The final volume in the Our Home series, and the sequel to Evolution, was Mechanisms of Mediumship, which came out in 1960. It makes for slightly easier reading, as if the author had realized his previous book was way over the heads of his regular readers. (Evolution, for all its difficulty, had sold over 40,000 copies by 1974, though I have yet to meet anybody other than Mr Andrade who claims to understand it.) Instead of chapters with titles like "From Arthropoda to Amphipoda", "Spiritual Histogenesis" or "Exploratory Symbiosis", we find here a relatively straightforward treatise on the workings of mediumship as compared to those of hydraulics and electricity.
   Andre Luiz makes it clear that there is nothing magical or supernatural about mediumship; it is a human faculty like any other, even if less generally used. It does, however, contain a spiritual element that must be understood if mediums are to achieve anything useful.
   "The more he investigates Nature," he says in his introduction, "the more man becomes convinced that he lives in a kingdom of waves transformed into light, electricity, heat or matter, according to the vibratory model in which they express themselves.
   "There are, however, other manifestations of light, electricity, heat and matter, unknown on the bands of human evolution, upon which for the time being we can only gather information by way of the spirit."
   What we call mediumship is no more than the interaction of our minds with those of others, whether incarnate or discarnate. The means of interaction is the mind, and the thoughts we emit are analysed and described as material things. Mental matter obeys natural laws parallel to (and just as strict as) physical matter, being corpuscular in formation and made up of mental nuclei, protons, neutrons, positrons, electrons and photons.

Mechanisms covers much of the ground mapped out by Kardec in his The Mediums' Book. It goes much deeper, however, into the actual workings of mediumship, as its title implies, while making it clear that the ultimate mystery of life is just as mysterious to the spirits as it is to us.
   The Our Home collection is the most complete study ever written on the workings of the spirit world. Had it not been written by a supposed spirit, I suspect it would by now be regarded everywhere as a classic. This applies to a fair amount of Chico's other books as well, especially the poetry and historical novels, for what is most surprising of all about his oeuvre is not so much its quantity as its overall high quality.
   By 1975 he had published 130 books, which is not very many when compared, say, to the output of the late John Creasey, who began writing at about the same time as Chico. Creasey reached a total of 560 books, using 28 different pseudonyms, averaging 18 books a year and sometimes writing a whole novel in as little as 10 days. (He once told a friend of mine that he was trying to cut his output down to 12 books a year but just couldn't make it. There are times when I suspect Creasey must have been getting help from discarnate detectives!)
   The overall quality of the books received by Chico is extremely high by Brazilian standards, and when we bear in mind that the only Brazilians who normally write books at all come from the country's relatively small educated classes, their literary value seems all the more impressive. They send even an experienced Portuguese-English translator such as myself to the dictionary at least five times on each page, often more. They must make use, at some point or other, of every single word in the Portuguese language.

There are similarities in the styles of several of his discarnate author-sources. Their fiction style in general tends to be what in English would appear overwritten, with sentences often running to 20 lines and adjectives piling up against each other like cars in a freeway accident. This, however, is acceptable to Brazilians, who like their prose the way they like their coffee; as sweet as possible.
   Yet the plots of the novels are as carefully structured as those of any other writer's. The novel I have summarized here is, if anything, one of the more straightforward. Nowhere in any of the books taken down by Chico is there evidence of a "stream-of-consciousness" style after the manner of James Joyce, which we might perhaps expect from a trance author who seems to have no control over his writing hand. Every one of the major works shows evidence of sound literary craftsmanship, narrative skill being matched by vivid delineation of any kind of character.
   Chico does not enjoy the reputation and affection he has won because of the books he has helped write so much as because of the kind of person he is. Impressive as his literary work is, it is nothing compared to what he has achieved as a human being.
   His entire life story has been one of rejection of material desire and personal ambition, and it is worth noting that he had very considerable wealth and influence within his grasp but voluntarily renounced his claim to it at the very start of his career. It must be much harder to turn your back on power and fortune when you actually have a good chance of winning both, as he had.
   St Ignatius Loyola's Prayer for Generosity of 1548 might serve as Chico Xavier's personal motto. Nobody in his time has given without counting the cost, fought without heeding his wounds, toiled without seeking rest, and laboured without asking for any reward "save that of knowing that we do Thy will", to the extent that he has.

Some of Chico's more devoted admirers insist that he is the reincarnation of St Francis of Assissi, which he firmly denies. Indeed, the only occasion to my knowledge on which Chico has been known to show displeasure was when a study of him entitled "A Saint of our Times" was brought to his notice. He resents being regarded as exceptional in any way, and seems to imply that everybody could be like him if they really wanted to.
   One of the most generous tributes to Chico yet published came from a man from a very different background, the doctor and playwright Pedro Bloch, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine who is a member of one of Brazil's leading magazine publisher families.
   Commenting on the suggestion that some insisted on regarding Chico as an impostor, Dr Bloch wrote in 1962:
   "What a divine impostor he must be to live the life he does of humility and abnegation; to renounce that surprising work whose authorship he denies; and to keep himself isolated in a little interior town when fame and fortune would welcome him with open arms. To find the way to salvation, humanity needs a few million Chico Xaviers, even if they do not write a single message. For Chico Xavier himself is already a message ..."
   The Nobel Peace Prize for 1973 was awarded to representatives of two governments that have been largely responsible for the longest and dirtiest war of this century, and for the signing of a totally meaningless "peace treaty".
   When this prize is once again awarded to men who devote their lives, their money and their influence to the advancement of peace, the Nobel committee should have no difficulty in finding at least one Brazilian who has more than met these conditions.

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