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The Spiritist Institute The Spiritist Institute mission is to advance Spiritism in the English speaking-world.

Editor. Poet. Novelist. And one of 19th-century America's most articulate defenders of Spiritualism.Epes Sargent (1813–1...
09/27/2026

Editor. Poet. Novelist. And one of 19th-century America's most articulate defenders of Spiritualism.

Epes Sargent (1813–1880), born in Gloucester, Massachusetts on September 27, 1813, lived a literary life that would have been distinguished without Spiritualism — and a Spiritualist life that would have been remarkable without literature.

A poet, novelist, playwright, and editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, Sargent published widely in mainstream American letters. He also wrote two of the most cited defenses of Spiritualism of the 19th century: Planchette, or the Despair of Science (1869) and The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism (1880), his last book, completed weeks before his death.

The combination of his literary credibility and his earnest advocacy gave 19th-century American Spiritualism one of its most respected public voices.

Born in Galicia, he became Argentina's most enduring Spiritist voice for half a century.Cosme Mariño (1847–1927) — born ...
09/27/2026

Born in Galicia, he became Argentina's most enduring Spiritist voice for half a century.

Cosme Mariño (1847–1927) — born in Galicia, Spain, on September 27, 1847 — emigrated to Argentina as a young man and spent the next five decades building the institutional and cultural foundations of Spanish-language Spiritism in the Americas.

He presided over the Confederación Espiritista Argentina, founded and edited the magazine Constancia (one of the longest-running Spiritist publications in the Spanish-speaking world), and was instrumental in connecting the Argentine Spiritist movement to its French and Brazilian counterparts. By the time of his death in 1927, the movement he led was the central Spiritist body in South America outside Brazil.

His contemporaries called him the Argentine Kardec — a tribute to the rigor and devotion he brought to the work.

Eighty books. One lifetime. One conviction: that Spiritism could reconcile science and spirit.José Herculano Pires (1914...
09/25/2026

Eighty books. One lifetime. One conviction: that Spiritism could reconcile science and spirit.

José Herculano Pires (1914–1979), born in Avaré, São Paulo on this day in 1914, was Brazilian Spiritism's most rigorous 20th-century systematizer.

A journalist by training and a philosopher by temperament, Pires authored more than eighty books examining the philosophical, scientific, and religious dimensions of Spiritism — and translated all five of Allan Kardec's foundational works into modern Portuguese, in editions that remain the standard reference for Brazilian study groups today.

He insisted, against both Spiritist orthodoxy and skeptical dismissal, that Spiritism was neither a religion nor a faith — but a science of the soul that the modern world was still learning how to take seriously.

Two brothers. Four continents. The most-witnessed physical mediumship of the 19th century.Ira Erastus Davenport (1839–19...
09/17/2026

Two brothers. Four continents. The most-witnessed physical mediumship of the 19th century.

Ira Erastus Davenport (1839–1911), born in Buffalo, New York on this day in 1839, was — with his older brother William — one of the most internationally visible mediums of the early Spiritualist movement.

Beginning as teenagers in the early 1850s, the Davenport Brothers demonstrated the phenomena of physical mediumship in front of audiences across the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and Australia. Their hallmark presentation involved being securely bound inside a wooden cabinet, after which witnesses observed musical instruments playing, hands appearing, and other manifestations through the cabinet's openings.

For Victorians who had only read about séances, the Davenports were often the first time they witnessed the phenomena firsthand — and a significant reason Spiritualism became as widely discussed as it did across the 1860s and 70s.

Twenty-seven years after Barcelona burned Kardec's books, the city hosted Spiritism's first international congress.On Se...
09/08/2026

Twenty-seven years after Barcelona burned Kardec's books, the city hosted Spiritism's first international congress.

On September 8, 1888, the First International Spiritist Congress opened in Barcelona — held deliberately in the same neighborhood that had publicly burned Allan Kardec's books at an auto-da-fé just 27 years earlier. The symbolism of the venue was not lost on the participants.

Organized by the Vizconde de Torres-Solanot, the Congress drew representatives from 70 Spanish societies, 18 from South America, and 124 from France. The writer Amalia Domingo Soler served as vice-president. Delegates voted to establish an autonomous federation of all Spiritist organizations — the first step toward what would become the international Spiritist conversation that continues to this day.

Subsequent international congresses would follow in Paris (1900, 1925) and elsewhere. Barcelona was the first — and a symbolic victory for the Spanish movement.

What did Victor Hugo do during two years of political exile? Take dictation from the dead.On September 6, 1853, Victor H...
09/06/2026

What did Victor Hugo do during two years of political exile? Take dictation from the dead.

On September 6, 1853, Victor Hugo — exiled from France for opposing Napoleon III, then living on Jersey Island — sat down at a séance for the first time, at the suggestion of his friend Delphine de Girardin.

What followed was extraordinary. For nearly two years, Hugo and his family held hundreds of sessions of table-turning, recording transcripts of communications they attributed to Shakespeare, Molière, Joan of Arc, Plato, Galileo, his dead daughter Léopoldine, and others. The transcripts, kept private during his life, were eventually published as Le Livre des Tables.

The séances ended in 1855 when one of the regular participants suffered a psychotic break. But Hugo remained convinced of the survival of the soul for the rest of his life — a conviction that shaped his later poetry and the great spiritual passages of Les Misérables.

What does an Anglican priest do when his own hand begins writing messages he never composed?William Stainton Moses (1839...
09/05/2026

What does an Anglican priest do when his own hand begins writing messages he never composed?

William Stainton Moses (1839–1892) — Anglican priest, school teacher, and one of the most respected mediums of the British Spiritualist movement — discarnated in Bedford on September 5, 1892.

It began in 1872 with a séance attended out of professional curiosity. Within a year he was producing automatic writing — long philosophical treatises he attributed to a group of spirits he came to call "the Imperator." Those writings were eventually published as Spirit Teachings (1883), a book widely regarded as one of the most articulate spiritual works to come out of the Victorian Spiritualist movement.

He co-founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and edited Light magazine until his death — the journal continues publication to this day.

Under his careful hypnotic protocols, dozens of subjects described in detail lives they said they had lived before being...
09/02/2026

Under his careful hypnotic protocols, dozens of subjects described in detail lives they said they had lived before being born.

Eugène Auguste Albert de Rochas d'Aiglun (1837–1914) — French military engineer, director of the École Polytechnique, and one of the most rigorous psychical researchers of his era — discarnated in Grenoble on September 2, 1914.

Rochas spent decades investigating hypnotic phenomena. His early work examined what he called the "exteriorization of sensitivity" — the phenomenon by which a subject's perceptions seemed to extend beyond the body. His later work in Les Vies Successives (1911) published detailed transcripts of subjects under hypnotic regression who described, often with verifiable specificity, lives they said they had lived before being born.

His research did not claim to prove reincarnation. It opened the question to scientific examination — and helped shift the survival debate from purely mediumistic phenomena into the territory of memory and identity.

Portuguese Spiritism opened its first national chapter in Lisbon on this day in 1926.On August 31, 1926, the Federação E...
08/31/2026

Portuguese Spiritism opened its first national chapter in Lisbon on this day in 1926.

On August 31, 1926, the Federação Espírita Portuguesa (FEP) was founded in Lisbon, becoming the central institutional body for the Spiritist movement in Portugal.

For a century the FEP has anchored Portuguese-language Spiritist scholarship, federations, study groups, and conferences — connecting Portugal to the broader international Spiritist community in France, Brazil, and beyond. Its quarterly journal, books, and study programs remain reference points for Spiritist readers across the Lusophone world.

Doctor. Politician. A spirit communicator Brazil has been hearing for more than a century.Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Cava...
08/29/2026

Doctor. Politician. A spirit communicator Brazil has been hearing for more than a century.

Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes Cavalcanti (1831–1900) — born in Riacho do Sangue, Ceará, on this day in 1831 — was a physician, congressman, and journalist who became one of the most beloved public figures of 19th-century Brazil.

He treated the poor of Rio de Janeiro without charge, served in Parliament, and edited journals advocating for the abolition of slavery and the welfare of the poor. After joining the Brazilian Spiritist Federation in 1886, he became one of its most influential leaders, serving twice as its president.

More than a century after his discarnation, his spirit continues to be cited as a communicator and helper in Brazilian Spiritist circles.

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