'Post-Grave's Parnassus': the problem could be nipped by the bud

FIRST EDITION OF PARNASO DE ALÉM-TÚMULO (POST-GRAVE'S PARNASSUS), THE FIRST BOOK OF CHICO XAVIER, PUBLISHED IN 1932.

Unfortunately, a religious idol can be developed, over the decades, from suspect people who made disguises of charity and kindness, occulting the dark side of their lives. Several false people can be made like almost saints for an able work to make subtile rhetoric and comfortable myths about them.

Chico Xavier is officially one of the most loved personalities from Brazil. But this sweetened image, mixing forged myths of "humble person" and divinized messianic man, as an well-calculated lark developed with the help of mainstream media.

Going to most of eight decades ago, we can shockingly find in the young Francisco Candido Xavier, born in former district of Minas Gerais' Santa Luzia city, Pedro Leopoldo (currently a city) in April 2nd 1910 (a day after the famous Fool's Day, April 1st), not a sanctified humble man, but a smart catholic guy who had in hands a book alleged organized from a collect of several spirits poems and texts.

Chico Xavier tried to be a poet by his own name. He published some little verses in some magazines published in Brazil, in 1930. But the first book had the pretension, which is extremely suspicious, to show poems and proses made by famous dead authors in spiritual world.

Titled Parnaso de Além-Túmulo (Post-Grave's Parnassus), this book, published in 1932 by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (FEB) in its own publishing company, has so much problems about the veracity of alleged poems and proses in its pages.

First of all, it's not possible to reunite so much spirits from different times and places to make together a same artistic event. It has no sense of logic. Let's compare to our school mates and it can be easy to comprehend about the difficulty to reunite all the desired spirits of different dead people associated to a same artistic activity.

Let's suppose that, thirty years after, a former school class decided to reunite former school mates to celebrate that date. A school class had appoximately 40 students. Nobody can imagine than, rigorously, all of those students can be ready to reunite and meet themselves to the event.

Some of the students can live in far places. Someone got families and live with partners and children. A little bit of them may be dead. Probably, it will be expected that, at most, less than half of a class can be ready to meet in the celebration event. Normally, there's so much chances to have five, then of fifteen students ready to attend this meeting.

If those difficulties are unavoidable within three decades, we can not admit that it is easy to gather spirits from different places and who are deceased in different and remote times. It seems so wonderful to suppose that Luís de Camões, Castro Alves and Olavo Bilac and a lot of their respective contemporaries can find everybody in the same artistic event, specially after more than forty years of their most recent death.

In the case of Parnaso, the fact that the most of the alleged authors were living people in 19th century and dead over that time or at the first 20th century's years doesn't prove veracity of the pretense poetry reunion attributed to Chico Xavier's book.

Other problem rises and that one is related about the poetic style. Reading the poems, it seems easily so false, so parodic and with less quality than the original poems (and proses, in some cases) left by the alleged authors when they lived on Earth. Olavo Bilac, for example, "lose" his cautious work to make metric verses which almost sound so musical.

Other problems. An confused Antero de Quental, an author from Portugal, seeming like Augusto dos Anjos' style. Casimiro de Abreu allegedly happy to suffer. And Auta de Souza "losing" her female and almost childish style to write poems and "reappearing" with masculine Chico Xavier's own style.

There's other problems, which we will not mention because it will make our text so long and tiring. But we can describe one another problem, that unmasks the alleged spiritual superiority of the Chico Xavier's 1932 book.

Nobody in lucid consciousness can admit a perfect work from spiritual benefactors to a book which had undergone gross changes. Parnaso de Além-Túmulo had six editions: beyond the first one, from 1932, there was other editions: 1935, 1939, 1944, 1945 and the last and definitive, published in 1955.

Some poems and proses were added of excluded over the 23 years between the first and last edition. Strange reasons including changing verses and problematic authors deny the supposed reputation of the book as a finished message of higher spirituality.

The friendly fire inside de brazilian spiritist movement can be found in Suely Caldas Schubert's book, Testemunhos de Chico Xavier (Chico Xavier's Testimonies), published in 1981. Suely is an alleged medium and was a friend and supporter of Xavier, but accidentally published one letter wrote by him to FEB's president, Antonio Wantuil de Freitas, dated to May 03 1947. Chico wrote in his own words, about the works to the sixth edition, the most delayed of the changing editions:

"Grato pelos teus apontamentos alusivos ao “Parnaso” para a próxima edição. Faltam-me competência e possibilidade para cooperar numa revisão meticulosa, motivo pelo qual o teu propósito de fazer esse trabalho com a colaboração do nosso estimado Dr. Porto Carreiro é uma iniciativa feliz. Na ocasião em que o serviço estiver pronto, se puderes me proporcionar a 'vista ligeira' de um volume corrigido, ficarei muito contente, pois isso dará oportunidade de ouvir os Amigos Espirituais, em algum ponto de maior ou menor dúvida".

("Thanks for your allusive appointments to (Post-Grave) Parnassus to the next edition. Competence and possibility to contribute to careful revision are missed to me, having the reason to your intention to make this work with the collaboration of our loved Dr. Porto Carreiro and it's a happy initiative. For the moment to the ready job, if you can give me a chance to make a 'speed review' of a corrected volume, I can be so glad, because it can give an opportunity to listen the Spiritual Friends, in some point with more or less doubts").

"Revision"? The farce is unmasked. The quote from the term "Spiritual Friends" is rather bleak and vague. But Chico Xavier revealed that Parnaso de Além-Túmulo proved the accusations given by the famous writer and catholic activist, Alceu Amoroso Lima, also known as his pseudonym Tristão de Athayde.

Alceu accused Parnaso de Além-Túmulo and other books brought by Chico Xavier to be literary forgeries organized not only by the alleged medium, but also by Wantuil and the FEB's editor staff. Porto Carreiro, mentioned in that letter, was the writer and also alleged medium Luiz da Costa Porto Carreiro Neto, who was member of the FEB's editor staff.

An unnecessary controversy was made about Chico Xavier's alleged mediunity, using the hypothesis that he made his works always alone. Brazilian spiritist movement improved this controversy to make two cully choices:

1) If Chico Xavier's mediunity is false, how could he immitate so much different literary styles?

2) If Chico Xavier's mediunity is true, it can be so brilliant because the alleged humble and low-instructed guy had spiritual light enough to receive contacts from the best literary personalities from Brazil and Portugal.

The second choice is usually chosen, because of Chico Xavier's reputation found over the years. But it's so doubtful, because the alleged spiritual authors had style and quality of expressions' serious problems. Olavo Bilac, for example, was demoted to a mediocre religious pamphleteer who "forgot" his personal style to make verses.

Alceu Amoroso Lima got the answer. Chico Xavier really did literary pastiches and parodies, but he didn't it alone. He always had the help from his master Wantuil de Freitas, the FEB's editor staff and literary consultants served to this federation.

The credit given to Parnaso de Além-Túmulo could be avoid and the problem could be nipped by the bud, preventing to make the dangerous rise of a religious idol who, who, behind his sweet and deified image, committed grave betrayals to the original lessons of french Spiritism.

Chico Xavier destructed the original Spiritist instructions and demoted Spiritism, in brazilian form, as a crazy mockery of Catholicism, inserting over the kardecian legacy concepts and practices which are so appropriate to Middle Age's Catholicism. Chico Xavier does not deserve the holiness that many people attribute to him.