From The Unknown Power by Guy Lyon Playfair, Granada Publishing Ltd.
Published in 1977 by Panther Books Ltd, Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF
First published in Great Britain by Souvenir Press Ltd 1975 (titled The Flying Cow); Copyright Guy Lyon Playfair 1975


CHICO XAVIER

Rows of parked cars jammed the short side street in the Sao Paulo satellite town of Sao Bernardo do Campo, a few blocks from the largest automobile factory in South America. Inside the main hall of the sports club, about 800 people were sitting quietly on rows of bare benches, getting up every few minutes to move closer to the small bandstand at the far end of the dance floor that also served as basketball court. Everybody was clutching one or more books, waiting his turn to file past the long table strewn with red roses on the bandstand, in the centre of which the author [Chico Xavier] was hard at work signing his name, shaking hands with his fans and kissing those of the ladies, handing them a pair of roses, and occasionally flashing his well-known smile at the TV cameras and press photographers.
   The ceremony was being held to launch the latest book, or in fact the latest two books, by the world's most unusual author; a man who has written practically non-stop since 1932, with an average output of just under three works a year, publishing his hundredth in 1969. These have included poetry, children's books, historical and contemporary novels, in addition to treatises on science, philosophy and religion. Their combined sales have totalled almost three million copies, making their author one of the best selling in Brazilian literary history.
   The author is a popular hero to millions throughout Brazil, rich and poor. His name is a household word. He has been awarded the freedom of most leading Brazilian cities, and his two television appearances in 1971 were watched by more than two million viewers.
   Yet despite his enormous popularity and record-breaking sales, Francisco Candido Xavier is a poor man. He has never sought nor received a single payment for anything he has written. For Chico Xavier, as everybody knows him, is a Spiritist medium whose speciality is that of automatic writing, or psychography as Brazilians prefer to call it.
   By the latest count he has received the work of almost 500 different discarnate authors. His entire literary output has been produced in a state of trance, much of it in public at Spiritist centres in the towns of Pedro Leopoldo, where he lived until 1958, and Uberaba, where he now lives in a sparsely furnished house on his government pension of about 100 dollars a month. Chico is loved and revered by Brazilian Spiritists as their ideal of a man whose life is wholly given up to helping others, whose personal needs are given last priority, and who has put into practice the basic ideal of Allan Kardec: that there can be no Spiritism without charity.
   I watched Chico at work for 4 hours. His right hand, which over the years had drafted something like 5 million words, was kept busy without a break, alternating between signing books and shaking the hands of the public that was helping push his sales even higher. About 2,000 books were sold on that day alone, from the temporary bookstall set up at the entrance to the club. Normally, this would bring the author about 600 dollars in royalty payments, but like all the rest of the money Chico's books have been making for 40 years, this would soon be spent on food, clothing and medical assistance for the poor. Chico is a one-man welfare service.
   My turn came. Chico greeted me as if there were nobody he wanted to meet more, asked to be remembered to his friend Maurice Barbanell, the English Spiritualist medium and journalist, signed 3 books for me and gave me 2 red roses and a warm handshake. As I left the club in the early evening, 400 people were still waiting their turn and more were arriving all the time. Chico, I was assured, would not leave his post until everybody had been given an autograph, a handshake and a souvenir rose, even if this would take all night.
* * *

Chico Xavier was born on April 2nd, 1910, in the small interior town of Pedro Leopoldo in the central state of Minas Gerais. He was one of a family of nine children, whose mother died when he was only five, after which he was brought up by a godmother.
   In the same year, he had his first experience as a medium, seeing his mother materialized in front of him after her death, and by the time he went to primary school three years later he was quite accustomed to hearing voices and feeling the presence of spirits around him.
   One day the pupils were told to write an essay on the history of Brazil, for a competition being run by the state government. Chico was about to begin writing and wondering what to put down, when he saw a man beside him who seemed to be dictating to him: "Brazil, discovered by Pedro Alvares Cabral, may be compared to the most precious diamond in the world which was soon to be set in the Crown of Portugal ..."
   Chico wrote what he heard, and won an honourable mention in the contest, much to the surprise of his teacher and classmates. These were even more surprised when he claimed to have received the essay complete from a spirit, and he was challenged to do it again on a subject to be chosen by one of his fellow pupils. Chico promised he would try.
   Somebody suggested "Sand", and everybody laughed at such a ridiculous theme, except for Chico, who went to the blackboard, took the chalk and began writing at once: "My sons, creation is not mocked. A grain of sand is almost nothing, yet it appears as a tiny star reflecting the sun of God ..."
   That kept the class quiet, but the teacher forbade any further mention of unseen voices from then on. Being a kindly soul, she took young Chico aside after school and told him to pray for guidance along traditional Catholic lines.

Chico left school at 13 after completing primary level, which in the Brazil of 1923 was scarcely adequate training for a boy who was to become the country's most prolific author. While still at school, he began to work for his living, first at the age of 11 in a textile plant where he stayed 4 years, later working as a kitchen hand and counter salesman, and finally at a very modest job in a branch office of the Ministry of Agriculture, where he remained from 1933 until his retirement in 1961.
   He began his work as a practising medium in 1927. One of his sisters appeared to have gone insane and was seriously ill. She was visited by a local healing medium, who decided it was a case of possession and promptly cured her, which so impressed the entire Xavier family that they renounced Catholicism on the spot and became Spiritists. The healing medium's wife, Mrs Carmen Peracio, was so pleased with the recovery of Chico's sister that she decided to found a small evangelical Spiritist centre. Chico, also deeply impressed by what had happened to his sister, was eager to attend.
   On July 8th of that year, he produced some more automatic writing. Mrs Peracio heard a voice telling her to give Chico a pencil and some paper, and when she did so there followed a 17-page message of spiritual guidance. At another session shortly afterwards, Mrs Peracio saw a vision of a man dressed in priest's robes and surrounded by a brilliant aura, who again told her to give Chico pencil and paper, upon which 17-year-old Chico write down detailed instructions for the treatment of his sister lately cured of apparent madness. The spirit introduced himself to Mrs Peracio as "Emmanuel", saying he was Chico's spiritual friend, although it was only in 1931 that Chico himself was to become aware of the chief spirit guide who has remained with him ever since.
   At another early session at the Pedro Leopoldo centre, Mrs Peracio saw a vision of what she later described as a rainstorm of books falling about Chico's head. She interpreted this as a sign of a mission he was to carry out. When she mentioned this, however, Chico - always the reluctant hero - misheard the word livro (book) as lirio (lily), and wondered why he should be honoured with a shower of flowers in his early stages of development as a medium. If ever a writer had his career literally thrust upon him, it was surely Chico Xavier (pronounced, by the way, sheeco shaveer).

Since 1927, he has spent, on his own reckoning, an average of 5 hours every day in direct contact with his spirit guides. His lifelong friend, author-doctor Elias Barbosa, has calculated that Chico spent a total of 73,000 working hours as a medium, equivalent to more than 8 years, in his first 40 years of activity, all of this outside the working hours of his regular government job.
   Chico soon proved to be an amazingly prolific automatic writer, and before long he began to produce a series of poems that made a profound impression on his fellow members of the centre run by Mrs Peracio. The poems kept on coming, signed by the names of most of Brazil's greatest deceased poets, and in 1932 a selection of them was published by the Federacao Espirita Brasileira (FEB), or Brazilian Spiritist Federation. The 421-page volume is still in print today [1975] and has sold some 40,000 copies.
   Entitled Parnassus From Beyond the Tomb, it became a best-seller at once and started a controversy that had not died out 40 years later. To many Brazilians, it offered the most convincing evidence ever published for the fact that human beings, or some component of them, really do survive physical death.
   There are 259 poems in Parnassus, signed by 56 poets. These include almost every leading figure in both Brazilian and Portuguese poetry. There can be no mistaking their individual styles; one poem, signed by Augusto dos Anjos - one of the most difficult of all Brazilian poets to understand, let alone parody - is a sequel to a well-known sonnet written during the poet's lifetime.
   There is a world of difference between writing a parody or pastiche and producing a poem that really gives the impression of having been written by its deceased author. Could any living English writer publish a volume of new poems by Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Hopkins, and 50 other poets both major and minor, and convince critics and public that they were not his own works, but those of dead authors? This is exactly what Chico did in Portuguese, in effect.
   Moreover, if you are thinking of faking a Shakespeare sonnet, you must do more than imitate the poet's style. You must get across an idea, an image, that elusive ingredient that makes a poem something more than the sum of its words.
   The words themselves in Parnassus are impressive enough. Anasarca, conterminous, esthesia, gravamen, heteromorphous, laconism, moneran, prodromal, sanbenito, stertor ... How many of these 10 words can the average English-speaking elementary school dropout understand, not to mention incorporate in a poem?

But it is the variety and the force of the ideas and images behind the words that gives the Parnassus collection its value. There are profound meditations on human evolution, scathing attacks on the hypocrisy of Catholic priests, simple sonnets about love, life and death, and now and then a straightforward assertion of the poet's identity:

Eu sou quem eu sou. Extremamente injusto
Seria, entao, se nao vos declarasse
Se vos mentisse, se mistificasse
No anonimato, sendo eu o Augusto

   (I am who I am. Therefore it would be extremely unjust if I did not declare myself: if I lied, or deceived you in anonymity, since I am Augusto.) Thus begins a sonnet called Ego Sum, signed by Augusto dos Anjos, who also contributes a moving little tribute to the town where his physical body is buried: "Kiss this generous soil, Augusto ... Kneel and recall your last place of refuge, forget the bitterness of your old torment and kiss the hands of your benefactors."
   Many of the poems deal with the subject of life after death, though some, like the one just quoted, are as down to earth (literally) as can be imagined. There is even one, signed by the playwright Artur Azevelo, that comments wittily on the vanity of the living, ending with a prominent moralist and public figure being caught in his servants' quarters in his underwear! This is far from typical of the collection, but it gives some idea of the variety of subject matter.
   Parnassus made quite an impact even in circles not previously interested in Spiritist matters. The academician Humberto de Campos, one of the leading literary figures of his time, made a careful study of the poems from beyond the grave and declared in public that "their authors were showing the same characteristics of inspiration and expression that identified them on this planet ..."
   "The themes they tackle," he went on, "are those that preoccupied them when alive. The taste is the same, and the verse generally obeys the same musical flow; loose and ingenuous in Casimiro (de Abreu), broad and sonorous in Castro Alves, sarcastic and varied in (Abilio Guerra) Junqueiro, funereal and serious in Antero (de Quental), and philosophical and profound in Augusto dos Anjos."
   To which Monteiro Lobato, whose children's books are as much in Brazil as those of Lewis Carroll in the English-speaking world, added: "If the man produced all this on his own, then he can occupy asd many chairs in the Academy as he likes!"