From skepticism to systematic study
Rivail was born in Lyon in 1804 and built a career in education before turning his attention, in 1854, to the "rapping" phenomena then drawing attention across America and Europe. Initially doubtful, he attended a demonstration at friends' urging and came away convinced the events warranted rigorous investigation rather than dismissal. A group of researchers eventually handed him some fifty notebooks of transcribed communications from mediums, which he organized and supplemented with his own questions posed to mediums in different countries, comparing their answers for consistency. The resulting work, "The Spirits' Book," was first published in 1857 under the name Allan Kardec, and a revised English translation appeared in 1996 through the U.S. Allan Kardec Educational Society, which judged the original translation's language obscure.
A cosmology of progressing spirits
The book is structured as answers, said to come from spirit communicators, to more than a thousand questions about God, the soul, and the afterlife. Its central claims describe a spirit-world understood as the primary and eternal reality, with the physical world as secondary; human beings are described as spirits temporarily housed in a body and linked to it by an intermediate "perispirit." Spirits are described as belonging to different orders reflecting their moral and intellectual development, and as advancing toward that development gradually through repeated incarnations rather than in a single lifetime.
Kardecist spiritism holds that spirits do not incarnate in animal form, that the human species alone was chosen for the incarnation of developed spirits, and that both departed loved ones and higher intelligences can communicate with the living, generally through a medium, either spontaneously or in response to being called. This body of teaching remained a distinct spiritual movement in Brazil, and it is this Kardecist current — not Santo Daime itself — that later Santo Daime figures such as Padrinho Sebastião drew on as practicing Spiritist mediums.