Spiritism in Brazil
Spiritism is well on the way to becoming the most national of the religions practiced in Brazil. Yet apart from Christian clergymen, social scientists, and of course Spiritists themselves, few educated people pay much attention to its rapid and wide spread. Although they must see the sensational picture stories frequently appearing in magazines and on screens, they fail to realize that Brazil has become the acknowledged capital of the spiritualistic world in the West. At most they may know that Brazil's most famous mediums get invitations to travel abroad North of the equator and in the Far East a ready coterie awaits these mediums whose best-selling psychographed works find foreign publishers. Spiritist journals, however, play on news of their travels to work up nationalist pride in Brazil as “Heart of the World, Homeland of the Gospel.” That self-regarding expression is the title of a popular national history psychographed (dictated by the Spirit of a deceased person to a medium who writes it down in trance) in 1938. Since then Brazilian Spiritism has grown hugely in national ardor and in numbers.