The Spirits' Book
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~190,000 words · 881 passages
Cite this work
- APAAllan Kardec. (n.d.). The Spirits' Book. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/allan-kardec/the-spirits-book
- MLAAllan Kardec. "The Spirits' Book." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/allan-kardec/the-spirits-book.
- ChicagoAllan Kardec. The Spirits' Book. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/allan-kardec/the-spirits-book.
What it is about
The founding book of Spiritism: a thousand-odd questions on God, the soul, reincarnation and the moral life, with their answers.
Context and history
How it presents itself has to be explained, because it is part of the text: the work states that the answers were dictated by spirits through mediums, and that Allan Kardec — the pen name of the educator Hippolyte Rivail — merely gathered and ordered them. That attribution is a doctrine, not a verifiable fact, and this note can neither endorse it nor hide it. The book is of 1857 and stands here as what it is: the founding document of a movement of considerable influence, above all in Brazil, and a piece of evidence for nineteenth-century religiosity.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The book thus produced and published sold with great rapidity, making converts not in France only, but all over the Continent, and rendering the name of ALLAN KARDEC "a household word" with the readers who knew him only in connection with it; so that he was thenceforth called only by that name, excepting by his old personal friends, with whom both he and his wife always retained their family-name. Soon after its publication, he founded The Parisian Society of Psychologic Studies, of which he was President until his death, and