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Brazil has the largest Catholic population in the world, but in the last decades, this predominance of Catholicism has been decreasing. The Catholic Church has been losing followers mainly to Neo-charismatic movements and to Spiritism/Kardecism.
Spiritism is a spiritualistic philosophy codified in the 19th century by the French educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, under the code name Allan Kardec; it proposed the study of “the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relation with the corporeal world”. Spiritism soon spread to other countries, having today 35 countries represented in the International Spiritist Council.
Spiritism postulates that humans are essentially immortal spirits that temporarily inhabit physical bodies for several necessary incarnations to attain moral and intellectual improvement. It also asserts that spirits, through passive or active mediumship, may have beneficent or maleficent influence on the physical world.
The term first appeared in Kardec’s book, The Spirits Book, which sought to distinguish Spiritism from spiritualism.
