The Mediums' Book

by Allan Kardec, Anna Blackwell (Translator)

Overview

The Mediums' Book is about mediumship – a faculty that enables the communication between human beings and the spirits.The Mediums' Book -Le Livre des Médiums, in French, is a book by Allan Kardec published in 1861, second of the five Fundamental Works of Spiritism - the spiritualist philosophy Kardec had been publishing - being the tome in which the experimental and investigative features of the doctrine were presented, explained and taught.It is intended to be actual handbook for would-be mediums, containing doctrine and practices that one must master in order to become a medium, an elementary course on theories and basic methods to assess the new light that had never been tried by rational inquiry before: the interaction of the physical and spiritual worlds.The Book on Mediums set the bases and the terminology that guided Parapsychology and Paranormality for quite sometime. In its pages one will find a classification of paranormal phenomena, with a special focus on those capable of communicating messages, and thorough descriptions of the mechanisms that - according to Spiritism - were involved. It also contains serious warnings against unguided use of the gift of mediumship, especially without the necessary seriousness.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013647060
Publisher:	Montecristo Publishing LLC
Publication date:	09/25/2011
Series:	Allan Kardec's Spiritist Codification , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	615 KB

About the Author

Allan Kardec is the pen name of the French teacher and educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (Lyon, October 3, 1804 – Paris, March 31, 1869). He is known today as the systematizer of Spiritism for which he laid the foundation with the five books of the Spiritist Codification.
Early life Rivail was born in Lyon in 1804. He was a disciple and collaborator of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and a teacher of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, physiology, comparative anatomy and French in Paris. For one of his research papers, he was inducted in 1831 into the Royal Academy of Arras. He organized and taught free courses for the underprivileged.
He was already in his early 50s when he became interested in the wildly popular phenomenon of spirit-tapping. At the time, strange phenomena attributed to the action of spirits were reported in many different places, most notably in the U.S. and France, attracting the attention of high society. The first such phenomena were at best frivolous and entertaining, featuring objects that moved or "tapped" under what was said to be spirit control. In some cases, this was alleged to be a type of communication: the supposed spirits answered questions by controlling the movements of objects so as to pick out letters to form words, or simply indicate "yes" or "no."
Rivail used the name "Allan Kardec" allegedly after a spirit identified as Zefiro, whom he had been communicating with, told him about a previous incarnation of his as a Druid by that name. Rivail liked the name and decided to use it to keep his Spiritists writings separate from his work, basically books for high school students.
On April 18, 1857 Rivail (signing himself "Allan Kardec") published his first book on Spiritism, The Spirits' Book, comprising a series of 1,018 answered questions [n 1] exploring matters concerning the nature of spirits, the spirit world, and the relations between the spirit world and the material world. This was followed by a series of other books, like The Book on Mediums and The Gospel According to Spiritism, and by a periodical, the Revue Spirite, which Kardec published until his death. Kardec thus produced the books that form the Spiritist Codification.
Allan Kardec coined the word "spiritism" and followed pseudo-scientific methods in its study, which was recognized among others by Camille Flammarion, a famous French astronomer and author, who said "spiritism is not a religion but a science".