Chapter 9 : The between “The Doctrine” and Reflexivity

Rio de Janeiro, early 1990s. A Kardecist Spiritist center located at an affluent neighborhood had been innovating with “chromotherapy” sessions which took place before the weekly séance rituals. In a dark room, volunteers held a color-​ filtered flashlight over patients on a chair. The intention was to improve their “energetic health”, consequently ameliorating the entire being. Weeks later, however, to everyone’s surprise, the director of the center announced that the practice had to stop. He cited a letter sent by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (Federação Espírita Brasileira, or feb hereafter) formally stating that chromo- therapy was not a Spiritist practice. An upset member, a medium who regular- ly attended the center, wrote back to feb on her own. The official response was polite but it confirmed: “the central coordinating body of the national - ist movement does not condemn chromotherapy but, in fact, advises against esoteric practices and other alternative therapies being adopted in Spiritist centers.” The argument given by feb was deemed weak by local volunteers, “chromotherapy should not be seen as a scientific aspect of Spiritism, nor is it related to the doctrine codified by Kardec”, and concluded that the “greater purpose of the Spiritist institution is to promote the spiritual growth of people on earth.” Chromotherapy sessions were thereafter replaced by “fluidic passes” (hand imposition), a long-​held spiritual practice recognized by feb. , early 1980s. Zibia Gasparetto, famous medium and regular TV guest, telepathically writes down the complaints made by the spirit of a de- ceased journalist about the spiritual world he inhabits: “Soon I learned that there was terrible censorship around here. Nothing can be conveyed to hu- mans without the permission of the spiritual leaders.” As she writes in her book Bate-​Papo com o Além (literally “chit-​chatting with the ”), the spirit insinuated: “The absence of atmospheric pressure is an advantage of the world I live, but there are pressures of a different nature nevertheless.” Af- ter two decades of military dictatorship, ’s return to democracy meant an increasing acceptance of criticism in general. Unexpectedly, this critique was being indirectly turned to the Brazilian Spiritist Federation, the ultimate representative of Kardec-based​ Spiritism in the nation. The Gasparetto fam- ily gradually distanced itself from the institutional orthodoxy of São Paulo State chapter of FEB. Zibia’s son, Luiz Antônio became especially famous for

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004380110_010​ New Age Spiritism 107 his art paintings which he claimed to telepathically receive from deceased masters (Renoir, Picasso, Monet, etc.) while in a trance state. With a degree in , he attended Esalen, the international center for holistic thinking in California, inspiring him to open the Espaço Vida e Consciência (Space Life and Consciousness), a holistic center catering to middle-​class individuals of the city of São Paulo since the 1990s. In addition to his , psycho- logical and artistic proclivities, Luiz was a LGBT personality, wrote several self-​ help books, and regularly appeared on TV shows. Diseased in May 2018 at age 68, his spiritualist work aimed at promoting a “revision of traditional Spiritism in a more eclectic and universalist direction.” These episodes underscore the collision of two religious movements origi- nated in nineteenth-​century New . On the one hand, the positivist Spiritism codified by in France was brought by affluent profes- sionals in 1880s, and adapted to the local circumstances of imperial Brazil. On the other, its younger sibling, the New Age presents itself as the emergent alien promoting individualist syncretisms in post-​traditional fashion. From that common origin, both Kardecism and the New Age have adapted the notion of a sacred self to widely different historical contexts. While heralding the rise of modern individualism in the religious scene, Spiritism takes a different direction after transposed to Brazil in the 1880s. Whereas in Europe it provided a channel for the intellectual curiosity of the petit bourgeoisie, in Brazil it had to adapt to the daunting of a post-​ colonial nation whose elites have long been trying to modernize. They saw French-​inspired Spiritism as an opportunity to provide a “modern” or “civ- ilized” to a population they deemed uneducated and superstitious (Damazio, 1994). But its development in Brazil remained largely isolated from the rest of the world, particularly when compared to twentieth-​century coun- tercultures which later resulted in the New Age. To understand the Spiritist matrix that the New Age will encounter in the 1980s, we must briefly review key studies on Spiritism. The scholarship has fo- cused on the symbolic and ritual aspects in Spiritist groups, on historic anal- yses of its dissemination against competing systems of healing, and on its re- lationship with a broader national (Giumbelli, 1995b). More generally, authors have exclusively privileged either a sociological or a culturalist angle (p.7). Spiritism is seen either as an that can be explained according to a more basic (economic or psychosocial) domain, or as an expression of a na- tional culture that contributes to its expansion (p. 11). An intermediate position proposes that religion is only one of the domains that Spiritists use to move on a daily basis (Cavalcanti, 1983: 34). It generates that help interpret but are also influenced by the material world, indicating that “the relation of