The Gospel Explained by the Spiritist Doctrine
Allan Kardec, the nom de plume of H. Leon Denizard Rivail, was a French educator and philosopher born in Lyon on October 3, 1804. In Iverdon, Switzerland, he studied under the prominent Swiss educator, J. H. Pestalozzi, becoming one of his close collaborators. On returning to France, Rivail founded a school modeled after Pestalozzi's and published works on public education and on the teaching of mathematics and French. For one of his research papers, he was inducted into the Royal Academy of Arras. Rivail spoke several languages, and his impressive intellectual background allowed him to teach courses in comparative psychology, astronomy, chemistry and physics in a prestigious scientific school in Paris. Like his teacher Pestalozzi, he was also a champion of the under privileged and, from 1835 to 1840, organized and taught free classes in his own home.In 1854, at the age of 50, Rivail first heard of the mysterious "rapping" phenomena that had taken America and Europe by storm. Despite his initial skepticism, he was convinced by close friends to attend an experimental meeting where he was able to witness such occurrences first hand. His intellectual curiosity and scientific instincts told him that there had to be a rational explanation for those phenomena. Consequently, he began soon afterwards to conduct investigations of his own. Eventually he was approached by a group of fellow-researchers who asked him to organize a set of fifty notebooks containing transcripts and journals of numerous spirit communications. Using the same logical rigor that he had applied to his work in education and science, Rivail set out to study this material. In the meantime, he supplemented the transcripts with philosophical and scientific questions, which he posed which he posed to different channels (mediums) in different countries. The answers were compared, analyzed, and organized into The Spirits' Book, which was first published in 1857. To keep his new area of research apart from his writings on education, Rivail -- on the advise of spirit-instructors -- adopted the name Allan Kardec, which he was told had been his name in a previous incarnation. In addition to the books he wrote, he founded the Spiritist Society of Paris and La Revue Spirite, a journal he edited until his death in March 31, 1869.