Whoever intended to do miracles for Spiritism would be nothing but ignorant

“... Let there never be among you those who consult fortunetellers, who follow dreams and forebodings, who use evil, sorcery, enchantment, or consult those who have a Python Spirit and engage in divination practices by interrogating the dead”. - Deuteronomy, 18:10 and 12.

The Israelites were not to enter into alliances with foreign nations, and it was well known that in those nations they were going to fight, they would find the same practices. Moses should therefore politically inspire the Hebrews to dislike all customs that might have similarities and points of contact with the enemy. To justify this aversion, he had to present such practices as disapproved by God himself, and hence these words: "The Lord abhors all these things and will destroy at your arrival the nations that commit such crimes".

Moses' prohibition was quite fair, because the evocation of the dead did not originate in feelings of respect, affection, or pity towards them, but rather as a resource for divination, as well as in the omens and premonitions exploited by quackery and superstition. These practices, it seems, were also traded, and Moses, as much as he did, he failed to unravel it from popular customs.

The following words of the prophet justify the statement [5]: - "When they say to you: consult the magicians and fortune tellers who stammer enchantments, answer: - " Does not each people consult their God? And to the dead are spoken what belongs to the living? I am the one who points out the falsehood of magical wonders, who drives crazy those who propose to guess, who disturbs the Spirit of the wise and confuses their vain knowledge".  (64:25).

"Let these soothsayers, who study the sky, look at the stars and count the months to make predictions - saying that they will reveal the future to you – come now to save you. They have become like chaff, and the fire devoured them; they cannot free their souls from the blazing fire: there shall be nothing left from the flames that they caused, or coals that may heat, and nor fire where they may sit on". "This is what all these things that you have been so earnestly engaged will be reduced to: the dealers - which deal with you since your childhood - have vanished, one by one, and not one of them will be found to take away your evils”. (67:13 to 15).

Unmistakably, in those days, evocations were meant for divination, and at the same time they were trade associated with the practices of magic and spell, accompanied even by human sacrifices. Moses was right, therefore, forbidding such things and claiming that God abhorred them.

These superstitious practices perpetuated until middle Ages, but today reason prevails, at the same time that Spiritism came to show the exclusively moral, consoling and religious purpose of relations from beyond the grave.

However, since the Spiritists do not sacrifice little children, nor eat and drink to honor gods; since they do not interrogate the stars, the dead, and the augur to guess the wisely veiled truth to men; since they repudiated dealing with the faculty of communicating with the Spirits; since they are not moved by curiosity or cupidity, but a sense of pity, a desire to educate and improve oneself, relieving suffering souls; since it is so, because it is - the prohibition of Moses cannot be extended to them.

If those who unfairly cry out against Spiritists went deeper into the meaning of biblical words, they would recognize that there is nothing analogous in the principles of Spiritism with what was happening among the Hebrews. The truth is that Spiritism condemns everything that motivated the ban on Moses; but their opponents, eager to find arguments with which to rebut new ideas, do not realize that such arguments are negative because they are completely false.

Contemporary civil law punishes all abuses that Moses intended to suppress. However, if he pronounced the ultimate penalty against the delinquents, it is because he lacked the mildest means to rule such an undisciplined people. This penalty, on the other hand, was very prodigal in the Mosaic legislation, because there was not much to choose the means of repression. Without prisons or houses of correction in the wilderness, Moses could not grade the penalty as it is done today, and his people were not of a nature to be frightened by purely disciplinary penalties. Therefore, those who rely on the severity of the punishment to prove the degree of guilt in the evocation of the dead are wrong. Would it be convenient, considering the Law of Moses, to capital punishment in for all cases he stipulated it? Why, then, so insistently relive this issue, while silencing the principle of the chapter which forbids priests to possess earthly goods and share any inheritance, because the Lord is the inheritance itself? [6]

There are two distinct parts in the Law of Moses: the Law of God, promulgated over the Sinai, and the civil or disciplinary law, appropriate to the customs and character of the people. One of these laws is immutable, while the other changes as time goes by and it does not occur to anyone that we can be governed by the same means as the Jews in the desert.  

Everything had its raison d'être in the legislation of Moses, since it foresees everything in its smallest detail, but the form, as well as the background, adapted to the occasional circumstances. If Moses came back today to legislate over a civilized nation, he would certainly not give him a code like that of the Hebrews.

 ... Did not Jesus come to change the Mosaic Law, making His Law the Code of Christians? Did He not say, "Do you know what was said to the ancients, such and such, and do I tell you something else?" However, Jesus did not outlaw, but sanctioned the Law of Sinai, of which all His moral doctrine is an unfolding...Jesus never ever mentioned the prohibition of evocating the dead, and this was a very serious matter to be omitted from His preaching, especially having dealt with other secondary matters.

Are the Jewish, more than the Christian, detractors of Spiritism? It should be noted that of all religions, it is precisely the Jewish one that is least opposed to Spiritism, since it does not invoke the Law of Moses contrary to relations with the dead, as the Christian sects do.

But we have yet another contradiction: If Moses forbade the evocation of the dead it is because the dead could appear, for otherwise the ban was useless. Now if the dead could come in those days, so can they today; and if it is the Spirits of the dead who come, they are not exclusively demons. Moreover, Moses in no way speaks about the latter”.

In the basic book of Spiritism entitled "Heaven and Hell", more precisely in Chapter XI of the first part, item 8 and following, Allan Kardec teaches, with his usual intellectual and logical insight: "(...) if Moses forbade to evoke the dead, it is because they could come, for otherwise the prohibition would have been useless, but if the dead could come in those days, so can they today, and if they are Spirits of the dead, those who come are not exclusively demons. Also, Moses never spoke about the latter.

The reason is, therefore, twofold why the authority of Moses in the species cannot be logically accepted, namely: - first, because his Law does not govern Christianity; and second, because it is inappropriate to the customs of our time. But let us suppose that this Law has the fullness of authority by some granted, and yet it cannot, as we have seen, apply to Spiritism. It is true that Moses’ banning covers the interrogation of the dead, but in a secondary way, as an adjunct to witchcraft practices. The very word interrogation, together with those of soothsayer and the one that used divination, proves that among the Hebrews, evocation was used for guessing; however, Spiritists only call upon the dead to receive wise counsel and to obtain relief for those who suffer, never to gain unlawful revelation. Surely, if the Hebrews used communications as the Spiritists do, far from forbidding them, Moses would reinforce them, because their people would only have to profit with it.

Admittedly, some good-hearted or malicious critics have described the Spiritist gatherings as assemblies of necromancers or wizards, and the mediums as astrologers and Gypsies, because perhaps some charlatans have attached such names to their practices, and this Spiritism cannot approve.

On the other hand, there are also many people who do justice and testify the essentially moral and reliable nature of serious meetings. Also, the Doctrine, in books worldwide, protests loudly against abuse so that slander falls on those who deserve it. (...) That skeptics deny the manifestation of souls, it is acceptable, since they do not believe in them; but what is odd enough is to see them so much against the means to prove that their exist, striving to demonstrate the impossibility of those means, the very ones whose beliefs lie in the existence and in the future of souls! It would seem more natural that they accept as benefits of Providence the means of confusing skeptics with irrefutable proof, since they are the deniers of religion itself. Those who have an interest in the existence of the soul constantly deplore the avalanche effect of disbelief that invades the flock of believers, decimating it: but when the most powerful means of fighting it is presented, they refuse it with as much or more stubbornness that the unbelievers themselves. Then, when the evidence rises beyond doubt, they seek as a resource for a supreme argument the interdiction of the matter, searching, to justify it, an article of the Mosaic Law which no one had considered, forcibly giving it a nonexistent meaning and application. And they are so happy with the discovery that they do not realize that the mentioned article is also a justification of the Spiritist Doctrine.

All the alleged reasons to condemn the relations with Spirits cannot stand a serious examination. From the zeal with which one fights in this sense it is easy to deduce the great interest attached to the subject. Hence the insistence ... Watching this crusade of all cults against the manifestations, one would say that they are frightened of them.

The real reason could well be the fear that the very enlightened Spirits would instruct men about the issues that are to be kept obscure, while making them aware of the certainty of another world, along with the true conditions for being there, happy or in disgrace. The reason must be the same as used by saying to the child, "Don't go there, there are werewolf". They say to man, "Do not call the Spirits: - They are the devil".

However, it doesn't matter. "They prevent men from summoning them, but they cannot prevent them from coming to men to lift the lamp from under the bushel".

Worship based on absolute truth will have nothing to fear from the light, for the light shines the truth and the devil can do nothing against it.

To reject communications from beyond the grave is to repudiate the most powerful means of instructing oneself through the initiation into the knowledge of the Future Life, and from the examples that such communications provide. Experience teaches us, moreover, the good we can do by diverting imperfect Spirits from evil, helping those who suffer to detach themselves from matter and perfect themselves. To ban communications is therefore to deprive suffering souls of the assistance we can and should give them.

The following words of a Spirit remarkably summarize the consequences of evocation when practiced for a charitable purpose: "every suffering and desolate Spirit will tell you the cause of his fall, the ravings that have lost him. Hope, fighting, terrors, remorse, despair and pain he will tell you everything. And when you listen to him, two feelings will come upon you: compassion and fear: compassion for him and fear for yourself.

And if you follow him in his grumbling, then you will see that God never loses sight of him, waiting for the repentant sinner and extending his arms as soon as he seeks regeneration. From the guilty you will finally see the beneficial progress to which you will have the happiness and glory to contribute, with the surgeon's solicitude and care accompanying the healing of the wound that he treats daily”.

Spiritism is, in fact, the "Promised Comforter" [7] by Jesus "who the Father would send later in His name and would teach us all things, reminding us of all He had said."

If, therefore, the Spirit of Truth had to come later to teach all things, then Christ had not said all; if he comes to remember what Christ said, it is because what He said was forgotten or misunderstood. [8]

Spiritism comes, at the foretold time, to fulfill the promise of Christ: the Spirit of Truth presides at its advent. He calls men to the observance of the law: He teaches all things by understanding what Jesus only said in parables.

Christ warned, "Listen to those who have ears to hear". Spiritism comes to open the eyes and the ears, because it speaks without figures, nor allegories; it lifts the veil intentionally cast upon certain mysteries. It comes at last to bring supreme consolation to the disinherited of the Earth and to all who suffer, ascribing just cause and useful end to all sorrows. Said the Christ, "Blessed are the afflicted, for they shall be comforted".

But how can one feel happy for suffering if one does not know why one suffers? Spiritism shows the cause of suffering in previous existences and in the destination of the Earth, where man atones for his past. It shows the purpose of the sufferings, pointing them out as healthy crises that produce healing and as a means of cleansing that guarantees happiness in future existences.

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[5] - Isaiah 8:19.

[6] - Deuteronomy, 27: 1 and 2.

[7] – Jo., 14:15 to 26.

[8] - KARDEC, Allan. The Gospel According to Spiritism. 129^th.edition. Rio [de Janeiro]: FEB, 2009, Chapter VI, item 4.