The Religious Affairs Office

Over the years, Barcelona has welcomed important figures of spiritualism such as the renowned Amàlia Domingo Soler or Miquel Vives. Josep Mª Fernández de Colavida was the first person to spread spiritualism in Spain, and he did so from the La Clota neighborhood of Barcelona in the second half of the 19th century.

Without entering into a debate about what is or is not considered religion, the followers of spiritualism themselves have never identified their movement with a religion and prefer to be regarded as a spiritual or neo-spiritual movement.

 

ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF SPIRITISM

Spiritualism is said to have started in 1848 in the United States, specifically in a house in the village of Hydesville, in New York state, which the Fox family, who were originally from Germany, had moved to. A series of paranormal phenomena began to be experienced in the house (moving objects and, above all, strange noises) which caught the attention of the curious, such as the Quaker Isaac Post, who started to devise various mediums, in collaboration with one of the Fox family’s children, for communicating with the “spirits” present in the house, the presumed forces behind the phenomena. One of these means of communication, based on a system of knocks, was the so-called spiritual telegraph. The spiritualist movement at this initial stage called itself modern spiritualism and meetings soon began to be organised, open to the public. The first general congress was held in 1852 in Cleveland. There was obviously no lack of detractors and two of the Fox family’s daughters are even said to have confessed before a crowd gathered at the New York Academy of Music that the whole thing had been a hoax and explained the tricks they had used.

The spiritualist movement came about during a period of history when there was widespread discontent and disillusionment with conventional forms of religion and a notable growing interest in all things paranormal, occultist or exotic. It was the period when numerous secret societies were set up and groups consolidated with the aim of linking up with oriental traditions, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Theosophical Society; movements whose relationships with one another were not always good but which shared quite a few interests.

The first stage of spiritualism may have been based in the United States and England, but it was in France that it entered its next, fairly crucial stage. Spiritualism in France found a more receptive environment to develop in, given its comparison, above all, with newly created occultist groups. The highest representative of spiritualism at this stage, and its great “codifier”, was Hippolyte Rivail (1804-1869), a Lyons school teacher who had moved to Paris. He called himself Allan Kardec, which, he claimed, had been the Celtic name he had used in his previous life. Five books stand out from all the works produced by Kardec and his collaborators, especially Léon Denis: “The Book of Spirits”, “The Book of Mediums”, “The Gospel According to Spiritualism”, “Heaven and Hell” and “Genesis”. These works should be considered benchmarks rather than a “closed corpus” of teachings, given that spiritualism will always be open to new “communications” from spirits.

The next stage saw spiritualism spread around the world, finding a larger reception in particular in Argentina and Brazil. A key figure from this more modern period was Chico Xavier (1910-2002), an extremely prolific author and great populariser of spiritualism worldwide.

Josep Mª Fernández de Colavida (1819-1888) was the first person to promote spiritualism in Spain, specifically in the La Clota neighbourhood in the Horta district in Barcelona. For a time, he lived in political exile in Paris, where he learnt French and came into contact with several occultist groups practising the so-called phenomenon of “magnetism”. After he returned to Barcelona, he began translating the writings of Allan Kardec, who subsequently sent him three hundred copies of his works. When the Catholic Church learnt of what he had been sent, it condemned spiritualism as a heresy and issued an order, in October 1861, for all the copies to be confiscated and burnt in Parc de la Ciutadella.

Fernández de Colavida also founded a magazine and numerous associations to promote the spiritualist movement in Spain and Latin America. The year of his death in 1888 marked the holding of the first International Spiritualist Congress in Barcelona, with the Seville-born Barcelona resident Amalia Domingo Soler (1835-1909) and her fellow Barcelona resident Miquel Vives (1842-1906) taking part in the organising council, two key figures in the history of spiritualism in Spain and the rest of the world. Some of the issues dealt with at that 1888 congress were remarkable: banning the death penalty; disarming armies; abolishing slavery; gender equality and the need for secular education.

Spiritualism and the Theosophical Society developed close ties in Barcelona thanks to figures such as Josep Xifré (1855-1920) and Francesc Montoliu (1861-1892).

The main leaders of spiritualism in Barcelona were persecuted after the Spanish Civil War and soon executed or incarcerated . Books, archives and documents belonging to spiritualists were confiscated and sent to Salamanca.

There are currently three spiritualist centres in Barcelona, all of which carry the legacy —by family tradition or studies of the works— of the first pioneers of spiritualism in Spain.

 

THE SPIRITUALIST IDEOLOGY

There is a tendency to present spiritualism as a phenomenon, but this is not completely accurate. It would be better to regard it as an attempt to explain or theorise certain phenomena. Spiritualism was originally mainly interested in phenomenon of a paranormal nature, the things normally associated with magic or witchcraft: materialisations, magnetism operations, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance and other extra-sensory faculties. Starting from these paranormal phenomena, the spiritualist movement continued to develop its own explanations for the constitution of being human and its posthumous destiny, where the idea of progress played an essential role. The life process is seen as a spiritual evolution where beings are reincarnated again and again until they reach their final moral perfection.

The importance of the social environment where spiritualism first arose deserves attention. It is hard not to notice the impact of other contemporaneous movements: Darwinian evolutionism, the exaltation of science, socialist and democratic ideologies, anarchism, anti-clericalism and so on.

We also see an internal plurality within spiritualism over time, with several schools (the Spiritualist Congress in Brussels of 1910 had already attempted to create the first Universal Spiritualist Federation) and even a different terminology when it came to defining the same fact or reality. For example, for the purposes of describing “non-corporeal” aspects of human beings, terms as varied as ectoplasm, ob (derived from Hebrew), fluid corporality, astral body, ethereal body etc. Interpretations from the Bible, the Gospels in particular, making spiritualism follow the line set out by Protestantism.

The distinctive feature of the spiritualist movement had originally been communication with the dead through material media. Spiritualism believes that a person, once dead, leaves their physical or carnal body and moves on to take a new, subtler body originally known as the perispirit; a form lying somewhere between physical body and pure spirit. The world of the dead is regarded as equivalent to the world of the living; the only difference is that the dead are disembodied and clad in perispirit.

Without entering into a debate about what is or is not considered religion, the followers of spiritualism themselves have never identified their movement with a religion and prefer to be regarded as a spiritual or neo-spiritual movement.

While spiritualism recognises the existence of God, it certainly lacks a series of features that other traditions and religions share to a greater or lesser extent. For example, it has no sacred or revealed writings, which are fundamental for establishing a religious system. Nor does it have a tradition of dogma that sees to the orthodoxy of such  writings and the development of their implicit meanings, especially those of a more metaphysical nature. And, whereas spiritualism accepts the existence of angels and prophets as mediating figures between God and humanity, it does not rule out the widespread capacity of humans too, living or dead, for being a medium. It is in the latter case where it recognises “disembodied individuals” ending up acting as “guides” or “guardian angels” for the living. Finally, as regards issues such as predestination and the afterlife, spiritualism champions the theory of reincarnation and the idea that our actions are responsible for (cause) our situation (effect).