Spiritist Knowledge

Broadly speaking, mediumship can be defined as a person's ability to get in touch with the spirits. This concept follows very closely a famous definition made by A. Kardec in his treatise on mediumship, published in the heyday of Spiritualism. At the time, it was clear that mediumship manifestations could make use of external objects (as in the case of the celebrated "table-turning" or more generally in the haunting phenomena) or simply transmit elaborate information through the so-called "intellectual mediums". It is understandable that the invention of electronic communication systems (as new manifestation media) prompted the emergence of new effects under the action of corresponding electronic mediums . As in every mediumship, the new ability can be understood as a more or less developed human skill to communicate with spirits through electronic equipment. "Development'' refers to the observed level of elaboration in the communicated message, or ...

Fig. 1 One of the earliest EVP reports published in the XX century: " Voices from the beyond on the telephone. New and admirable system of communication. Spirits talk on the telephone ''. As in XK's karaoke recordings, the Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP (*) gained notoriety when F. Jürgenson (1903-1987), a Swedish artist and singer, was recording birdsongs in 1959. At first, he believed voices were interference sources coming from radio stations operating nearby. Since the voices replied unmistakably to “callings”, and other anomalous answers were obtained even when the equipment was shielded in Faraday cages (to block external electromagnetic radiation), Jürgenson was convinced of their paranormal origin. Since then, names like Konstantin Raudive (1909-1974) and Hans O. König are linked to the history of EVP as relevant researchers who recorded many clear voices which cannot be explained away easily. In what appeared to be an acceptance of something already known, ...

Fig. 1 Spectrogram of the first recording showing the audio feedback at about 1KHz and the anomalous voice (AV1) after 11 seconds. The number of audio samples for each FFT segment is 256. But, soft: behold! lo where it comes again! I'll cross it, though it blast me. - Stay, illusion! If thou hast any sound, or use a voice. Speak to me! W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1 My nephew XK lives in the US and is a young American who speaks both Portuguese and English. Driven by his love for singing, he was alone at home recording songs with a Karaoke system. Careless about one of his recordings, he left the recorder on a little longer. To his surprise, he noticed an unexpected voice at the end of one of the files. After inquiring the unseen to give him and his mother a reply, the unusual voice appeared a second time. Fearing the invisible, he abandoned his karaoke sessions since then. Fig.2 Filtered waveforms of AV1 in the indicated interval showing the anomalous voice. My sister sent me two of ...

Death is a continuation. My glance penetrates  as deep as possible into this darkness where I can see,  from an extent that seems so fearful if it were not sublime,  the onset of the immense dawn of Eternity. W hat makes a man free? The soul. Who says free, says responsible as well. Is he responsible for all in this life? Definitely not, because there is anything more proved in this world than the possible and recurrent prosperity of bad men and the undeserved misfortune of the good ones during their passage on Earth. How many righteous men had only anguish and miseries until their last day? How many criminals had lived until old age in a peaceful and serene enjoyment of all goods of this world, including consideration and respect of all! Is man then responsible after this life? Evidently so, since he is not responsible during the present one. Something in him must survive to submit itself to this responsibility: the soul. The freedom of t...

Since 2003, the annual meeting of LIHPE ( Association of Researchers on Spiritism ) has been a lively space dedicated to discussions and studies on Spiritualist themes according to academic standards. LIHPE is essentially a virtual community of researchers interested in academic studies but not necessarily composed by Spiritualist people (in this sense, LIHPE is a non-denominational group). Members should only observed the group behavior standards in order to participate. In its beginning, LIHPE was created to support records on history of Spiritualism (in its Brazilian version called Spiritism - a term originally created in France in the XIX century). Other research interests were then added to the group, from a wide variety of academic fields such as philosophy, physics, psychology, social sciences, anthropology among others. Since its inception, LIHPE founder, Eduardo Carvalho Monteiro, realized that simple collaboration at distance would not be enough to establish grou...