What Are Spirits, and Where Do They Come From?

We are spirits now, temporarily joined to physical bodies, created by God as individual beings capable of learning, choosing, and progressing.

Spirits are not fragments of God, and they are not created as angels or demons. They begin without knowledge and develop through experience, freedom, and successive lives.

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  • Death does not create a spirit

    People often imagine a spirit as someone who has died.

    But death does not create a spirit. It reveals the spirit that was already living through the body.

    In Spiritism, a spirit is an intelligent, individual being.

  • The soul is a spirit in physical life

    The soul is the name Spiritism gives to a spirit while it is incarnated in a physical body.

    You are not simply a body that may possess a spirit. You are a spirit temporarily experiencing earthly life through a body.

    The body is temporary. The individual spirit is not.

  • Spirits are created by God

    According to Spiritism, spirits are created by God as individual beings.

    They are not fragments separated from a divine whole, and each has its own path and capacity to develop.

    But Kardec is careful about the limits of what we can know.

    How and when God creates spirits remains beyond our present understanding.

  • No spirit begins morally complete

    Spirits do not begin as angels, demons, or finished moral beings.

    They begin simple and without knowledge. Through experience, freedom, and successive lives, intelligence develops, conscience awakens, and each spirit learns to direct its choices.

    Some progress more quickly than others.

    No spirit is created for evil or condemned to remain imperfect forever.

  • The spirit world is made of beings like us

    The spirit world is not populated by a different species of being.

    It is populated by spirits at different stages of development—the same kind of beings we already are.

    Death changes our condition, but not our essential nature or individuality.

    Every human life is one stage in the long education of a spirit learning to understand, choose, love, and become.

Doctrinal Source | Grounded in The Spirits’ Book by Allan Kardec, especially Questions 76–95, on the nature, origin, individuality, spiritual world, and embodiment of spirits.

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  • Essentially, yes, but Spiritism uses the words to describe different conditions of the same individual being.

    A spirit is the intelligent, conscious being itself. When that spirit is temporarily united with a physical body during an incarnation, Spiritism commonly calls it a soul.

    Death does not transform a soul into a different kind of being. It ends the incarnated condition and the individual continues again as a spirit.

    Soul and spirit describe the same conscious being in different states of existence.

  • No. Spiritism does not teach that some spirits are created good while others are created evil.

    Spirits begin simple and without knowledge and develop gradually through experience and the choices they make. Because they possess freedom, they can progress at different rates and may temporarily follow harmful paths.

    But no spirit is created for evil or condemned to remain morally inferior forever.

    The differences between spirits reflect different stages of development, not different origins or destinies.

  • Spiritism teaches that spirits may sometimes influence our thoughts, feelings, or impulses, just as people around us can influence us while we are alive.

    But influence is not the same as control. We remain responsible for examining what we feel, resisting harmful impulses, and deciding how we act.

    The possibility of spiritual influence therefore does not remove personal responsibility.

    A spirit may suggest or encourage, but the moral choice remains ours.

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