The Spiritist Religions of Africa and Spiritism in Brazil

[Karyn]

 

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Saybrook University, is a Fellow in four APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, in Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, The Mythic Path, and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, and co-editor of Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion, Healing Tales, Healing Stories, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Advances in Parapsychological Research and many other books. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams. Here Stanley Krippner discusses the three main spiritist religions of Brazil: Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecismo. Candomblé and Umbanda are, essentially, variations of the African Yoruba tradition. The African slaves in Brazil incorporated Catholic Saints into their religion in order to disguise the fact that they were still worshipping the deities of their homeland. The Kardecismo tradition was imported from Europe, based on the spiritist writings of the French pedagogue, Allan Kardec. Krippner describes his own research with spiritist mediums of these traditions, pointing out that when they incorporated spiritual entities measurable changes occurred in their physiology. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.