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Allan Kardec

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (French: [ʁivaj]; 3 October 1804 – 31 March 1869), known by the pen name of Allan Kardec ([kaʁdɛk]), was a French educator, translator, and writer. He is the author of the five books known as the Spiritist Codification, and the founder of Spiritism.

Rivail was born in Lyon in 1804 and raised as a Roman Catholic. He pursued interests in philosophy and the sciences, and became an acolyte and colleague of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Rivail completed a Bachelor of Arts and a doctorate in medicine. He was also fluent in German, English, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to his native French. Kardec became interested in Protestantism after his education in Switzerland. He was also trained in positivist ideas, although he ended up not being an orthodox positivist.

He was a member of several scholarly societies, including the Historic Institute of Paris (Institut Historique), Society of Natural Sciences of France (Société des Sciences Naturelles de France), Society for the Encouragement of National Industry (Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale), and The Royal Academy of Arras (Académie d'Arras, Société Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts). He organized and taught free courses for the underprivileged. He was also involved, from the age of 19, with the controversial hypothesis of animal magnetism, being a practitioner of mesmerism.

Rivail's work with Pestalozzi helped lay the foundations for the teaching model in schools in France and Germany.[citation needed] For several decades he helped advance Pestalozzi's pedagogy in France, founding schools and working as a teacher, educational writer and translator.

In 1839, with a new partner, Mr. Maurice Delachatre, a merchant, he created a so-called "exchange" bank, which aimed to facilitate commercial transactions and thus create new opportunities for trade and industry, in order to support in default of pecuniary resources for the natural products.[clarification needed] The duration of the trading bank was fixed by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry at ten years.

According to “My predictions concerning spiritualism” as he himself described in his manuscript written between 1855 and 1856, "in May 1855, he met a certain Mr. Fortier, a magnetizer, who took him to Madame de Plainemaison, a medium who lived in the Rue de la Grange Bateliere in Paris, just a step away from the Opera House. In the presence of other guests for the session, he entered into communication with a spirit named Zephyr, who gave him the mission of being the spokesman of the Dead. For him, it was a revelation. He was there, for the first time, witnessing the phenomenon of turntables jumping and running".[clarification needed]

Rivail was in his early 50s when he became interested in séances, which were a popular entertainment at the time. Strange phenomena attributed to the action of spirits were considered a novelty, featuring objects that moved or "tapped", purportedly under the control of "spirits". 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". At the time, Franz Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism had become popular. When confronted with the phenomena described, some researchers, including Rivail, pointed out that animal magnetism might explain them. Rivail, however, after seeing a demonstration, dismissed animal magnetism as insufficient to explain his observations.

As a result of these influences, Rivail began his own investigation of psychic phenomena, mainly mediumship. During his initial investigation, he stated that before accepting a spiritual or paranormal cause for some phenomena, it would be necessary first to test if ordinary material causes could explain them. He proposed that fraud, hallucination and unconscious mental activity might explain many phenomena regarded as mediumistic, and also proposed that telepathy and clairvoyance may be responsible.

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systematizer of Spiritism (1804–1869)
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