Allan Kardec

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who wrote under the pen name Allan Kardec, was a French educator, translator and writer, born in Lyon in 1804 and died in Paris in 1869. He is regarded as the systematizer of Spiritism, a movement that spread in the second half of the nineteenth century and combined the idea of communication with the dead with a moral and philosophical teaching. He worked in an age shaped by positivism and materialism, and he presented his doctrine as a science rather than a religion.

He was educated in Lyon and completed his studies in Yverdon, Switzerland, where he became a pupil and collaborator of the pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He never attended university, though he claimed a good command of several foreign languages. Around 1824 he moved to Paris and began teaching at a school of his own, modelled on Pestalozzi's methods. When financial trouble forced him to close it, he worked as a bookkeeper and accountant and translated English and German works. He published textbooks on arithmetic, grammar and teaching, and in 1832 he married Amelia Boudet.

His second career began in 1854, when he first heard of the so-called talking tables. In May 1855 he witnessed phenomena involving moving tables and automatic writing, and his interest grew. Persuaded that a spirit world existed and that the souls of the dead could be reached, he studied a large collection of psychographic writings and attended séances regularly, putting prepared questions to mediums, the people through whom spirits were said to speak. He reviewed the answers and used them as the basis of The Spirits Book, published on 18 April 1857, which sold out quickly. According to his own account, a protective spirit suggested the name Allan Kardec, claiming that in an earlier life, among the Druids, the two had known each other in Gaul.

The doctrine distinguishes superior and inferior spirits and presents reincarnation as an explanation for the unequal conditions of human life. Kardec also warned that not every spirit could be trusted, since some lied or borrowed famous names. After that first book he founded the Revue Spirite and, in 1858, the Parisian Society for Spiritist Studies, which he led until his death. The Book on Mediums, What Is Spiritism, The Gospel According to Spiritism, Heaven and Hell and Genesis followed, and together these works form the Spiritist Codification.

His influence reached well beyond France. The Catholic Church condemned his books, which were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1864. Several psychical researchers of the late nineteenth century, among them Charles Richet, Camille Flammarion and Gabriel Delanne, acknowledged that his work had shaped their own investigations.