Hypolyte Léon Denizard Rivail aka Allan Kardec:
1804-1869

Allan Kardec was born October 3, 1804 in Lyon, France. At birth he was named Hypolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. Both Allan and Kardec were said to have been his names in previous incarnations. He was known as The father of Spiritism (the French variation of Spiritualism). The difference between Spiritism and Spiritualism is distinguished primarily by its acceptance of reincarnation.

When I looked up the two words, this is what I found:

Spiritism: The belief that the dead communicate with the living.
Spiritualism: The belief that the dead communicate with the living through a medium.

Allan was educated at the Institution of Pestalozzi, at Yverdun (Canton de Vaud), he acquired at an early age the habit of investigation and the freedom of thought. This in his later years of life was destined to furnish. Endowed by nature with a passion for teaching, he devoted himself at an early age to aid his school fellows who were less advanced than himself. He had a great fondness for botany and often spent an entire day walking twenty or thirty miles in search of specimens for his herbarium.

Born in a Catholic country, Allan was educated in a Protestant one. As a young boy he began to meditate on the means of bringing together a unity of various Christian sects. But because of the acts of intolerance that he witnessed under these circumstances, he labored silently for many years.

About the year 1855, the spotlight focused on the subject of the manifestations of the Spirits. Allan became dedicated in persevering the observation of that phenomenon. He could see at once that this phenomenon was the beginning of new natural laws. These were the laws that governed the relationships between the visible and the invisible world. Allan recognized that this observation of the invisible world (one of the forces of Nature) would place light on the immense problems that until then had been considered insoluble.

Allan Kardec became so dogmatic on this point that he always disparaged physical medium ship in which the objective phenomena did not bear out his doctrine. He encouraged automatic writing, where there was less danger of contradiction stemming from the psychological influence of preconceived ideas.

One of Allan's (Rivail) friends named, Emile Charles Baudin had two daughters 16 and 13, who were mediums. He began sitting at Emile's home with the girls whose messages were coming through mainly mundane natured, but once Allan was present, the messages became serious and profound. He was informed that spirits of a higher order were communicating when he was present because they knew he could comprehend the messages and get them to the public. According to Allan's writing some of the messages came from spirits such as: John the Evangelist, St. Augustine, St. Vincent De Paul, St. Louis, Socrates, Plato, Fénélon, Benjamin Franklin, and Emanuel Swedenborg. It was these advanced spirits who told him to adopt the pseudonym Allan Kardec for the books he would write "in the fulfillment of the mission" which they had for him.

When these conversations had been going on for nearly two years, one day Allan remarked to his wife, in reference to the unfolding of these views, which she had followed with intelligent sympathy: "It is a most curious thing! My conversations with the invisible intelligences have completely revolutionized my ideas and convictions. The instructions thus transmitted constitute an entirely new theory of human life, duty, and destiny, that appears to me to be perfectly rational and coherent, admirably lucid and consoling, and intensely interesting. I have a great mind to publish these conversations in a book; for it seems to me that what interests me so deeply might very likely prove interesting to others." His wife warmly approving the idea, he next submitted it to his unseen interlocutors, who replied in the usual way, that it was they who had suggested it to his mind, that their communications had been made to him, not for himself alone, but for the express purpose of being given to the world as he proposed to do, and that the time had now come for putting this plan into execution. "To the book in which you will embody our instructions," continued the communicating intelligences, "you will give, as being our work rather than yours, the title of Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirits' Book); and you will publish it, not under your own name, but under the pseudonym of Allan Kardec. Keep your own name of Rivail for your own books already published; but take and keep the name we have now given you for the book you are about to publish by our order, and, in general, for all the work that you will have to do in the fulfillment of the mission which, as we have already told you, has been confided to you by Providence, and which will gradually open before you as you proceed in it under our guidance."

April 18th, 1857, Allan (Rivail) book entitled Le Livre des Esprits (The Spirit's Book) was published.

Below are a few of the questions that he asked the spirits with their answers. I only choose to a few because I wanted to give a good example of The Spirit's Book.

(Q) Have the human beings who inhabit the other worlds bodies like ours?
(A) "They undoubtedly have bodies, because it is necessary for the spirit to be clothed with matter in order to act upon matter; but, this envelope is more or less material according to the degree of purity at which each spirit has arrived, and it is these gradations of purity that decide the different worlds through which we have to pass; for in our Father's house are many mansions, and therefore many degrees among those mansions. There are some who know this, and possess the consciousness of this fact, while upon the earth; and there are others who have no such intuition."

(Q) Can we obtain any exact knowledge of the physical and moral state of the different worlds?
(A) "We, spirits, can only reply according to the degree at which you have arrived, that is to say, that we must not reveal these things to all, because some are not in the state which would enable them to understand such revelations, and would be confused by them."

(Q) Might not the certainty of being able to improve one's self in a future existence lead some persons to persist in evil courses, through knowing that they will always be able to amend at some later period?
(A) "He who could make such a calculation would have no real belief in anything; and such a one would not be any more restrained by the idea of incurring eternal punishment, because his reason would reject that idea, which leads to every sort of unbelief. An imperfect spirit, it is true, might reason in that way during his corporeal life; but when he is freed from his material body, he thinks very differently; for he soon perceives that he has made a great mistake in his calculations, and this perception causes him to carry an opposite sentiment into his next incarnation. It is thus that progress is accomplished; and it is thus also that you have upon the earth some men who are farther advanced than others, because some possess experience that the others have not yet acquired, but that will be gradually acquired by them. It depends upon each spirit to hasten his own advancement or to retard it indefinitely."