The Spirits' Book

In the mid-nineteenth century, Paris was caught up in a fever that had arrived from the United States: parlor gatherings where people sat around a table, rested their hands on it, and the table seemed to knock or turn by itself, answering questions with agreed-upon raps. The fad had started a few years earlier, with reports of similar phenomena in a small American town, and it spread across Europe as family entertainment.

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, a respected French educator and translator of school textbooks, was invited by acquaintances to attend sessions of this kind. Instead of treating it as just a game, he decided to apply the same rigor of a teacher: organize questions by theme, carefully write down the answers, and compare what came out of different sessions and mediums.

To separate this new work from the teaching career he already had, he adopted the name Allan Kardec. Over years of gathering and organizing answers collected from mediums, since he himself did not have that gift, he published the result on April 18, 1857, a date that Spiritists still mark today as the official birth of the doctrine. For this work of gathering and systematizing the answers, Kardec became known among Spiritists as the codifier of Spiritism.

The book is organized into more than a thousand numbered questions, each followed by an answer that, according to Kardec, came from spirits through mediums, and often by a comment from the author himself developing the idea.

The work is divided into four parts: primary causes, about God and the origin of the universe; the spirit world, about what spirits are and how they communicate; moral laws, about how to live; and hopes and consolations, about death, grief, and what might come afterward.

This question-and-answer format, similar to a school lesson, is no accident: it comes straight from Kardec's experience as a teacher, used to organizing content into clear, sequential blocks.

The first part of the book deals with what it calls primary causes. For Spiritist doctrine, there is a supreme intelligence, creator of everything, eternal and unique, called God, with no required link to any particular church.

The central argument, repeated in several answers, is that the order and laws that govern the universe could not arise by chance, and therefore must come from an intelligence prior to everything. It is a line of reasoning similar to the one other philosophical and religious traditions also use, only adapted to the book's vocabulary.

It's worth noting that this is a thesis of the book, not a demonstrated fact. It is the starting point of the doctrine, accepted by those who follow Spiritism and questioned by those who don't, just as any discussion about the origin of the universe still divides opinion today.