Allan Kardec

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Spirits' Book (1857), The Mediums' Book (1861) and Heaven and Hell (1865).

A science and a philosophy

Spiritism, as Kardec defines it, is at once a science of observation and a philosophical doctrine. As a practical science it consists in the relations that can be set up with spirits; as a philosophy it takes in all the moral consequences that follow from those relations. Its subject is the nature, origin and destiny of spirits and their relations with the bodily world. He made new words for it on purpose. Spiritualism, in the French of his day, meant any belief in a soul as against the materialists, so he called the doctrine founded on communication with spirits spiritisme, and those who hold it spirites.

Its method is ordered questioning. A question is put, the answer is written down as it comes, and the answers are compared. A teaching belongs to the doctrine only when many spirits give it in agreement, through many mediums who do not know one another, in many places, and when it stands up to reason; he calls this the universal control of the teaching of the spirits. A single message proves nothing, whatever great name it signs.

God, spirit and matter

The Spirits' Book opens with its first question: what is God? God is the supreme intelligence, the first cause of all things. Kardec reasons from the axiom that there is no effect without a cause: the order of the universe is an intelligent effect, so its cause must be an intelligence above it. God is eternal, unchanging, immaterial, one, all-powerful and sovereignly just and good. What God is in essence a human being cannot yet grasp, the spirits answer, because the sense for it is lacking.

Beneath God the universe holds two general elements, spirit and matter. Between them is a universal fluid, a matter so fine that spirit can act on it, and through it on the grosser matter of bodies. The forces of nature come from its changes, and from it each spirit draws its envelope.

The three parts of a person

The spirits are the intelligent beings of creation, and they people the universe beyond the visible world. Each begins simple and ignorant and rises by its own free will, some quickly and some slowly, none favoured by God above another. A human being is such a spirit in a body, and has three parts: the body; the soul, which is the spirit incarnate; and the perispirit, a fine envelope drawn from the universal fluid, which binds the two together in life and which the spirit keeps after death as its body in the world of spirits.

Incarnation has a double purpose. It is the road to perfection, since only through the trials of bodily life does a spirit learn; for some it is an expiation and for others a mission. It also gives the spirit its share in the work of creation, because through a body it works on matter and on the world.

Many lives on many worlds

Rebirth, for Kardec, is the only teaching that reconciles the inequality of human lots with the justice of God. One child is born gifted and another slow, one rich and one in want, one for a long life and one for a short one; if each soul had this life alone, God would be unjust. If each life follows earlier ones and prepares later ones, every lot is a lesson, a trial or a reparation fitted to the spirit that bears it, and inborn gifts and leanings are what the spirit has brought with it.

The worlds of space are inhabited, and not all alike. The Gospel According to Spiritism ranks them under the saying of Jesus that in his Father's house are many mansions: primitive worlds, where spirits take their first bodies; worlds of trial and expiation, where evil still outweighs good; worlds of regeneration, where souls who have amends still to make find rest; happy worlds, where good outweighs evil; and celestial or divine worlds, the home of purified spirits. The earth is a world of trial and expiation, and it rises toward a world of regeneration as the spirits who live on it improve.

The ten moral laws

The law of God, the natural law, is written in the conscience, and Jesus summed it up in the rule of doing to others as one would be done by. The Spirits' Book divides it into ten laws: of worship, of labour, of reproduction, of preservation, of destruction, of society, of progress, of equality, of liberty, and last of justice, love and charity, which holds all the others. Charity, as Jesus meant it, is benevolence toward everyone, indulgence for the faults of others and forgiveness of offences.

The true Spiritist, Kardec writes, is known by his moral transformation and by the efforts he makes to master his bad inclinations. The practical means he gives is the old counsel to know oneself, with the practice that an answer signed by Saint Augustine adds to it: at the end of each day to question one's conscience, pass in review what one has done, and ask whether one has failed in any duty and whether anyone has cause to complain. When unsure of an act, one asks how one would judge it if another had done it.

Heaven, hell and the three conditions

Heaven and Hell sets aside eternal punishment. Joy or pain after death is not a sentence passed from outside but the natural outcome of what the soul has made of itself: every imperfection it keeps is a source of suffering and every virtue a source of happiness. No suffering is endless. It lasts as long as the spirit clings to the evil that causes it, and it ends when the spirit turns. Three conditions wipe out a fault: repentance, expiation and reparation, which is the good done where harm was done.

No being is created for evil alone. Angels are spirits who have reached perfection by their own effort, along the road every spirit walks, and demons are imperfect spirits who have not yet turned and in time will. The book prints messages it gives as from the dead of every condition, the happy, the suffering, suicides and the hardened, as witnesses to the states the doctrine describes.

Mediums and obsession

Everyone who feels the influence of spirits in any degree is in that degree a medium, The Mediums' Book teaches, but the name is kept for those in whom the gift is marked. It sorts them by their gifts: mediums of physical effects, of hearing, of speech, of sight, of healing, and above all of writing, which Kardec counts the most useful, since it leaves a record that can be weighed. A writing medium is mechanical when the hand moves without the mind taking part, intuitive when the thought passes through the medium's own mind, and semi-mechanical between the two.

The danger of mediumship is obsession, the hold of an imperfect spirit over a person, and it has three degrees. In simple obsession a spirit thrusts itself into the communications and will not be sent away. In fascination it deludes the medium, who takes its absurdities for wisdom and defends them. In subjugation it bears down on the person's own will. Pride is its chief door, for a proud medium will not hear that a message is false. The remedy he gives is humility, prayer, patience and firmness, and the medium's own moral betterment, which draws better spirits.

He warns against developing mediumship in children, or in anyone of weak health or excitable nerves, and against using it for amusement, curiosity or gain. The general teaching of the Spiritualist circles and their cautions is given in Mediums and Spiritualism.

Faith face to face with reason

Kardec holds that the only unshakeable faith is one that can look reason in the face in every age. Spiritism binds itself to science accordingly: his Genesis says that if new discoveries show it to be wrong on any point, it will change on that point. In the same spirit he reads the miracles of the Gospels as natural facts whose laws were not yet known, the action of spirit on the universal fluid, and the six days of creation as the long ages of the earth's forming.