desobsessão ("disobsession").^[19]

Charitable work has had a prominent role in Brazilian Spiritist identity. Spiritist associations have established schools, children's homes, social-assistance organizations, clinics, and hospitals. Scholars have examined these activities both as expressions of Spiritist ethics and as an important means by which the movement obtained social legitimacy.^[20]^[17]

Spiritist institutions generally do not have a sacramental priesthood, and participation in mediumistic or religious activities is ordinarily performed by lay members. National federations and international associations exist, but there is no universally binding central authority over doctrine or practice.^[10]

Spiritism and science

From its beginnings, Spiritism made unusually strong claims about its relationship to science. Kardec characterized the investigation of mediumistic phenomena as observational and experimental and believed that systematic study could demonstrate the existence and activity of spirits.^[5] Historians place these claims in a 19th-century setting in which the boundaries among science, religion, psychology, mesmerism, and psychical research were still being negotiated.^[6]^[21]

Several phenomena important to early Spiritism later received explanations that did not require spirits. In 1853, for example, physicist Michael Faraday investigated table-turning and concluded that participants' unconscious muscular movements could account for the observed motion, an effect now associated with the ideomotor phenomenon.^[22]

Research on mediumship and related paranormal claims has continued in parapsychology and in a small number of medical and psychological research programmes. Such research has not established the existence of discarnate spirits as a generally accepted scientific finding. A 2015 review of quantitative studies of mediumship found heterogeneous results and noted the small amount of empirical research and the need for more rigorous methods.^[23] Parapsychology more generally remains a prominent case in philosophical discussions of the distinction between science and pseudoscience.^[24]

Consequently, descriptions of Spiritism as a "science" in encyclopedic contexts generally refer to Kardec's own classification of his project or to the movement's historical self-understanding, rather than to the present scientific acceptance of its claims.^[5]^[25]

Relations with other religious traditions

Spiritualism

Spiritism developed from the same transatlantic culture of séances and spirit communication as 19th-century Spiritualism, but Kardec constructed a more systematic doctrine around reincarnation, moral progression, and a hierarchical universe of spirits. Reincarnation in particular became an important distinction between Kardecist teaching and many contemporary British and American Spiritualist groups.^[3]^[2]

Afro-Brazilian religions

In Brazil, Spiritism developed in continuous interaction with other mediumistic traditions. Terms such as espiritismo were historically applied not only to Kardecist groups but also, sometimes pejoratively, to practices associated with African and Afro-Brazilian religions. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, officials and commentators sometimes distinguished supposedly respectable or "high" Spiritism from "low Spiritism", a classification strongly entangled with questions of race, class, medicine, and policing.^[17]

Umbanda, which emerged in the early 20th century, incorporated elements whose practitioners and scholars have related to Kardecist ideas alongside African, Indigenous, Catholic, and other religious influences. Despite areas of interaction, Umbanda and Kardecist Spiritism are distinct religious traditions.^[26]

Demographics

Reliable worldwide estimates of the number of Spiritists are difficult to produce because few national censuses record Spiritism as a separate category, while estimates by Spiritist organizations may include sympathizers as well as formal adherents.^[10] The movement has communities in Latin America, Europe, North America, and elsewhere, but Brazil has by far its most prominent institutional and cultural presence.

According to Brazil's 2022 census, whose religion results were released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2025, approximately 3.18 million Brazilians aged ten or older identified as Spiritists, representing about 1.8% of the population in that age group.^[27]

Brazilian Spiritism has historically been concentrated disproportionately among urban and relatively highly educated sections of the population, although its ideas have circulated more widely through books, radio, television, film, charitable institutions, and popular religious culture.^[8]^[9]

Cultural influence in Brazil

Spiritist ideas have had an influence in Brazilian publishing and popular culture greater than would be suggested by census affiliation alone. Chico Xavier became one of Brazil's best-known religious authors, while novels attributed to spirits through psychography have supplied material for films and television productions.^[9]

Among the best-known examples is Nosso Lar, published under Xavier's name in 1944 and attributed by him to the spirit "André Luiz". Its description of a structured spiritual colony became influential in Brazilian popular understandings of the Spiritist afterlife and was adapted as the 2010 film Nosso Lar. Such works belong to later Brazilian Spiritist culture and are not part of Kardec's original 19th-century codification.

References

↑ Eliane Garcia Rezende (2011). "Education: knowledge and flavor in the relationship between subjects". Pontoevírgula: 283.
1 2 3 Monroe 2008, pp. 95–149.
1 2 3 Sharp 2006, pp. 1–33.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Negrão 1987, pp. 259–261.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Monroe 2008, pp. 105–149.
1 2 Sharp 2006, pp. 33–59.
1 2 3 4 Arribas 2008.
1 2 3 4 Hess 1991, pp. 1–21.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Stoll 2002, pp. 361–402.
1 2 3 4 Lewgoy 2008, pp. 84–104.
↑ Monroe 2008, p. 105.
1 2 Monroe 2008, pp. 95–105.
↑ Lewgoy 2008, pp. 84–88.
↑ Monroe 1999, pp. 219–246.
↑ Sharp 2006, pp. 1–59.
↑ Lewgoy 2008, pp. 84–91.
1 2 3 Giumbelli 2003, pp. 247–281.
↑ Hess 1991, pp. 65–87.
↑ Hess 1991, pp. 65–110.
↑ Hess 1991, pp. 113–150.
↑ Monroe 2008, pp. 1–18.
↑ Faraday, Michael (1853). "Experimental Investigation of Table-Moving". Journal of the Franklin Institute. 56 (5): 328–333. doi:10.1016/S0016-0032(38)92173-8.
↑ Bastos Jr., Moreira-Almeida & Pimentel 2015, pp. 129–138.
↑ Hansson, Sven Ove (28 July 2025). "Science and Pseudo-Science". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
↑ Hess 1991, pp. 159–190.
↑ Hess 1991, pp. 13–21.
↑ Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (2025). Censo Demográfico 2022: Religiões: resultados preliminares da amostra (Report). Rio de Janeiro: IBGE.

Sources

Arribas, Célia da Graça (2008). Afinal, espiritismo é religião? A doutrina espírita na formação da diversidade religiosa brasileira (Master's thesis). University of São Paulo. doi:10.11606/D.8.2008.tde-05012009-171347.

Bastos Jr., Marco Aurélio Vinhosa; Moreira-Almeida, Alexander; Pimentel, Leda (2015). "Mediumship: review of quantitative studies published in the 21st century". Archives of Clinical Psychiatry (São Paulo). 42 (5): 129–138. doi:10.1590/0101-60830000000063.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Giumbelli, Emerson (2003). "O "baixo espiritismo" e a história dos cultos mediúnicos". Horizontes Antropológicos. 9 (19): 247–281. doi:10.1590/S0104-71832003000100011.

Hess, David J. (1991). Spirits and Scientists: Ideology, Spiritism, and Brazilian Culture. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Lewgoy, Bernardo (2008). "A transnacionalização do espiritismo kardecista brasileiro: uma discussão inicial". Religião & Sociedade. 28 (1): 84–104. doi:10.1590/S0100-85872008000100005.

Monroe, John Warne (1999). "Making the Seance "Serious": "Tables Tournantes" and Second Empire Bourgeois Culture, 1853–1861". History of Religions. 38 (3): 219–246. doi:10.1086/463542.

Monroe, John Warne (2008). Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4562-0.

Negrão, Lísias Nogueira (1987). "Kardecism". In Eliade, Mircea (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan. pp. 259–261.

Sharp, Lynn L. (2006). Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-1338-7.

Stoll, Sandra Jacqueline (2002). "Religião, ciência ou auto-ajuda? trajetos do Espiritismo no Brasil". Revista de Antropologia. 45 (2): 361–402. doi:10.1590/S0034-77012002000200003.