A Codified Religion, Beyond the Two Prayers Already Catalogued

This entry addresses Spiritism as a broader codified religious and philosophical movement beyond the two specific prayers, for a guardian spirit and for the beginning of a meeting, catalogued individually elsewhere in this atlas, since Allan Kardec's nineteenth-century codification, most fully developed in The Spirits' Book and The Gospel According to Spiritism, established an extensive body of doctrine and practice, including prayer, that continues to be studied and applied by Spiritist centers and practitioners worldwide, without reproducing that further material here.

Kardec's written corpus itself remains widely published and available, unlike some other traditions catalogued in this atlas, but the specific pastoral and mediumship practice built around it varies by individual Spiritist center and country, particularly given Spiritism's especially large and organizationally diverse following in Brazil, meaning any single description of contemporary Spiritist prayer practice risks overgeneralizing across genuinely different center-level traditions. Kardec himself framed his work as a scientific investigation of spirit phenomena rather than as a new revealed religion in the conventional sense, a self-description that has shaped how many Spiritist centers present their practice publicly, often alongside charitable and educational activity, as much as through devotional prayer alone.