The first edition of April 1857 was recast in 1860 into the definitive arrangement of 1,019 questions, and around it Kardec built the rest of the codification: The Mediums' Book on practice, The Gospel According to Spiritism on ethics, Heaven and Hell on justice after death, and Genesis on miracles and creation, together with the Revue Spirite he edited until his death in 1869. He insisted the result was neither a religion of his founding nor a science of his invention but a doctrine dictated by the spirits and organised by method, and the anonymity of its true authorship is part of its self-understanding, the title page crediting the spirits themselves. The book's fortunes were contested from the start: church condemnation placed Spiritist works on the Index, and in 1861 a bishop in Barcelona had a consignment of Kardec's books publicly burned, an event the movement remembers as the auto-da-fe of Barcelona. Its deepest reception came across the Atlantic.
In Brazil, where Spiritism arrived within a decade, the doctrine joined with a culture already dense with mediumship, and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation, founded in 1884, made Kardec's five books its canon; today Brazil counts millions of declared Spiritists and many more sympathisers, with The Spirits' Book in continuous print, studied chapter by chapter in weekly centre meetings, and its teachings of charity expressed in the movement's vast network of hospitals, schools and social works.