Allan Kardec

And, you know, they worked for the diplomatic service, my parents did.

However, they had a lot of ties into these communities, while at the same time having a library, you know, filled with Nietzsche and you know, all kinds of philosophy and, you know, whatever was in vogue in the 70s and 60s, like Allan Kardec and, you know, spiritism and so forth, right? Like a wild library.

And of course, you know, I didn't find a lot of TV programs in Africa back then, you know, which were really of interest to me, which was good in the sense that it made me read a lot.

And I just would go through all those books in my father's library, which I found, oh, which actually sounded cool.

Reincarnation?

Yeah, because Alan Kardec, who started spiritualism, he's French.

And that's where, I mean, that's where my, you know, because that's so big in Brazil.

Spiritism.

Spiritism.

Because, I mean, my grandma's in...

Alan Kardec spiritist.

Nice.

Then something happened.

In Victorian times, there was a man who came along named Allan Kardec.

He was French.

And it became very, very, very...

It became kind of like a cultural phenomenon that happened in the United States and happened in Europe called spiritism.

And Allan Kardec... who was a teacher and then became, I guess you could say, a paranormal investigator, honestly, who studied mediums and trance mediums and people who are getting possessed by spirits and people who talk to spirits.

The spiritism became the doctrine of spiritism.

And Allan Kardec wrote books on this.

It's the early 1860s, and spiritualism is attracting people who believe they're witnessing scientific discoveries.

In France, a writer named Allan Kardec had published The Spirit's Book and The Medium's Book, presenting spiritualism as a system for investigating the invisible world.

And if you consider what else is happening in the world during these years, that kind of makes sense.

Photography is still relatively new, but telegraph makes it possible to send messages across enormous distances.

The board was partially inspired by the planchette, a device previously used by spiritualists to communicate with the deceased.

Initially developed by Alan Kardec, the device, described as either a heart-shaped or shield-shaped piece of wood with a hole at the top to hold a pencil, the planchette first arrived in the United States in 1858, where it became incredibly popular, selling over 200,000 units in its first year alone.

Its popularity continued throughout the 1860s as the device was sold primarily in toy and bookstores before being repurposed for the Ouija board in the 1890s.

As Hugh Urban shares, quote, together, the planchette and the Ouija board helped introduce spirit communication to a much broader audience of ordinary customers, muddying the boundary between spiritual phenomena and popular commodities to be enjoyed in middle-class living rooms and opening the door for a new mass audience to begin experimenting in mediumship, end quote.

Now I'm a spiritist.

I follow a religion that also things guide me, like Alan Kardec.

I don't know if you're familiar with it.

I've been a spiritist since 2004, and I lecture in spirit centers.

Godfather Sebastião, Padrinho Sebastião, was a guy who was raised in the Cardassist era.

tradition, spiritualism, spiritism in Brazil, which means that you communicate with the dead, which also goes very well with indigenous people, although Allan Kardec, the founder of this spirituality, is Swiss.

It goes some kind of well with indigenous religions.

That is the communication with ancestors.

Y- you had mentioned that maybe the people that are controlling these platforms or algorithms, and maybe I misheard you, but did you say something about maybe how they're not human?

human?Um, Jason and I are about to do an episode on a guy who published under the name Allan Kardec.

This was back at the end of the Victorian, I don't know, 1850 up into the very early 1900s when seances were the big deal.

Um, and what's interesting is he demonstrated they were making contact.

But there's a bad neighborhood there.

There's a couple of them that have been identified through culture after culture after culture.

And one of the things Allan Kardec did in spades was he's amazed, "Look, we're contacting this, and we verified it with these other people in this other place, and they're laying it all down." But what he came to realize is we don't know who we're talking to.

They've got the upper hand here.