Spiritism holds that mediums transmit information from the dead. The claim is testable in principle and has been examined, with results that Spiritists and their critics read very differently.
Two Brazilian episodes show what is at stake. Letters psychographed by Chico Xavier have been submitted as evidence in homicide trials, most famously at Goiania in 1979, where a letter purporting to come from the victim said the shooting had been accidental and the jury acquitted the defendant. Brazilian legal scholars still argue over whether such documents are admissible at all. Separately, the healer Joao Teixeira de Faria, known as John of God, ran a spiritist-influenced centre at Abadiania visited by hundreds of thousands of people, helped by international television publicity. From 2018 hundreds of women accused him of sexual abuse; he was convicted of rape in 2019 and again in 2020 and sentenced to decades in prison. The Spiritist federations had no authority over him and did not endorse him, but the case did real damage.
Academic study has produced no result accepted outside the movement. Analyses of Xavier's letters published in parapsychology journals have argued for accuracy beyond chance; mainstream psychology attributes the phenomena to cryptomnesia, cold reading and generous interpretation, and no controlled demonstration of mediumistic information transfer has been replicated to an accepted standard.
One distinction is worth keeping clear. Spiritism is not the same thing as Anglo-American Spiritualism, out of which it grew. The dividing line is reincarnation, which Kardec's spirits taught and which most English-speaking Spiritualist bodies rejected, and the split has held for more than a century and a half.