Case file · High strangeness
Chico Xavier's 'Parnaso de Além-Túmulo'
In 1932 Francisco Cândido 'Chico' Xavier, a 22-year-old clerk from Pedro Leopoldo, Minas Gerais, published a book of poems he said had been dictated by dead Brazilian and Portuguese poets.
1932 CE · -19.62, -44.04 · status: disputed
The account
Over seven decades Chico Xavier produced more than 400 books by 'psychography' (automatic writing) and gave the royalties away. He became Brazil's best-known religious figure after the Pope's visitors, and his funeral in Uberaba in 2002 drew huge crowds.
The sceptical view
Critics have pointed to the imitative style of the poems and to Xavier's wide reading. The writings cannot show where they came from, and he worked in a Spiritist setting full of literary models.
Connections in the atlas
- A letter from the dead in a murder trial
- Chico Xavier on 'Pinga-Fogo'
- 'Nosso Lar'
- Eurípedes Barsanulfo's Spiritist school at Sacramento
- Divaldo Franco and the Mansão do Caminho
- First Spiritist group in Brazil, Salvador
- Zé Arigó, the 'surgeon with a rusty knife'
- Jaboticabal poltergeist
- Bezerra de Menezes declares himself a Spiritist