Madero Conference in Mexico City's National Palace: From Spiritism to the Bhagavad-Gita and Other Esoteric Influences

Francisco I. Madero

It's in Spanish, of course, but it's worth noting here because 

(1) I know that many of you, dear readers, also read in Spanish;

(2) I'm speaking in the conference, December 2, together with Ignacio Solares, one of Mexico's most respected novelists, and; 

(3) this a major public reexamination of Francisco I. Madero, one of the most outstanding figures in Mexican history, for he was not only the leader of the 1910 Revolution, but President of Mexico from 1911- 1913.

All the lectures are free and open to the public and will take place in the Recinto Juárez of Mexico's National Palace.

FRANCISCO I. MADERO:
DEL ESPIRITISMO AL BHAGAVAD-GITA, Y OTRAS INFLUENCIAS ESOTERICAS

November 6, 2014
Yolia Tortolero
Nueve lecturas sobre Francisco I. madero y su creencia en el espiritismo

November 11
Lucrecia Infante
De espíritus, mujeres e igualdad. Laureana Wright y el Espiritismo Kardeciano en México

November 18
Alejandro Rosas
La Revolución de los espíritus
Manuel Guerra
Los escritos espiritistas perdidos de Francisco I. Madero

November 25
Carlos Francisco Martínez Moreno
Masonería, espiritismo e hindismo: senderos comunicantes en los tres pilares místicos de Francisco I. Madero

December 2
C.M. Mayo
Odisea metafísica hacia la revolución Mexicana: 
Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto Manual espírita
Ignacio Solares
Madero, el otro


COMMENTS always welcome.

Podcasts about Francisco I. Madero

Selected films and videos

Rare Book Adventures in Mexico City: 

Una ventana al mundo invisible

Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller and Francisco I. Madero: 

Some Notes on Sources

An interview with Yours Truly 

about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, 

for the University of Chicago Social Science Division newsletter.

I'm presenting the English edition of the book at the 

Texas Book Festival this Sunday at 11 am. 

Read more about the Spanish edition, 

Odisea metafisica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, 

which has been beautifully translated by 

Mexican poet and novelist Agustín Cadena.

El legado documental de Roger Mansell por Yolia Tortolero

Mexican historian Yolia Tortolero has just published a profile of my dad's research: "El legado documental de Roger Mansell" (PDF) in Diario de Historias, which goes out to Spanish-speaking librarians and archivists. My dad passed away in 2010 but he left his archive of books, documents, film and more about POWs of the Japanese during WWII to the Hoover Institution. He also left his book, expertly edited by historian Linda Goetz Holmes, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam (Naval Institute Press).

Tortolero, by the way, is the author of the hands-down best book about Francisco Madero's Spiritism, El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero, a book which was quite difficult to find but is now, quite wonderfully, available on Kindle. I'll be blogging more about her work anon.

COMMENTS

Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Racing to meet the deadline.... I'm almost finished with my revised and expanded introduction to Spiritist Manual, my translation of Manual Espírita, the secret book of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.  This excerpt mentions Swedenborg and the Fox sisters of Hydesville-- more about them anon.

Enter Allen Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Allan Kardec

Though an energetic evangelist, Francisco I. Madero schemed to hide his Spiritism from the public—his personal letters during his campaigns and his presidency make this clear—  and, over the several decades after his death, few Mexicans in public positions have had the incentive, the metaphysical context, or whatever wherewithal to begrudge more than a glancing mention of it. As early as 1915, any public discussion of Spiritism became taboo—historian Yolia Tortolero uses this word, and quite rightly, even while, as she also notes, Spiritism was being practiced “under cover by many public figures.” There is more to say about this thundering silence about Spiritism in Mexico, which, with a few notable exceptions, has persisted to this day, but to first properly comprehend the term we must hie back to Paris of 1891 and, reanimating our scene, let that page of La Revue Spirite fall. And another.

This magazine Pancho Madero is reading belongs to his father—though his mother and other family members are devout Catholics and, as he surely knows, the Pope had declared the main ritual of Spiritualism and its derivative, Spiritism, the séance, diabolical. Decades earlier, Pope Pius IX had slapped the works of Allan Kardec, founder of La Revue Spirite, on the Index, the Vatican’s list of prohibited books.

Allan Kardec: this elbow-sharp and magnetic nom de plume, supposedly taken from one of his other lifetimes as a Druid priest, belonged to a French educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who died in 1869. From his stern-looking portrait, with his knob-chin and kingly pose, one might take him for a mightily conservative banker. Kardec was an unlikely guru. According to his English translator, Anna Blackwell, he was “grave, slow of speech, unassuming in manner, yet not without a certain quiet dignity.” Further, and somewhat frighteningly, “he was never known to laugh.” Yet anyone who doubts his influence, from France to Mexico, Brazil to the Philippines, can visit Paris’s Père La Chaise cemetery and find, among the stone angels and sarcophagi and mausoleums of the likes of Chopin, Collette, Victor Hugo, La Fontaine and Molière, Kardec’s megalithic tomb ever-heaped with flowers.

Rivail had been educated by the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, radically for the time, emphasized freedom of thought and direct observation. According to John Warne Monroe in Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France, Rivail was a longtime student of mesmerism in 1853 when he learned of the strange phenomenon of the tables parlantes or table tipping, from a friend who said he had managed to induce a table to lift by itself off the ground and turn, and more: like the Fox sisters of Hydesville, he was communicating with spirits through the table by means of raps and knocks.

Though skeptical, Rivail determined to study this phenomenon. He soon moved on to observing mediumistic writing, in which two young mediums, the Mlles Baudin, would place their fingertips on a planchette, a triangular contraption with little wheels and a pencil attached, thus allowing spirits to answer his questions and offer messages in writing.

It was the spirit “Zéphyr” who assigned him the name Allan Kardec, and, along with other spirits, such a mass of teachings to solve “the controversial problem of humanity’s past and future,”  that Rivail turned it into a book—including additional information channeled by medium Célina Japhet. Published in 1857, Le Livre des Esprits, (The Book of the Spirits), concurrently with the levitating medium D.D. Homes’ visit to France, became a best-seller of its time, translated into multiple languages, and is still in print today. 

With down-to-earth language and easy-to-reference numbered questions and answers, The Book of the Spirits is a guide to nothing less than the universe and its laws, the nature of God, the spirit world and its relations with humanity. The concluding message, channeled from the spirit of Saint Augustine, calls for kindness and benevolence. It is this work that first spelled out the doctrine of Spiritism, which Kardec distinguishes from Spiritualism—the latter, according to him, simply the belief that there is more than physical matter— as a doctrine based on the specific nature of relations between the physical and spirit worlds. Spiritism’s most notable departure from Spiritualism is its assertion that spirits reincarnate as, in life after life, whether on Earth or some other planet, they evolve into ever greater states of consciousness.

This was the most modern of modern science, Kardec argued, for, as a scientist might peer through a microscope to see the detail in a leaf, so he could employ a medium to communicate with the spirit world. Through Ermance Dufaux, a teenaged medium famous for her channeled autobiography of Joan of Arc, a nameless spirit instructed Kardec to publish La Revue Spirite as soon as possible and using his own money and so, in 1858, he did. In 1861, Kardec published Le Livre des Médiums (The Book on Mediums), a how-to and advisory on the dangers of communicating with spirits based on his own and collagues’ experiences as well as more material channeled from spirits, among them Erastrus, Channing, “Spirit of Truth,” and Matthew. More followed: The Gospel Explained by Spirits (1864) ; Heaven and Hell (1865); and Genesis (1867), in addition to shorter works. 

This was the Swedenborg-sized pile that Pancho Madero, having finished with La Revue Spirite, ran to that magazine’s offices to purchase. In his words:

"I did not read [Kardec’s] books; I devoured them, for their doctrines were so rational, so beautiful, so new, they seduced me and ever since I consider myself a Spiritist." 

That is to say, Madero believed he had incarnated on this planet in order to help usher in a golden age, evangelist for the doctrine that was nothing less than, to quote Kardec in Genesis, “the pivot on which the human race will turn.”

Our Coahuilan prince has stepped onto his metaphysical Montgolfier, as it were. Soon he will be tossing sandbags overboard.

(Copyright © C.M. Mayo 2013, all rights reserved) 

>>Read more about the Spiritist Manual (website includes Q & A and resources for researchers)
>>Get the current edition on Kindle.

>>Read a previous excerpt on this blog, "Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas"

***UPDATE My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available***

COMMENTS

Why Aren't There More Readers? A Note on Curiosity, Creativity, and Courage

I live books. I read books every day. I review books, translate books, edit books, and write books. I have always had a hard time fathoming why other people don't shimmer with the same enthusiasm. Perhaps they never developed the habit of reading-- it does take some effort to learn, after all; perhaps they simply don't have a clue about what treasures await them, silently gathering dust upon an infinite number of shelves (both real and digital, pay and free, as in archive.org); or, perhaps they find it too frightening to reach beyond the incuriosity of those around them. (What if they were to arouse some bully? "Hey, Egghead!")

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Of course, many citizens have been gypped-- there is really no other word-- by their public education system. But over the centuries, and particularly the past two, some of the least privileged, by luck and pluck, have become avid readers and writers. (I speak as a descendant of Irish immigrants.) And indifference and even hostility towards reading and books can be found all across the social spectrum. Some of the wealthiest people, graduates of private schools, don't have anything beyond a coffee table book and maybe a thriller in their mansions-- though, true, some hire decorators who order books by the yard. (One dead giveaway: when the maid rearranges the books by size and no one objects.)

In today's New York Times David Toscana laments the lack of readers in Mexico and the woeful state of public education. Though I celebrate Mexico's vibrant and long-standing literary tradition, I have to agree with his sad portrait, alas. And it is not just the less fortunate Mexicans who do not read. When I taught the thesis seminar for seniors at a leading private university in Mexico City, I found the general level of reading and writing skills, shall we say... underwhelming. But why light on Mexicans? Plenty of people in other countries, including my own country, the United States, don't read. A few years ago, I used to do PEN Writers in the Schools visits in some Washington DC public high schools. In one instance, in their assignment about my collection of short stories, seniors were allowed to draw pictures with crayons instead of writing an essay (I am not kidding). Many graduates of even the finest U.S. colleges don't read much, either, and oftentimes, in terms of any aesthetic or intellectual nutrition, what they read would be about on par with, say, a Big Mac.

A book is not necessarily expensive. There are public libraries, Internet archives, free Kindles... In Mexico City, I've seen street vendors by the metro stations offering scads of used books, many for the price of a glass of orange juice. So why do so many people, whether well off or poor, ignore the riches around them? This is actually a very interesting question. We all do it some way, and not just with books. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I believe the future belongs to those with curiosity, creativity, and courage-- and anyone with those three attributes, and the opportunity to do so, is more likely than not to end up in a library, either bricks-and-mortar or on-line, and with heartfelt zest.

Toscana writes, "Books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity." I know, I know in my bones, this is true.

A few links to surf:

One of the best books about books (and a hilarious read) is Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books.

Ediciones El Naranjo, a fine Mexican children's book publisher that is also dedicated to promoting reading. Truly a great endeavor and a wonderful website. Even if you don't read Spanish I think you'll enjoy the visit.

A few years ago, my amiga DC librarian Jane Kenney Meyers started the Lubuto Library Project to provide uniquely stocked and super low-cost libraries for homeless AIDs orphans in Africa-- and it has been a roaring success.

Check out my collection of 24 Mexican writers on Mexico, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion. 
>Listen to the prologue as a podcast

The book that --really-- launched the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 

And a secret book published in 1911 by the same author, Francisco I. Madero, translated into English for the first time by Yours Truly.

Seven Reasons Why Ebooks Will be Big in Mexico (according to Yours Truly)

Speaking of Kindles, if you read Spanish, check out Dr Yolia Tortolero's magnificent El espíritismo seduce a don Francisco I. Madero and the Mexican writer (and my translator) Agustin Cadena's latest novel, also a Kindle, Marjuna Knabino.

A Conversation with Michael K. Schuessler, author of Guadalupe Amor, the biography of one of Mexico's greatest poets (better known as Pita Amor)-- among many other works on Mexican literary figures and Mexican history.

Free podcast series: Seth Godin's Startup School 
(Speaking of curiosity, creativity and courage-- this guy is the guru.)

My dad's book, Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam

My great great uncle William Wirt Calkin's book, History of the 104th Illinois