ABSTRACT
The birth of modern spiritualism and its democratisation process started with the Fox sisters who discovered a way of communicating with the spirit of a dead person through mysterious raps and knocks. Leon Rivail under the Breton pseudonym of Alain Kardec, tried to unify and codify Spiritualism to make it a religion ‘tinted with sentimentalism and rationalism’. In the nineteenth century, the Theosophical Society and Occultism criticised modern Spiritualist movement because of the reductionism of its vision of the noumenal world. Spiritualism as they represent it only contacts the spirits of the dead, while they believe in the presence of other kinds of spirits such as elementais, astral bodies, angels, demons. In the West, the cultural transaction between evolutionism and the theory of reincarnation allowed only for progressive reincarnation: progress on a symbolic spiritual ladder, until the final theomorphic stage. Serious spiritual progress needs to be achieved over thousands, may be millions of years.
