Now the plot, already fairly thick, thickens further still. News comes that Elisa (that's Ernesto's widow) is seriously ill after having been cheated out of her business rights by Caio, who plans to marry Vera. It is arranged that their first baby will be Tulio, followed by Elisa. A marriage has already been planned between Elisa and Desiderio.
   Evelina and Ernesto are appointed as spirit guides to oversee this complex series of arrangements. They are told to see to it that Caio and Vera make a happy marriage (Caio, though a villain, has a vital role to play), that Elisa recovers quickly after passing on, and that Desiderio's future mother brings him up properly. Caio is expected to die in thirty years' time, whereupon his estate will revert to Vera, daughter of the man it originally belonged to. Justice will be done.
   Elisa finally dies, and the attendant spirit of Desiderio is persuaded to leave the earth plane and move to higher places. Evelina gets to work on the mind of Caio and finally has him marry Vera, while Tulio is made ready to reincarnate as their baby.
   The boys upstairs explain to Evelina that she, Tulio, Caio, Ernesto and all the others form a team of personalities involved with each other for centuries "like chemical elements in a hot crucible awaiting the necessary refining process". She and Ernesto will eventually be reincarnated within the group, and will probably end up as man and wife.
   Meanwhile, back on earth, Brigida and Amancio take in a poor girl as servant. Her husband dies and she puts her four children in an orphanage, while she herself dies after giving birth to her fifth. This of course is Desiderio, who is adopted by one of the men who helped kill him on his last time round. And so life goes on ...
* * *

Next in popularity to the prolific Andre Luiz comes Chico's chief guide himself, Emmanuel, who is generally supposed to have been Roman senator Publius Lentulus and Brazilian priest Manuel da Nobrega in previous incarnations.
   Emmanuel began his literary output with a series of 5 historical novels, 4 of which appeared between 1939 and 1942 and the fifth in 1953. The first two, totalling 734 pages, were written in the same year, while the third, Chico's longest single book, runs to 553 pages and took him 8 months to set down. They were all, of course, written at a time when Chico was a full-time government employee with only evenings for literary activity. (By comparison, Lew Wallace's historical novel Ben-Hur took eight years to research and write.)
   Emmanuel's historical novels are similar in some respects to those of the British trance authoress Joan Grant. They are written as if recalled by one who was there at the time, though they also read like constructed works of fiction. They contain such a mass of detail on Rome and its empire that a guide to historical and geographic references found in them was published in 1960, running to 157 pages and containing over 450 entries. They are also notable for their lurid sex scenes, which the chaste and celibate Chico could hardly be expected to think up on his own, and it is difficult to imagine how the series could have been written without prolonged research and access to a well-stocked library, unless of course the author was there at the time.
   Third in the fiction sales charts comes Humberto de Campos, one of the few writers working through Chico who knew him when alive. He had produced his 12th book by 1971, bringing his sales to 323,000 copies of 54 separate editions. In the general literature section, Campos has slightly outsold Emmanuel, most of whose recent work has been in the field of doctrinaire writings on spiritual themes.
   Campos was also the author who signed the 1938 historical treatise Brazil, Heart of the World, Fatherland of the Gospel, a self-explanatory title for a work that has done much to strengthen the Spiritist belief that Brazil has a special mission to save the world from destruction. This is one of the most impressive of all Chico's works. It is a perfectly straightforward and accurate history of Brazil from its discovery in 1500 to the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, interspersed with episodes in which the country's chief spirit guide, Ismael, is seen to be doing his best to manipulate events and speed the implantation of Spiritism, which he calls "resurrected Christianity". Events of the later part of the 19th century, when Campos was alive but long before the birth of Chico, are described as if from personal memory, including verbatim conversations between eminent personalities.
   The discovery of Brazil is seen historically as an attempt to start from scratch and build a new civilization of fraternity and peace. This cannot be said to have taken place as yet; indeed, it would be harder to imagine a country where personal vanity, religious hypocrisy, social inequality and injustice and general contempt for human life are more widespread. Yet the Spiritists, citizens of psi Brazil, have tackled their mission with determination ever since the founding of the Brazilian Spiritist Federation in 1884, and are convinced that in the end they will prevail against the decadent and corrupt legacy of their colonial and imperial periods.
* * *

After literature and history, the third general category of Chico's output is that of Spiritist doctrine, a theme that runs through all other categories as well. While much of this section seems devoted to preaching to the converted, with a good deal of repetition, the books are full of surprises. Chico has always been a thoroughly orthodox Kardecist, both in and out of trance, though in some of his books he ventures deep into areas that Kardec never touched, notably that of general science. (Chico does, in fact, disagree with Kardec on one or two doctrinaire points, which suggests that his writing cannot be simply subconscious reconstructions of the Frenchman's ideas. These differences, though considerable, are too complex to examine here.)
   Even Chico's novels, especially those by Andre Luiz, are scattered with tantalizing passages like this one from the novel summarized above, in which Brother Claudio is lecturing new arrivals to the other world:
   "Any apprentice of elementary science on the Planet is aware that so-called dense matter is no more than condensed radiant energy. In the final analysis, we shall find that matter is coagulated light, a divine substance suggesting to us the omnipresence of God." (Italics in original.)
  In another novel, Andre Luiz describes a machine he calls the psychoscope as follows:
   '"This is an appliance to which a distinguished student of Spiritist phenomenology intuitively referred at the end of the last century. It is intended for the auscultation of the soul, with the power of defining its vibrations and the capacity to carry out certain observations concerning matter," Aulus explained with a smile. "We hope men will have it sooner or later. It works on a basis of electricity and magnetism, making use of radiant elements, analogous in their essence to gamma rays. It contains an eyepiece and facilities for microphotography."'
   Science fiction? Written in 1954, this could well refer to what is now known as a Kirlian camera, little known outside the USSR until about 10 years later.

Andre Luiz's Our Home series consists of 12 books written between 1943 and 1959; 9 novels, 2 scientific treatises, and a short volume of Spiritist philosophy. The novels are told in the first person, and comprise the fullest and most detailed description of life after what we call death ever written. Each one examines a certain aspect of spirit life, or the psi world, describing it as something as perfectly real as our life on earth. We see how social life is organized on the other side, how new arrivals are welcomed and helped to adapt, how various types of individual behave when they pass on and have to confront their karma, and how they are forced to help in the planning of their own development, often through reincarnation into a family where they will be given a chance to develop a specific portion of their wider selves.
   The novels are written in the style of popular Brazilian fiction, with a heavy dose of sentimentality that has put off many scientifically-minded readers. One critic counted no less than 617 adjectives in 20 pages of one early novel, and the general style of all of them is too sweet and emotional for the tastes of many.
   Embedded among all the adjectives, however, there is a solid mass of clear information like a powerful pill under a double coating of sugar. Here, for instance, is a description of how a medium is prepared by her spirit guide for a materialization session:
   First, the room and surroundings are ionized. Next, oxygen throughout the house is condensed to form ozone, a highly bactericidal gas. A guide explains why for the narrator's benefit: "The atmosphere for the materialization of an entity of the invisible world before the eyes of man requires a high ozone content, and apart from this a similar operation is necessary for the extermination of all larvae and microscopic expressions of inferior activity ... The ectoplasm, or nervous force, that will be extracted in abundance from the medium, cannot suffer the intromission of certain microbic elements without fatal damage."
   Spiritual helpers then bring in large amounts of "luminous material", which the guide describes as natural resources gathered from plants and water, "naturally invisible to the eyes of men, being structured for a reduced rate of vibration". Next, the medium is given magnetic passes to prepare her organism for the ordeal to come, as her nervous force is exteriorized, "like an abundant flux of thick and milky mist", to which the communicating spirit then links himself and assumes his own form, speaking normally to the incarnate sitters.

Asking if anybody has the power to emit ectoplasm in this way, the author is given a little lecture by his guide:
   "All men have it to greater or lesser degree, but it must be understood that we have not yet reached the time for generalizing such accomplishments. You must know that this domain calls for sanctification. Man may not abuse the sector of spiritual progress, as he has been doing along the course of material evolution, where prodigious divine gifts are transformed into forces of destruction and misery. My friend, in the field of sublime realizations to which we feel ourselves connected, ignorance, vanity and ill faith become incapacitated in themselves, tracing the frontiers of their own limitations."
   Much of Andre Luiz's information coincides with that already known from other not widely accepted sources. His clear analysis of the seven "centres of force" of the perispirit will be familiar to students of yoga as referring to the traditional chakras. These he lists as the coronal, cerebral, laryngeal, cardiac, splenic, gastric and genetic centres, giving the position and function of each. Here he is on just one of them, the coronal, or Sanskrit Sahasrara:
   "... this on Earth is considered in Hindu philosophy as the lotus of a thousand petals, being the most significant due to its high radiation potential, this being where connection is made with that resplendent seat of consciousness, the mind. This centre receives first of all stimuli from the spirit, commanding the other centres yet vibrating with them in a precise regime of interdependence ... From it there emanate the energies that sustain the nervous system and its subdivisions; it being responsible for the alimentation of the thought cells and the provision of all electromagnetic resources indispensable to organic stability. It is, therefore, the great assimilator of solar energies and rays of Superior Spirituality that can favour the sublimation of the soul."