Kardec: The Biography

Kardec: The Biography tells the story of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, a skeptical teacher and author of pedagogical books in 19th-century France, whose life was transformed when he saw tables spinning in the air and dictating, to the sound of knocks, messages whose authorship was attributed to illustrious or anonymous dead people.

Rivail had a scientific theory to explain these episodes: it was the magnetic force of the séance participants, not ghosts, that fueled the tables. Other possible explanations were much simpler: fraud, collective hypnosis, autosuggestion. However, by using his Cartesian methods to investigate such events, witnessed by multitudes in Europe and the United States and revered by celebrities such as the writer Victor Hugo, he not only became convinced of the existence of occult forces but also changed his life and name to give voice to the spirits. At 53, after putting the invisible to the test, he became Allan Kardec, an increasingly well-known, admired, and persecuted figure.

In this book Kardec: a biography , Marcel Souto Maior, author of The Lives of Chico Xavier , goes into the field in search of the details of the events that transformed the skeptic into the leader of a doctrine, making him believe that the dead communicated through mediums and face fierce opponents from the Church and the press to bring his faith in the survival of the spirit to the greatest number of people.

The result of this research is this surprising portrait of the man who became a symbol of a doctrine for millions of followers and helped transform Brazil into the largest Spiritist country in the world.

In 2019, in celebration of Allan Kardec's 150th birthday, Kardec was adapted for the cinema by director Wagner de Assis, produced by Conspiração and distributed by Sony Pictures, with Leonardo Medeiros in the role of Allan Kardec.