On Netflix I viewed a movie Kardec based on the life of writer Allan Kardec. Kardec was a very influential writer who developed a philosophical system he called spiritism. Gaining little traction in Kardec's native France, Kardec's philosophy became quite popular in Brazil. So it is no surprise that the movie is a Brazilian production. But you can watch the movie on Netflix with some good English dubbing, as well as English subtitles.
Spiritism as taught by Kardec is similar to spiritualism, which is mainly the idea that the spirits of the dead survive and that it is possible for humans to sometimes communicate with them, largely through the use of mediums. The main difference between the two is that spiritism teaches a doctrine of reincarnation that most spiritualists reject. Spiritism teaches the dreary doctrine that it is necessary for a soul to undergo many incarnations for the sake of purification or perfection, or as punishment for previous sins.
Allan Kardec was the pen name of Leon-Denizarth-Hippolyte Rivail, born in France in 1804. The Netflix movie about Kardec starts out with Kardec as a teacher of young boys. We seem to see Kardec encouraging the children to think boldly, based on observations, without clinging to dogmas not supported by observations. Then a dour-looking Catholic cleric enters Kardec's classroom, announcing that now the children will have their weekly instruction in the Catholic catechism. A catechism is a book teaching the doctrines of a religion in question and answer format.
We see Kardec strongly complaining about the requirement that the children have to be instructed in the Catholic catechism. He resigns his teaching post. Then apparently having quite a bit of free time on his hands, he begins (roughly around 1850) to look into reports of the paranormal phenomenon called table-turning or table tipping. The depiction of this phenomenon may baffle readers because in Europe and the United States academia has swept under the rug this historical reality, tending to make either no mention of it, or making only brief, distorted, inaccurate depictions of it.
Table turning (also called table tipping) was reported with very great frequency by a host of distinguished observers in the middle of the nineteenth century. People would get together, put their hands on a table, and the table would very often turn dramatically, or begin rotating, or rise up in the air. The movie correctly suggests how widespread such reports were. At the 10:02 mark some academic authority says, "In cafes, salons, in all of Paris, or rather, in all of Europe, people are going mad over these tables, and now they come to us for explanations."
Phrases such as "table turning" or "table tipping" do not capture the stranger results, which were very often reports of table levitations. Attempts by men such as Michael Faraday to explain such results as "involuntary muscle action" were mere hand waving, because they failed to explain any of the more dramatic results very frequently reported, such as tables spinning around when no one touched them, and tables levitating with or without people touching them. As I discuss here and here, scientists such as Harvard chemistry professor Robert Hare, the German scientist Johann Zollner and Count Agenor de Gasparin provided literary works supporting the reality of an inexplicable phenomenon going on in many cases involving table turning or table levitation.
In the Netflix movie, Kardec begins to investigate table turning, at first very skeptically. At around the 21:45 mark Kardec says, "We need to have rational controlled experiments, observable facts, natural laws." But then he sees things he cannot explain, such as a table levitation. Kardec also has some experiences with mediums who produce writings while in trance. Kardec becomes convinced that it is possible to communicate with spirits. Kardec produces a book that the movie depicts as the outcome of his spiritual investigations. It is a book called "The Spirits' Book." At the end of the movie we are told that in Brazil the book ended up being bought by 30 million people.
The story we are told in the Netflix movie is one of Kardec gathering up spirit teaching coming from seances and mediums, and then publishing his magnum opus "The Spirits' Book" to compile such teachings. We get a depiction of the extreme hostility that Kardec got from conventional scientists, most of whom refused to seriously study the reports people were producing of paranormal phenomena. We also get a depiction of the extreme hostility that Kardec got from the Catholic Church. We have a scene of some Catholic authorities burning large numbers of Kardec's books.
The Netflix film is clearly made by an admirer of Kardec. Kardec is depicted as a virtuous investigator who plods forward against the intolerant and dogmatic forces of materialist academia and the Catholic Church. But how can we can judge whether Kardec deserved so laudatory a treatment? The best way is to take a close look at Kardec's main book, published in the 1850's, with a Second Edition published in 1857. Luckily, you can read the full book at www.archive.org (without even having a login) by using the link here. The book is entitled "Spiritualist philosophy : the spirits' book : containing the principles of spiritist doctrine" and is subtitled "THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL: THE NATURE OF SPIRITS AND THEIR RELATIONS WITH MEN: THE MORAL LAW: THE PRESENT LIFE, THE FUTURE LIFE, AND THE DESTINY OF THE HUMAN RACE. ACCORDING TO THE TEACHINGS OF SPIRITS OF HIGH DEGREE, TRANSMITTED THROUGH VARIOUS MEDIUMS, COLLECTED AND SET IN ORDER BY ALLAN KARDEC."
The book makes a very interesting read, so interesting that it is easy to understand why the book sold so many copies. The book is written in a question-and-answer "catechism" format that makes it very easy to read. But it seems that Kardec's method had some serious shortfalls.
If you make the generous assumption that Kardec did not simply write himself most of the supposed "spirit answers" in his book, Kardec's method seems to have worked like this:
(1) Gather up writings or statements produced by mediums, or statements produced during seances, in response to questions.
(2) Arrange these responses into a "question and answer" format.
(3) Claim the resulting questions and answers are teachings of spirits. On the page here, Kardec claims his book "has been written by the order and under the dictation of spirits of high degree, for the purpose of establishing the bases of a rational philosophy, free from the influence of prejudice, and of preconceived opinion."
Unfortunately, the technique has some serious shortcomings. In particular we never get any indication of when a particular answer was received, who it came from, or who produced it. We can contrast this with an alternate method in which each and every answer would be followed by a statement of exactly how that statement was received, who produced it, and when it was received. For example, after quoting a particular answer, we might have a statement in brackets such as this: "This answer was received through the table rapping method during the seance of July 12, 1862, at the house of John Hippolyte, there being also present Mary Adams, Frank Peterson and David Waters." Or after quoting another answer, we might have a statement in brackets such as this: "This statement was produced by automatic writing, while the medium Jane Franklin was in a state of trance on August 18, 1871." No such statements appear in Kardec's book.
He simply gives hundreds of pages of supposed "spirit answers" without ever telling us how any particular one of these answers was obtained. Unfortunately, this means we should have some doubts about the answers given, whenever they seem implausible or unsubstantiated. In particular:
(1) We do not know whether any particular answer came from some process that was so impressive that we should tend to believe that it is actually the production of any spirit not living on Earth.
(2) We do not know whether some of the answers were mere speculations produced by mediums writing answers.
(3) We do not know whether some or most of the answers were simply written by Kardec himself, possibly while thinking that his pen was "inspired by spirits," or that he could call his own writing an output from a spirit on the grounds that he himself was a spirit or soul.
(4) We do not know whether Kardec got disagreeing answers while asking his questions to mediums or during seances, and simply chose to preserve whichever answer he liked best, throwing away other answers that disagreed with such an answer.
You can imagine some type of paranormal communication that might inspire someone to accept on authority some paranormal communication. Suppose a particular psychic or medium showed numerous times either some miraculous or inexplicable ability to produce mysterious physical phenomena, or suppose that such a psychic or medium seemed to repeatedly show knowledge of many things that should have been unknown to such a person through normal means. Then, if we could identify particular statements about the nature of reality made by such a psychic or medium, we might have a cause for accepting such statements on some basis of a "special authority." But nothing like that goes on in Kardec's "Spirit's Book" opus. He mainly gives very many supposed "spirit answers" to particular questions, without explaining how he got particular answers to such questions.
The movie has some depiction of incidents that may have persuaded Kardec that some of the answers that he had got came from spirits. For example, at the 38:25 mark we see two young girls (Julie and Caroline) who are apparently mediums. They claim to be able to see spirits around them. The two girls write things down supposedly sent by spirits. But we may ask: were these writings from spirits, or just words from the minds of the girls?
I can give some other reasons for questioning the contents in Kardec's "Spirits' Book" opus:
(1) A wrong answer is given to an astronomical question. The question is, "Are all the globes that revolve in space inhabited?" The answer given is, "Yes." But we know that globes such as Mercury, Venus and Mars are not inhabited.
(2) A wrong answer is given to the question "Is matter formed of one element or of several elements?" The answer is, " Of one primitive element." Matter is made up of more than 100 elements such as hydrogen, carbon and oxygen.
(3) A wrong answer is given to the question, "Do any living beings come into existence spontaneously at the present day?" The answer given is this:
"Yes ; but the primal germs of these already existed in a latent state. You are constantly witnesses of this phenomenon. Do not the tissues of the human body and of animals contain the germs of a multitude of parasites, that only await for their development the occurrence of the putrid fermentation necessary to their life?"
This is the doctrine of spontaneous generation, widely believed around 1850, but disproved by the eminent scientist Louis Pasteur around 1858.
(4) The book claims that "according to the statements of spirits... Mars is stated to be at a point even lower than that of the earth, and Jupiter to be greatly superior to the earth in every respect." We read, "The souls of many persons well known in this earth are said to be reincarnated in Jupiter." We now know that Jupiter is an uninhabitable ball of gas. Citing "the statements of spirits" the book also says, "Venus is said to be more advanced than the earth." We now know that Venus is an uninhabitable planet with an average temperature of about 847 degrees F.
(5) In the book we read the question, "In the production of certain phenomena, of storms, for example, is it a single spirit that acts, or a mass of spirits ?" We get this answer: "A mass of spirits ; or, rather, innumerable masses of spirits." Since about roughly the time the kinetic theory of gases was developed around 1860 by scientists such as Clausius, Boltzmann and Maxwell, scientists have known that storms are caused by mere imbalances of air pressure, not spirits. Wind simply flows from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure; and the larger the difference between the pressures, the greater the tendency for very high winds.
(6) On one page the book tells us that there are frivolous spirits who "reply to every question without paying any attention to truth." Similarly on another page the book tells us that there are spirits that "can give only false and incomplete notions of the spirit- world." But if that is true, how can we have confidence in the answers given in Kardec's "Spirits' Book" opus? How could we know that Kardec was not getting some of his most important answers from such frivolous misleading spirits, rather than truth-telling spirits?
(7) The quoted answers (supposedly from spirits) all speak with a literary style seeming to match those of the questions, and also Kardec's smaller-print elaborations of such answers. This should cause people to wonder whether Kardec was the real author of most or many of these quotations supposedly coming from spirits.
Kardec's "Spirits' Book" opus ends up being another dogmatic catechism, which ironically is the type of thing Kardec denounces near the beginning of the Netflix movie, where we have a scene where Kardec resigns his teaching position because a dogmatic Catholic catechism is being taught to children. But the book makes an interesting read presenting some ideas well worthy of serious consideration. The long book has a high moral tone, and very much of it is devoted to ethics. The ethical ideas advanced seem in general quite praiseworthy, and are often ahead of their time. Kardec was quite the organizer, and took steps to make sure that his teachings would be widely spread by a society he organized. He died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1869.
I find some of Kardec's main metaphysical teachings to be quite dreary, and I am puzzled by why so many in Brazil would be attracted to his depressing notions. Teaching that people have to undergo many reincarnations for the sake of purification and sin punishment and making the soul more perfect, Kardec's book teaches that an earthly life need not be followed by immediate reincarnation. As an answer to the question of "what becomes of the soul in the intervals between its successive incarnations?" we get this answer:
"It becomes an errant or wandering spirit, aspiring after a new destiny. Its state is one of waiting and expectancy."
To the next question "How long may these intervals last?" we read "From a few hours to thousands of ages." This sounds like a doctrine that each person has to experience a cycle of reincarnations, with each reincarnation interrupted by periods of a kind of limbo or purgatory (although some later answers describe such periods in more positive terms). We can only wonder whether such a teaching was inspired by Catholic teachings about purgatory commonly taught in the country that Kardec was raised (France). The idea above is inconsistent with the testimony of those having near-death experiences, who tend to report brushes with some realm of very great happiness, not some purgatory, and who repeatedly say they were very disappointed when having to go back to earthly life.
I am skeptical about the doctrine taught in Kardec's "Spirits' Book" that it is necessary for each person to undergo many incarnations by reincarnation. The book fails to give any weighty or subtle explanation for why such a thing would be necessary, other than the rather shallow-sounding explanation that such a thing is needed for "purification" or "perfection" of the soul, or to punish people for earthly sins (something that could be accomplished without repeated incarnations). In near-death experiences people often report seeing their deceased relatives in some afterlife state of existence, and such observations tend to conflict with ideas that people undergo reincarnation upon death (although they may be consistent with ideas that reincarnation occurs after long interludes between earthly incarnations). I have had more than 300 dreams seeming to suggest the idea of life after death, and none of them ever suggested the idea of reincarnation. Such dreams often suggest a much more cheerful idea that dying results in some great bonanza that is like winning the lottery.
There are many untrue statements that materialists keep repeating when they discuss paranormal phenomena. One is the simply untrue claim that there is no evidence for such phenomena, which is like saying there is no evidence for meteors or electrocution by lightning. Another claim frequently made is that we can reject all claims of communications from disembodied spirits, on the grounds that such communications are all childish "twaddle." Kardec's main book shows such a claim is not correct. We have in it a weighty intelligent-sounding philosophical treatise that is on the same intellectual level as a book that a philosophy professor might produce. It is also a book mainly consisting of quotes supposedly coming from spirits. The only problem is that it is very hard or impossible to tell how much of it came from spirits as Kardec claimed. It could well be that Kardec simply wrote most of the answers himself, after deriving them from speculation; and that he presented such answers as "spirit written" to make his answers sound more authoritative. Since Kardec's believed that he himself was a spirit undergoing an earthly incarnation, he could have described his own written answers to be part of answers from "spirits of high degree" without lying, if he believed himself to be a spirit of a "high degree." He only claimed that his answers came from spirits, not that they all came from immaterial spirits or spirits living beyond our planet.
Postscript: On page 165 of the October 1, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, we have a letter from the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home, on the topic of Kardec. He states this:
"I think it my duty to say here that in my dressing-room one morning, in the presence of the present Earl of Dunraven, Allan Kardec came and said, ' Je regret d'avoir enseigner la doctrine spirite.' (' I regret to have taught the spirite doctrine.') The fact is that this was the day following his departure from earth, and I was not then aware that he had passed away. I need not explain the difference between ' Spirite' and ' Spiritualism;' of course the former are reinearnationists."
The next edition of The Spiritualist has this critique of the catechism question and answer style of Kardec's main book:
"The chief feature of the method of argument in the book is, that it is exactly the reverse of ordinary scientific procedure in dealing with any truths new or old. A scientific thinker, lecturer, or writer, first collects a great mass of facts and has fierce battles with opponents over nearly every one of those facts, so that a certain number only pass through the fire, and are admitted both by friend and foe to be true and unanswerable. After this preliminary work, which may occupy the time of half a generation, a very few conclusions are drawn from these indisputable facts, which it is impossible lo deny. Allan Kardec, in his hook, reverses this process. He gives us more than. 400 pages of closely-printed assertions, with scarcely a solitary fact;, to prove any one of them, and the few facts he does mention are open to grave question in the matter of reliability. Thus the Spirits’ Book is pre-eminently a theological and not a scientific work; its readers must accept its statements on the ground of authority, or because in their own minds they think that it explains certain problems of life which had never been so clearly elucidated on any other hypothesis...[Kardec] advances numberless assertions in the most authoritative manner, without deigning to give an atom of proof. Some of the disciples of Allan Kardec say that reincarnation is a matter of revelation; that the spirits must know best, and that those spirits who do not teach the doctrine are of a lower order, less intelligent than the others. If the authority of supposed spirit teachings is appealed to, we, who have attended probably more seances with different mediums than anybody in Europe, emphatically pronounce such a position to be most unsafe. Practically speaking, the doctrine has not, up to the present time, been taught through any medium of any kind residing in England, and those doctrines which have been taught here have usually (with a few striking exceptions) been strongly coloured by the opinions of the medium, or those of the sitters ; in short, it may be laid down as a general principle that about ninety per cent, of spirit messages contain more of the thoughts of the medium than of the thoughts of the communicating spirit."
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