What is Spiritism?

Spiritism is a branch of Spiritualism that was started in France in the 1850s by a French teacher, educational writer, and translator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. He wrote books under the pen name Allan Kardec about “the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relationship with the physical world.” Kardec’s works are the result of his research into mediumistic phenomena, which he thought were fake at the start. He compiled, compared, and synthesised the answers he got from spirits by asking a lot of mediums in trance about a lot of different things. This body of knowledge is called the codification. Science and philosophy are two ways of looking at the world around us. We need to make sense of our findings and apply them to our daily lives so that we can improve ourselves and the world around us, which is why we do this all the time (religion). When Spiritism comes together with science, philosophy, and religion, it’s called the triple-aspect of Spiritism. Spiritism, then, is a moral doctrine that boosts religious feelings in general. It also belongs to all religions, not just one. Spiritists believe that humans, along with all other living things, are essentially immortal spirits that temporarily inhabit physical bodies for a few necessary incarnations in order to grow morally and intellectually. It also says that disembodied spirits, through passive or active mediumship, can have a good or bad effect on the physical world. Spiritism is a religion that believes in evolution. There was a book called The Spirits Book written by Kardec that he used as a way to separate Spiritism from spiritualism. Spiritism is now represented by the International Spiritist Council in 35 countries around the world. It has led to a social movement of healing centres, charities, and hospitals that includes millions of people in dozens of countries, with the largest number of followers in the country of Brazil. Spiritism is a big part of the Umbanda religion, which is a mix of African and Brazilian cultures. It is also very important in Cao ài, a Vietnamese religion started in 1926 by three mediums who claimed to have received messages that identified Allan Kardec as a prophet of a new universal religion.