P.1: The Making of Spiritism
TV celebrities like
James Van Praag and John Edward with Crossing Over,
Spiritism (talking to alleged spirits of the dead) has been in the news again
as per April 2003.
In The book of the Spririts 1857 (Le Livre des Esprits), Allan Kardec who changed on advice from a medium his name from
Hippolyte Rivall, elaborated a metaphysical system
based on communications with the beyond.
Born to a Lyon family
October 3, 1804, his father a magistrate, Hippolyte was baptized and raised as
a Catholic. After his first years of primary education in Lyon, his parents
sent him to Switzerland where he enrolled in the Pestalozzi innovative school,
which drew a great deal from the writings of Rousseau.
Later Rivall co-founded a Pestalozzi-inspired technical school in
Paris with the backing of an uncle trained as an educator. (Henri Sausse, Biographie d'Allan Kardec. 1927, 18-20)
Rivall
had been a casual student of Mesmerism since the 1820s. Late in 1853, a
Mesmerist friend, M. Fortier, told him about uncanny events that had occurred
in his experimental seances. M. Fortier came to Rivall
with startling news: his seance table had begun communicating clear messages by
means of mysterious tapping noises. Attending Fortier 's seances introduced Rivall to a small but active group of Parisians
engaged with these phenomena.
A. passages quoted
here from a memoir Kardec wrote in the late 1860s,
dated December 1855, sheds some light on this more personal aspect of his
interest in the beyond:
Q. Does my mother's
spirit come to visit me sometimes?
A. Yes, and she
protects -you as much as it is possible for her to do. Q. 1 often see her in
my dreams; is this a memory and a figment of MY imagination?
A. No; it is In fact
her spirit appearing to you; you must be able to tell by the emotion you feel.
The Baudin circle responded enthusiastically when Rivall informed them of his intention to produce a book of
spirit teachings. Other men who frequented the Baudin
séances. The playwright Victorien Sardou and his
father, the writer Rend Taillandier, and the
publisher Didier, provided Rivall with notebooks of
spirit communications they had collected from different mediums, in hopes that
the additional data would help him in his project. Mrs. Baudin
suggested a pseudonym for Rivall to use:
You will take the
name Allan Kardec, which we give to you. In 1856, to
accelerate the process of' information gathering, Kardec
began to frequent the somnambulist Wina Japlict and her magnetiseur, M. Roustan. Who devoted considerably more time to answering Kardec's questions.
Despite this
competition, Kardec's book enjoyed a remarkable
success, which was only to grow as the decade continued. The first edition of
Le Livre des Esprits sold out quickly. In 1858, Kardec
followed it with a revised and augmented edition. Though superficially similar
to other texts on spirit phenomena, Kardec's book in
fact constituted a dramatic innovation in its genre. Instead of in a
florid oracular style, the voices in Kardec's
book expressed themselves quite differently and spoke about clearly defined
subjects in simple language. And where texts like Auguez's
and Caudemberg's were dense and repetitive, Kardec's in short segments was set off with clearly
marked headings, each addressing a specific cosmological or moral question,
from "The Origin and Nature of Spirits" to
"Self-knowledge."
Also new things
require new words, Kardec proclaimed. (Quoted in La
Revue Spirite. vol.4,1861: 104) Spiritualism, he
wrote, was simply "the opposite of materialism," and hence applied to
any person is to believe he has something in himself other than matter.
"Spiritism," on the other hand, explicitly designated a
"doctrine" based on "relations between the material world and
Spirits, or beings from the invisible world." By inventing a specific name
to describe both his doctrine and the practices that went along with it, anyone
who held seances was a Spiritist - and all Spiritists accepted the metaphysical system Kardec outlined in his writings. Coining the word Spiritisine, therefore, allowed Kardec
to emphasize the distinctiveness and simultaneously creating the impression
that everyone who contacted spirits shared them.
The voices who
expressed themselves so succinctly in Kardec's books,
owed pronounced debts to the visionary tradition of French Utopian Socialism.
At the same time,
however, Kardec eliminated the revolutionary aspect this
visionary current had acquired during the 1840s. He accomplished this change of
direction quite shrewdly, by using one of the key elements of Charles Fourlier's cosmology - the idea of reincarnation - and
bolstering it with an epistemology drawn from Corntean
Positivism.
Kardec
and the spirits he quoted used the Golden Rule as the basis for a fundamentally
social conception of morality. Both good and evil, they argued, expressed
themselves primarily through an individual's relations with others. Charity and
selfishness, therefore, became the two poles of the Spiritist
moral compass.
In a Spiritist world, he argued, the rich would feel an
obligation to be charitable, while the poor, strengthened by the expectation of
a better life to come, would accept gifts with a resigned gratitude.
A similar blend of
egalitarianism and acceptance of inequality characterized the Spiritist view, of gender. While Kardec:
maintained that the soul had no sex, he nevertheless believed that male and
female bodies were suited for different social roles. For Kardec,
the roles men and women played in society were a biological inevitability - a
man's "physical organization" rendered him incapable of dispensing
the kind of love a mother could, just as a woman's rendered her incapable of
inhabiting the public worlds of science or politics.
Spirit phenomena
provided the underpinnings of this eschatological, moral and social vision.
Between incarnations, every soul existed for a period of time as a disembodied
"wandering spirit." These spirits filled the universe: though humans
ordinarily could not perceive them, they formed an omnipresent throng
surrounding the living. When people contacted the beyond in seances, these
"wandering spirits" were the beings that appeared. All such spirits
had distinct personalities, Kardec maintained. They
differed from one another as dramatically as a randomly assorted crowd of human
beings. Some had advanced rapidly, through the spirit hierarchy, and showed a
saintly concern for human welfare; others had only progressed slowly, and
exhibited a mischievous caginess to lead people astray.
While Kardec's presentation of his ideas was innovative, the
ideas themselves where not. Indeed, the doctrine of Spiritism was for the most
part a selective compendium of ideas from mid-nineteenth century French Utopian
Socialist thinkers.
Kardec's spirits appeared to have borrowed their notion of
reincarnation and their critique of eternal damnation from the works of Utopian
Socialists like Fourier and Jean Reynaud. Their moral vision, with its emphasis
on charity, owed a great deal to the thought of Pierre Leroux and
Saint-Simon one of the teachers of Eliphas Levi. (See
Georgcs Brunet, Le Mysticisme
social de Saint-Simon, Paris: 1922, and Robert B. Carlisle, The Proffered
Crown Saint-Simonianism and flee Doctrine of Hope,
1987)
The Spiritist conception of a universe driven to constant
improvement by a law of progresion too reflected the
optimism of thinkers like Eugene Pelletan. Even Kardec's notion of the spiritists
which might strike the modem reader as peculiar, had its antecedents in
Fourier's notion of the "aromal body" and
in the theories of the Mesmerists.
Despite of its
remarkable popularity, Kardec's work has received
little scholarly attention, and the following report of the "Spiritists on Trial" is the first to be written in
English.
See also:
Crossing Over P.2: Christian Spiritist
Conversion
Crossing Over P.3: Taming the Wild Spirits
Crossing Over P.4: Revelation of the Revelation
Crossing Over P.5: Phenomena on Trial
Crossing Over P.6: Theosophists a Galore
Crossing Over P.7: The Esoteric
Crossing Over P.8: The Never Ending Story?
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