THE PROMISED COMFORTER
Books
The essential Spiritist library in English — Kardec’s Codification, the André Luiz novels and the classics that carried the doctrine to the world, in editions sold in the United States.
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Spiritism was born in books — five of them, published in Paris between 1857 and 1868, that are still studied today. This page gathers the essential Spiritist library in English: the Codification of Allan Kardec, the André Luiz novels psychographed by Chico Xavier, and the classic that carried the doctrine into the twentieth century — every one in an edition you can order in the United States.
New to all of this? Start with the first section below. And if you would rather watch before you read, visit our Films page — every film there began as one of these books.
Start here
Two doors into the doctrine: Kardec’s own short introduction, and the great book of questions and answers that founded Spiritism.
What Is Spiritism?
Kardec wrote this short book in 1859 as the doorway to everything else. Most of it is a dialogue: a critic, a skeptic and a priest put their hardest questions to him, and he answers each one calmly and briefly. The later chapters condense the essence of The Spirits’ Book and The Mediums’ Book, and this edition opens with Henri Sausse’s abridged biography of Kardec himself. If you read one short book first, read this one.
The Spirits’ Book
The book that started it all, in 1857. Kardec organized more than a thousand questions — on God, the soul, life after death, reincarnation and the moral laws — and set down the answers he received from spirits through different mediums, comparing and systematizing them. It is the foundation stone of Spiritism, and still the reference every other Spiritist book points back to. This is the current United States Spiritist Council English edition.
The Codification — the five books of Allan Kardec
After The Spirits’ Book (above), Kardec completed the Codification with four more volumes: the practice, the morality, the justice and the origins. Together, the five are the doctrinal foundation of Spiritism.
The Mediums’ Book
The practical volume of the Codification. Kardec classifies mediumistic phenomena, explains how mediums develop and exercise their faculty, and deals frankly with the difficulties, dangers and moral discipline of the practice. Where The Spirits’ Book lays out the philosophy, this one is the working manual — the book Spiritist centers still study before any session.
The Gospel According to Spiritism
The moral heart of the Codification. Kardec takes the teachings of Jesus — the parables, the Beatitudes, “outside of charity there is no salvation” — and explains them in the light of Spiritism, alongside instructions attributed to spirits. It is the most devotional of the five books, and the one most often read aloud in Spiritist centers and in home Gospel study.
Heaven and Hell
Divine Justice according to Spiritism. In the first part, Kardec examines heaven, hell, purgatory and the fear of death with reason rather than dogma. The second part collects accounts attributed to spirits of people who died in very different conditions — the happy, the suffering, the repentant — each describing, in the Spiritist account, what they found on the other side.
Genesis
Kardec’s last book takes on the biggest questions of all: the origin of the Earth and of life, the “miracles” of the Gospel and the predictions attributed to Jesus — each examined against natural law rather than the supernatural. It is the volume where Spiritism states most clearly that faith and science do not need to be enemies.
Life in the Spirit World — the André Luiz series
Between 1944 and the years that followed, the medium Chico Xavier psychographed a series of novels signed by the spirit André Luiz — a physician who tells, in the first person, what he found after death. They are the most beloved narrative books in Spiritism.
Nosso Lar: Life in the Spirit World
The story that carried the Spiritist view of the afterlife to millions of readers. André Luiz, a successful Rio de Janeiro physician, dies — and wakes up not in heaven or hell, but in a shadowy region called the Umbral. Rescued to Nosso Lar, “Our Home,” a spirit colony of work, study and preparation for reincarnation, he slowly understands the life he wasted — and the one still ahead of him. The source of the film Astral City.
The Messengers
The second André Luiz volume follows spirits who return to Earth as messengers, working alongside incarnate mediums — and shows, from the other side, what that work demands: preparation, humility, and follow-through on the commitments made before birth. A book about responsibility as much as about the afterlife, and the direct source of the film Astral City 2: The Messengers.
Missionaries of the Light
The third volume goes where few religious books venture: into the process of reincarnation itself. André Luiz accompanies the missionary spirits who prepare a rebirth — the perispirit as the living mold of the physical body, and the choices and constraints that shape a new life. Demanding, detailed, and for many readers the most fascinating of the series.
A classic companion
After Kardec’s death in 1869, no one carried his work further than Léon Denis — the self-taught French writer readers call the Apostle of Spiritism.
After Death
Denis distilled a lifetime of study into this book, his best known. In clear, literary prose he takes up the questions every grieving person asks: Is death the end? Where do we go? Will we meet again? Drawing on the Codification and on decades of the Spiritist movement’s experience, he answers with the doctrine’s central consolations — the survival of the soul, reincarnation, and the moral purpose of suffering. It has comforted readers for well over a century; this is the United States Spiritist Council’s newly translated and revised English edition. Read more about its author on our Léon Denis biography page.
Prefer to meet these stories on screen first? See the Films page →