“Cada espíritu es un libroâ€: Spiritualism in Turn-of-the-Century Spain

On October 9, 1861, one of history’s last autos de fe was celebrated by the Spanish Catholic Church in Barcelona. The site chosen, an esplanade leading to a fortification known as the Ciutadella, was already famous for inquisitional autos dating back to the Middle Ages (Abend 518). This time the moral spectacle involved the burning of three hundred books confiscated at the French border by order of the Bishop of Barcelona. Each of these books concerned a particular and relatively new religious movement known as Spiritualism. Twenty-seven years after the official abolition of the Inquisition, Catholic orthodoxy still sought to control the free circulation of ideas, and its target was now a presumably small group of people who believed in the possibility of communicating with spirits. These last gasps of the Inquisition were in vain, however, for ironically enough, the Barcelona auto de fe actually marks the expansion of the Spanish Spiritualist movement, which would endure and even strengthen right up until the time of the Civil War (1936-39). From today’s perspective Spiritualism can seem like a harmless sect, but the reaction of the nineteenth-century Spanish Church indicates that it once represented a very serious threat to some.1