Apometry and Spiritism: a critical reading of their structural incompatibilities.

Paulo Degering R Jr
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The distance between Apometry and Spiritism does not appear on the margins, but at the very core of each proposal. When we closely examine the apometric system attributed to José Lacerda de Azevedo and compare it with the doctrinal principles consolidated in the works of Allan Kardec — The Book of Spirits, The Mediums' Book, The Genesis, Heaven and hell, Posthumous Works and the twelve years of Spiritist Magazine The result is not a gradation, but a division. Apometry is structured as a technique; Spiritism, as a science of moral observation. The first operates by command; the second, by cooperation between incarnate beings and Spirits, guided by moral law. Inconciliation is inevitable.

Apometry inaugurates its methodology by affirming the possibility of inducing the unfolding of the spirit through purely mechanical means—numerical counting, mental pulses, verbal commands. In essence: if the operator gives the order and sets a rhythm, the spirit separates, consciously, ready to be guided. This conception establishes a technical relationship between the incarnate and the spiritual phenomenon, as if the unfolding were a physiological process susceptible to external triggering, independent of the intimate nature of the medium and the free will of the Spirits involved.

None of this is supported by Kardec's work. Throughout Spiritist literature, there is not a single instance where perispiritual separation is treated as a voluntary procedure brought about by human techniques. Kardec is categorical: somnambulism, ecstasy, emancipation of the soul—all are natural, spontaneous phenomena, dependent on the psychic and moral state of the individual, never on the application of formulas. And when the influence of orders, rituals, words, or counting is discussed, the response from the Superior Spirits is always the same: any virtue attributed to such methods is superstition, and doctrines that prescribe mechanical processes are inspired by ignorant Spirits.

In the apometric universe, however, technique replaces the natural phenomenon. The operator assumes the role of an active agent, capable of "opening" and "closing" the astral projection, of "collecting" the patient's spirit, of projecting it to specific spiritual environments, or even of guiding it to past or future situations. The spirit is treated as a manipulable object, subject to external commands. In Spiritism, on the contrary, the autonomy of the Spirit is inviolable. Kardec establishes that, among Spirits, incarnate or disincarnate, supremacy only exists through moral superiority—never through force. No Spirit can be constrained by technical authority, and no legitimate process of spiritual assistance is based on any form of coercion.

Another point of rupture appears in the way Apometry conceives of the perispirit and the spiritual world. The system presumes the existence of multiple perispiritual layers that can be separated from one another, operated on individually, and treated as distinct functional levels, each susceptible to direct manipulation by the operator. In Kardec, there is nothing that even remotely resembles this fragmented vision. For Spiritist Doctrine, the perispirit is a functional, elastic, and plastic unit, subject to the will of the Spirit—and not to the vibratory scalpel of a human technician. The operational fragmentation of the spiritual being is foreign to Spiritist ontology.

The divergences become even more evident when one observes the introduction of devices, mechanisms, technological structures, and "astral equipment" into apometric practices. The presence of implanted devices, machines, and instruments of a supposedly electronic or electromagnetic nature in the spiritual plane contrasts radically with Spiritist science, according to which Spiritist phenomena are essentially fluidic, derived from the will and morality of the Spirits, and not from mechanics. Kardec never describes spiritual engineering equipped with screws, emitters, modules, or tools for physical intervention. For him, healing, obsession, relief, or disturbance are established through moral, vibratory, and magnetic processes, but never through instruments.

Deeper than any technical divergence is the philosophical rupture. Spiritism maintains that all evolution proceeds from the moral transformation of the Spirit, and that no external process—be it ritual, apparatus, technique, or command—can replace inner effort. Apometry, on the contrary, attributes to the operator the ability to correct, reorganize, and redefine spiritual states through technique, as if moral improvement were supplementary and not structural. Kardecian ethics are abolished when progress ceases to be the inner work of the Spirit and becomes a function of a technical process applied from the outside.

Finally, Apometry presents itself as a new doctrine, with its own laws, terminology, independent conceptual apparatus, and distinct objectives—but it claims proximity to Spiritism. Kardec's position on new doctrines, however, is unequivocal: any system that introduces principles that do not harmonize with the universality of the Spirits' teachings, or that creates divisions, exclusivism, closed groups, or identities parallel to Spiritism, is necessarily foreign to the Spiritist Doctrine. Furthermore, when a theory lacks universal confirmation, or presents elements contrary to the demonstrated moral and fluidic laws, it should not be incorporated into the doctrinal body.

Apometry, therefore, is not merely an addition to Spiritism; it is a foreign body. It operates by command where Spiritism operates by morality. It uses technique where Spiritism uses observation. It manipulates spirits where Spiritism cooperates with them. It introduces technology where Spiritism describes fluid. It offers artificial laws where Spiritism recognizes natural and moral laws.

There is no possible reconciliation.
And this does not detract from Apometry as a particular spiritualist construct; it merely places it in its proper context: an independent system, non-spiritualist, non-Kardecian, not compatible with the science of Spirits as established by Kardec.

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