Spiritist Knowledge

T he journal  Explore  (1) has recently published an article by Alexandre Caroli Rocha, Denise Paraná, Elizabeth Schmitt Freire, Francisco Lotufo Neto and Alexander Moreira-Almeida containing an interesting study about the mediumship of Chico Xavier. Entitled " Investigating the Fit and Accuracy of Alleged Mediumistic Writing: A Case Study of Chico Xavier’s Letters ", the work performed an analysis of 13 psychographic letters and searched for the degree of information accuracy in each of them against the chance of "normal" access by the medium to that information. The article abstract reads: We identified 99 items of verifiable information conveyed in these 13 letters; 98% of these items were rated as “Clear and Precise Fit” and no item was rated as “no Fit.” We concluded that normal explanations for accuracy of the information (i.e., fraud, chance, information leakage, and cold reading) were only remotely plausible. These results seem to provide empirical...

Fig. 1 Brazilian postage stamp released in 2010 in commemoration to Xavier´s birthday.    Read more about Chico Xavier mediumship by clicking here (access to SKL repository). Introduction Brazil has a spiritualist tradition that dates back to the beginning of Spiritualism. The Spiritualist movement in Brazil is known as Spiritism and started after several works on psychic phenomena that flourish around Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804-1869) in the third quarter of the XIX century in France. Allan Kardec, as Rivail was to be known later, introduced a set of Spiritualist principles (Kardec, 1985) encompassing not only the basic precepts of Spiritualism such as life after death, the possibility of communication between the material and the ‘invisible’ worlds, but alto the belief in reincarnation. Granted the stable existence of many Spiritist groups in Brazil, many mediums found a highly favorable environment for the development of their faculties starting with p...