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Hernani Guimarães Andrade 1913-2003
BORN IN 1913, Hernani Guimarães Andrade graduated in civil engineering
from the University of São Paulo in 1941, spending the rest of his
working life with various public and private companies, including
Brazil's National Steel Company and the Water and Electricity Department
of the state of São Paulo, where he became technical director of its
electricity and telephone division. After his retirement he moved to Bauru, in the interior of the same state, where he died in April 2003, a
few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. A chance remark at a social
gathering in 1930 set him on his parallel career as the pioneer of
scientific parapsychology in Brazil. Asked for his views on the question
of life after death, he replied that he regarded life as an essence
independent of the physical body, and that after bodily death this
essence went away to reappear in another living being. Hearing this, a
family friend thrust a copy of Allan Kardec's What is Spiritism?
into his hand and told him to read it, which he promptly did, finding
that, as he later told me, "I had been a Spiritist all along without
knowing it."
He was a cautious one, however. At one of the first séances he attended,
he worked out how all the various phenomena demonstrated could have been
produced by normal means, repeating the supposed medium's performance in
every detail. Even so, he decided that the phenomena associated with
Spiritism were worth serious study, and in 1961 he and a group of
like-minded friends founded the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (IBPP) with the objective: "The study of
paranormal facts and systematic research into the laws, properties and
potential of the spirit by scientific methods". In his first book, A
Teoria Corpuscular do Espirito (The Corpuscular Theory of the
Spirit, 1958), he upset some of his fellow Kardecists by telling
them that "The ridiculous strategy of the ostrich is to be avoided at
all costs. There should be no hiding the head under the sand of blind
mysticism and senseless dogmatism." He also reminded them that Kardec
had insisted that Spiritism had to be scientific as well as
philosophical and religious if it was to survive.
Although the IBPP was always a small group, Hernani and his colleagues
amassed a remarkable amount of first-hand evidence for a wide variety of
psi phenomena, notably his two special interests, poltergeists (32
cases) and reincarnation (75 cases). Field work always came first. At
the age of eighty Hernani drove several hundred miles to investigate an
unusually persuasive case of claimed reincarnation on which he published
a full-length book, Renasceu Por Amor (Reborn to Love,
1994). He also found time to write fifteen other books, the last of
which was published a few months before his death. These include the
first Brazilian parapsychology textbook, Parapsicologia Experimental
(1967), several original case histories, and a number of theoretical
works in which he put forward his detailed theory of the 'biological
organising model' behind all forms of life, and the connections between
matter and spirit by means of an organising psi field and what Kardec
called the 'perispirit' body.
More detailed accounts of Hernani's research and writings can be found
in my books, The Flying Cow (1975) and The Indefinite Boundary
(1976), and in three IBPP monographs that were translated into English:
The Ruytemberg Rocha Case (1973), a detailed verification of an
unusually convincing drop-in case; Psi Matter (1976), a summary
of the theoretical work mentioned above, and A Case Suggestive of
Reincarnation: Jacira & Ronaldo (1980), one of the best cases of its
kind in the IBPP files, all of which were meticulously compiled by IBPP
archivist (and active field researcher) Suzuko Hashizume.
Hernani was a man of infinite kindness: but for his encouragement and
infectious enthusiasm I might never have become involved in psi research
at all. The time I spent with him and his colleagues from 1973 to 1975
amounted to a prolonged private tutorial with an incomparable teacher
and friend. This continued through correspondence until shortly before
his death.
Source: Guy Lyon Playfair, Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research, October 2003, Vol. 67.4, No. 873. Published on this website
with the author's and Editor's permission. |