In the 1850s the table-turning craze reached Paris, and a middle-aged educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail was invited to watch. He was a pedagogue by training, a former student of Pestalozzi, and he approached the phenomena the way he approached everything — by asking systematic questions and collating the answers across many mediums, discarding what did not agree. He published the result in 1857 as Le Livre des Esprits, under the name Allan Kardec, and in doing so turned a parlour amusement into a doctrine with a moral architecture.
The core claims are simple and interlocking. Spirits are created simple and ignorant and are immortal. They incarnate repeatedly in matter because embodied life is the only school in which moral progress can be made, and no spirit is ever destroyed, condemned, or abandoned. Every incarnation is voluntary in the sense that the spirit, between lives, participates in planning the trials of the next one — including the hardships, which are chosen as instruments rather than imposed as penalties. Progress is guaranteed in the long run and slow in the short one, so that a spirit may take a very large number of lives, and there is no ceiling.
What happens between incarnations Kardec called erraticity. The freed spirit does not go anywhere in particular; it is in a wandering state, still in contact with the living world, reviewing the life just finished with a clarity the living do not have, and — because Spiritism is a communicating religion — able to speak through mediums. The picture explicitly excludes eternal punishment. Suffering after death is the spirit's own recognition of what it did and its own attachment to the state it made, which persists exactly as long as the spirit refuses to move; the mechanism is remedial and the exit is always open.
The practical consequences are what made it a religion rather than a philosophy. Kardec insisted on charity as the criterion of everything — his formula, outside charity there is no salvation, is the movement's motto — and Spiritist centres run on unpaid work: consultation, passe (a form of healing by laying-on of hands), disobsession for spirits and people entangled with each other, and very large-scale social services.
In France it faded. In Brazil it took root and grew enormous, absorbed into a country where it now supports hospitals, schools, orphanages, and one of the largest publishing operations in Portuguese; the medium Chico Xavier, who psychographed hundreds of books and gave away the proceeds, became a national figure. Millions identify as Spiritist, and many more borrow from it. It is the modern world's most successful attempt to keep reincarnation, moral seriousness, and continued contact with the dead all at once, without a hell to enforce any of it.
