March 31: Allan Kardec's death anniversary

Paulo Degering R Jr
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March 31st. A date little known or little remembered in the Spiritist world, it is the day on which, in 1869, the beloved and emeritus professor, scientist, philosopher and scholar of Spiritist phenomena, Hypolite Leon Denizard Rivail, died - spelled that way, as he himself corrected , in a handwritten document, made available by CDOR. This was Allan Kardec, the one who dedicated the last years of his life and did, in little more than a decade, what few do in a lifetime: he obtained, through the rational and methodological observation of spiritist, natural and intelligent phenomena, an entire Doctrine, consoling in its essence and which, one day, will be recognized as the great revolution in human thought regarding life, society, charity and the truth about good.

Contents hide
1 the sad day
2 Allan Kardec forgotten
3 An unknown doctrine
4 The unknown tampering
5 The context of Allan Kardec
6 Kardec overcome?
7 More motivation to study
8 Reading Recommendations (Books)

the sad day

With a poetic beauty, Simoni Privato, in The Legacy of Allan Kardec, expresses it like this, about Kardec's death:

As he felt that his incarnation was passing quickly and he saw that his doctrinal tasks continued to increase, Allan Kardec avoided wasting time. […] There [at the Sainte-Anne Passage] worked from morning to night and often from night to morning, without even being able to rest, since he was just about to occupy himself with a work whose dimension can hardly be imagined and which increased as spiritism spread.

As the lease for the property on the Passage Sainte-Anne was about to expire, Allan Kardec intended to leave it on April 1, 1869 and retire to Villa Ségur, where he intended to concentrate more on the elaboration of doctrinal texts. On the same date, the office for subscription and dispatch of the Spiritist Magazine, as well as the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies would be transferred from Passagem Sainte-Anne to the headquarters of the Spiritist Bookshop, at 72 rue de Lille.

On Wednesday, March 31, Allan Kardec was at Passagem Sainte-Anne, organizing his books and papers for the move, which had already begun and should finish the next day. During the morning, he received an employee of a bookstore who wanted to purchase an issue of Revista Espírita. Upon handing him the copy, Allan Kardec suddenly lost consciousness and fell to the ground without having said a single word.

[…]

Until the last moment of his physical existence, Allan Kardec left deep teachings. He died as he lived: working for Spiritism. His industrious hands said goodbye to this world delivering the Spiritist Magazine — a periodical in which he recorded his teachings, his struggles, his victories and, in that last moment, his immortality.

[…]

In the cemetery, the curious tried to position themselves in the places where they could listen to the speeches. However, when the coffin descended to the bottom of the grave, emotion silenced the words; there was a great silence.

And this silence seems to have dragged on to the present day, in which most of the spiritist movement, in fact, does not know Allan Kardec and, much less, his work in the formation of the Spiritist Doctrine — Spiritism.

Allan Kardec forgotten

With great sadness, we can verify that, in the historical points that involve this great work, the name of Kardec does not exist, neither as Allan Kardec, nor as Rivail: it was erased by the time, as they did with all the scientists who dedicated themselves to study Spiritualism and Magnetism. There is no plaque dedicated to Kardec. There is no bust. There is no inscription on the wall or on the sidewalk, when, for much less, personalities of satirism or horror deserve a dedicated recording, under the light of the spotlight, on the sidewalks of fame that exist, around the world. Do not. On the streets of France, it seems that the only place where the dear professor deserves a memory is in the cemetery, as if out of obligation, and where, dead and buried, he doesn't attract anyone's attention with his “subversive” ideas.

Passage Sanite-Anne, a place that gave access to what was the first headquarters of the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies
Rue des Martyrs, 8 (rose door), where Kardec lived with his wife, Amélie, on the 2nd floor

But the big issue here is not just the forgetting of the figure of Allan Kardec, but his role as a spiritist scientist and his methodology, his honesty, his humility and his seriousness in the study of Spiritism. We do not worship Kardec, but we recognize his work and dedication. In a very pertinent parody, there are those who believe, today, that gravity is a great farce, for not having studied and understood the study of Isaac Newton, who started the physical sciences, as we know them today. It is the same with Spiritism.

An unknown doctrine

We said that the Spiritist Movement is unaware of Kardec and his work. Yes, in such a way that, in fact, to a large extent, they are unaware of the very Doctrine they claim to profess. Few know the enormous deviation that the Doctrine, or rather the Spiritist Movement, suffered after Kardec's death, at the hands of Leymarie and with the influence of Roustaing and his followers; few know that the works “A Genesis” and “O Céu e o Inferno” were tampered with, respectively in the 5th and 4th editions; few know that this influence spread and settled in the nascent Spiritist Movement, here in Brazil, right in its first steps; few know that Bezerra de Menezes himself, due to his religious inclinations, preferred Roustaguist ideas over spiritists and that, therefore, he spread them in Brazil; few know, still, that Kardec planned to start, from April 1869, a new phase of Spiritism, without centralizing figures or entities and without hierarchies, so that no one could dictate rules — a scenario totally different from what we live in our country. country, where, since the beginning of the Spiritist Movement, a Federation called itself centralizing and ruler — the same Federation that also put Roustaing above Kardec.

In Brazil, a country where Spiritism seems to have conquered the largest number of adherents, we live in a religious spiritist movement, with rituals and vestments, where “the phone only rings from there to here” became law and, worse, where ideas of sin and punishment, karma, “law of cause and effect” or “law of action and reaction”, which Never were part of this Doctrine, they began to be taken as doctrinal.

I'm sorry, dear Chico, but, in the statement over the phone, he was wrong, or was misunderstood. However, the adepts err even more, who, due to lack of study and thoughtlessly, began to take the opinions of mediums and spirits as if they were the law or the unquestionable expression of truth and wisdom. That is why we reaffirm: the Spiritist Movement is unaware of Spiritism, since the fundamental point of the Doctrine is the one with which Kardec begins his latest work, A Genesis, presenting, right on the first page:

Generality and agreement in teaching, this is the essential character of the doctrine, the very condition of its existence, from which it follows that any principle that has not yet received the consecration of the control of generality cannot be considered an integral part of that same doctrine. It will be a simple isolated opinion, for which Spiritism cannot assume responsibility.

The Movement is much more unaware of the formation of the Doctrine, widely presented in the Spiritist Magazine (read This article), where Kardec, number after number, demonstrates several evocations of Spirits of the most diverse categories (according to the spiritist scale), asserting its usefulness. Kardec evoked assassins and scientists, wise and ignorant, suicides a few days after his death, kings and queens and, from all of them, he always obtained important teachings, which, progressively, through the method of seeking universal agreement, under the judgment of reason, common sense and human science, constituted a whole Doctrine and which later served as the basis for the formation of other works and for the complementation of The Spirits' Book.

The unknown tampering

But we cannot blame, at all, only the lack of commitment to study, as many studied, but studied without knowing that they were studying something adulterated, as was the case of A Genesis and Heaven and Hell[1]. Now, one of the most controversial points of OCI was born out of adulteration, as the following sentence did not exist in the original work, written by Kardec:

Every fault committed, every wrong done, is a debt that must be paid; if it is not so in one existence, it will be so in the next one or the following ones, because all existences are solidary with each other. He who discharges it in the present existence will not have to pay a second time.

Text inserted in the altered version of OCI, from the 4th edition

We know today, from historical documents, that not only these works, but the entire spiritist movement, under Leymarie's hands, was adulterated and subverted, in the name of money and vanity. One of the worst cases was the one known as “The Spiritist Process“, which tarnished the reputation of Spiritism in French society.

The context of Allan Kardec

We also did not know the context of Kardec, where Rational Spiritualism and Moral Sciences gave base education, as we can largely verify in “Autonomia: the never-told history of Spiritism”, by Paulo Henrique de Figueiredo, a work that also presents the purely autonomous face of Spiritism, completely removed from notions such as karma, widely present in the current Spiritist Movement. Not only that, we also have the issue of Magnetism, constantly cited by Kardec as the twin science of Spiritism, so that one without the other would be incomplete. Now, Mesmer, “father” of Magnetism, only came to be understood recently, through the recovery and translation of his works, culminating in the book Mesmer: The negated science of animal magnetism, by the same author.

Anyway: we need to recover Kardec. We need to study him in his works and in the Spiritist Magazine; we need to understand the context in which it was inserted; we need to know Magnetism; we need to understand Spiritism as a science, which in fact it is, and not as a religion, which never was, but under the understanding of natural religion, according to the understanding of Rational Spiritualism. And, understanding Spiritism in its essence, we need to make it leave the closed circles of spiritist centers, to make it conquer society through its renewing and truly consoling ideas. But for that, change needs to start with the individual, then spread to the family and society.

Kardec overcome?

Many think and say the following: “Kardec is outdated in the past, so let's forget about it and continue with the study of these new conceptions that we have today”, which is a profound error.

Spiritism is a science, both from the point of view of the French moral sciences, in the context of its birth, and from the point of view of a science of observation, which deduces, infers, analyzes empirically, as is very clear to all who study it in its sources. As a science, it has a foundation, without which it cannot advance. The Nuclear Physicist also needs to go through Newton, to later reach Einstein and, later, the current scientists.

In Spiritism, there are at least two things that have not changed in relation to our current state: morality and the Spirits. The first needs to be studied since Jesus, and even before, being one of the central proposals of Spiritism. The Spirits, on the other hand, continue to belong to that entire scale, proposed by Kardec and refined by the Spirits, and continue to communicate with us, influencing and leading us in the same ways they have always used. Since there is undeniably a science in this, it is necessary to study and understand it.

It is by forgetting Kardec that, today, pernicious, irrational and anti-doctrinal contents are accepted in the spiritist movement.

Do we have a lot to learn? Well, of course it is! And the Spirits teach us what we are ready to understand, according to the progress of our material science. Kardec “scratched” on such profound scientific matters, but which could not yet be understood. Imagine what he could achieve if, back then, we knew what we know today? Imagine, moreover, what a serious, elevated and honest researcher like him could obtain, according to current science, regarding everything that could not be explored in depth at that time?

But that, my dear ones, will only be done at the right time. That's why I echo Paulo Henrique de Figueiredo's words: let's study, study, study, until we get tired. Let's understand Spiritism in the Spiritist Magazine and in its complements. Let us study the works of Kardec, those of Bozzano, those that, today, study the context of Spiritism, inserted in Rational Spiritualism, and let us also study Mesmer's magnetism.

When we are ready, as in the past, the Spirits themselves will look for us and, who knows, they will need to turn tables and play invisible drums again in order to get our attention.

More motivation to study

And, if you still lack a motivation to delve into these studies, I leave you with the following reflection:

What keeps us from real happiness are our imperfections, our moral vices, our unbridled passions. Only the Spirit that conquered its imperfections, through the tests, and that developed its reasoning, through knowledge, manages to progress on the path of spiritual evolution. We all will, sooner or later, but the speed depends on the will of each one, based on reason, because only the Spirit that really you see, rationally.

Kardec says, in A Genesis: “He who doesn't master his passions can be very intelligent, but, at the same time, very bad. Instinct annihilates itself; passions can be tamed only by the effort of the will”.

However, that chapter ends here, in the 5th edition of this work (which formed the basis for all translations and future editions), which, we now know, has strong indications of having been tampered with. Taking the 4th edition, we have the following closing, all-important, omitted for tampering:

All men go through passions. Those who have overcome them, and are not, by nature, proud, ambitious, selfish, spiteful, vindictive, cruel, wrathful, sensual, and do good without effort, without premeditation and, so to speak, involuntarily, it is because they have progressed in the sequence. of their previous existences, having rid themselves of this uncomfortable weight. It is unfair to say that they have less merit when they do good, compared to those who fight against their tendencies. It turns out that they have already achieved victory, while the others have not yet. But when they do, they will be like the others. They will do good without thinking about it, like children who read fluently without having to spell. It is as if they were two sick people: one cured and full of strength while the other is still recovering and hesitates to walk; or as two runners, one of which is closer to the finish than the other.

Everything that we live, therefore, as the Doctrine shows us, it's never about punishment, but of opportunities for our evolution. Spiritism is autonomous in its essence — “In the eyes of God, repentance is sacred, because it is man who judges himself, which is rare on your planet” [RE—October 1858].

If all that doesn't motivate you to study Kardec, we don't know what else would.

1. The FEAL publishing house already has the translations of these works, according to the original text. The context of the tampering of A Genesis can be understood by reading the work O Legado de Allan Kardec, by Simoni Privato; the adulteration of O Céu e o Inferno can be understood in the work “Nem heaven, nor hell: The laws of the soul according to Spiritism”, by Lucas Sampaio and Paulo Henrique de Figueiredo

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