Spiritistm all Around You

Luis del Nero

Spiritism is not an invention of the XIX century. Allan Kardec himself tells us that as it deals with Natural Laws it has always existed and therefore, Spiritist phenomena have always happened from the most remote antiquity. And so it is that in our days you can see “traces” of Spiritism in the most different areas of modern life. It is as if the knowledge that Kardec organised and made available to everyone had unconsciously remained at the back of people’s minds. Occasionally surfacing here and there, on TV, cinema, works of art and the news. In this series of short articles we are going to see some examples of these “traces” of Spiritist knowledge, that we can find all around us. The film ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ has recently attracted huge attention, not only in this country, where it was created, but all around the world. In Brazil alone, no less than three of C J Rowling’s titles have headed the lists of best sellers for several weeks. The film is the story of a boy who had special 'magical’ powers, and went to a ‘school’ in order to develop them. There he gets involved in an adventure, where an evil wizard is trying to obtain a magic stone, which would ‘restore him to life’. Due to magic mishaps in his past, he was reduced to inhabiting somebody else’s body, too weak to have his own. Near the end of the film, his ‘host’, who always wears a turban, takes it off to reveal the witch’s face on the back of his own head, ordering him to snatch the stone from Harry and even to kill him. As the man touches the boy, the energy of love in Harry burns him off, as explained later on by the good wizard who presided over the school. In this very creative story, which has had such an incredible appeal on readers and audience world-wide, we can see an aspect of what we know in Spiritism as spiritual obsession. In the Book on Mediums’ Kardec defines obsession as “the dominion some spirits have over certain people.” That is, a spirit influencing the actions of an incarnate person due to a certain affinity between them, just like in the film in question. We could go further and ask ourselves where the idea of “magic” comes from. If we go back in time we could suppose that it is somehow related to mediumship; just as the sibyls, prophets, witches and xamans throughout the ages have always been know to be mediums. In our next issue, we will talk about a monument in central London that celebrates Spirit communication.