The Canon · No. 093
Spiritualism
Modern Spiritualism
1848 CE – present · Esoteric / Occult · Living · US, UK, Brazil, Philippines
VII. THE MODERN AGE — 1800 – 1945
How many
Small as an organised religion — perhaps 100,000 in Spiritualist churches. But Kardecist Spiritism in Brazil has roughly 4 million declared adherents and influences many millions more.
Who began it
The Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, who in March 1848 reported communicating with a spirit by rapping. Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Rivail, 1804–1869) in France systematised it into a doctrine.
What it is for
To demonstrate that the dead survive and can be contacted, and thereby to settle by evidence a question religion had left to faith.
What it worships
God, described in general terms as Infinite Intelligence. Jesus is honoured as a great medium and moral teacher rather than as God.
What it holds
Survival of the personality after death and the possibility of communication. Continuous progress of the spirit through higher spheres. Personal responsibility — Spiritualism rejects vicarious atonement, holding that each person makes good their own wrongs. Kardec added reincarnation, which British and American Spiritualists largely rejected — the main doctrinal split in the movement.
What it does
Séances; mediumship, both mental (clairvoyance, clairaudience) and physical (raps, table-turning, materialisations, ectoplasm — the last category now almost entirely discredited). Healing. Sunday services with a demonstration of mediumship. In Brazil: psychographia, automatic writing, and spiritual surgery; Kardecist centres run large charitable hospitals and social programmes.
After death
No hell, no eternal punishment, no judgment. The spirit passes to the next stage carrying exactly the character it developed here, and progresses through study, service and, in the Kardecist version, further incarnations. Wrongdoing is corrected by remorse and reparation rather than by sentence. This is one of the most consistently optimistic afterlives in the dossier, and its appeal in the aftermath of mass bereavement is not hard to see.
Its texts
The Spirits' Book (1857), The Mediums' Book, The Gospel According to Spiritism — all by Kardec. In Brazil, the very large corpus attributed to spirits through the medium Chico Xavier, whose books sold in the millions and whose royalties he gave away.
Its branches
Anglo-American Spiritualism (National Spiritualist Association of Churches, Spiritualists' National Union); Kardecist Spiritism (France, Brazil); Espiritismo in the Caribbean; Umbanda in Brazil incorporates it.
Of note
Two legacies pull in opposite directions. Spiritualism gave nineteenth-century women religious authority they had nowhere else, and it produced a century of documented fraud. Both are the movement's history.
Its timeline
- <strong>31 March 1848 CE</strong> The Hydesville rappings.
- 1850s CE Explosive growth in the US; séances in the White House under Mary Todd Lincoln.
- 1857 CE Kardec publishes The Spirits' Book.
- 1860s–1880s CE Overlap with abolition and women's suffrage — Spiritualism gave women a public speaking platform as mediums when almost nothing else did, and its rolls include Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president.
- 1882 CE The Society for Psychical Research founded to investigate the claims scientifically.
- <strong>1888 CE</strong> Margaret Fox publicly confesses that the rappings were produced by cracking her toe joints, and demonstrates it on stage. She recants the confession a year later. The movement continues regardless.
- 1914–1920s CE Enormous revival after the First World War and the influenza pandemic, driven by mass bereavement. Arthur Conan Doyle becomes its most famous advocate; Harry Houdini its most effective debunker, and their friendship ends over it.
- 1920s–30s CE Repeated exposure of fraudulent physical mediums.
- 1890s–present Kardecism takes root in Brazil and becomes a major national religion, unusually well integrated with medicine and philanthropy.
- 1951 CE The UK repeals the Witchcraft Act of 1735, under which mediums had still been prosecuted as recently as 1944, replacing it with the Fraudulent Mediums Act.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.