Francisco Ignacio Madero was the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and the democratically elected President of Mexico from 1911 until 1913, when, in a violent coup, his government was overthrown and he was murdered. Today Madero is best remembered as the "Apostle of Democracy," the visionary leader who overthrew Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who had ruled Mexico, both directly and indirectly, for more than three decades.

Less known is that Madero was also one of Mexico's leading Spiritists and a medium. Not only did he maintain an extensive correspondence with Spiritists in France and Mexico, but he was a organizer of Latin America's first and second Spiritist Congresses held in Mexico in 1906 and 1908, respectively, and it was after the latter that he took upon himself the task of writing and publishing the ardently evangelical Spiritist Manual, albeit under the pen name, "Bhima."

Although for several decades following the Revolution, historians tended to underplay or even ignore Madero's Spiritism— not to mention his role as Spiritism's Maecenas— in recent years, Mexican historians Enrique Krauze, Yolia Tortolero, and Manuel Guerra, among others, have shown that Madero's Spiritist beliefs and the messages he channeled as a medium inspired his first and much better known book, La sucesión presidencial en 1910 (The Presidential Succession in 1910), which helped spark the popular movement for the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz. His channeled messages also inspired his decision to launch the Revolution of 1910.

Born in 1873 into a wealthy family in Coahuila, in the north of Mexico, Madero was the eldest of what would be a large family of 14 brothers and sisters. Both his father and his grandfather, Evaristo Madero, were leading landowners and industrialists and, from 1880 to1883, the latter served as Governor of the state. Though Madero's father was a Spiritist, the other family members were Catholics, and he was raised in this faith. At the age of 12 he was sent to the Colegio Jesuita (a Jesuit school) in Saltillo; then, briefly, St. Mary's College near Baltimore. On his return to Mexico, on vacation, he and some friends played with a planchette, a piece of heart-shaped wood, which, ostensibly taken over by spirits, would point to letters on a board (such as a Ouiji) to spell out messages. According to his biographer, Stanley Ross, "When Francisco's turn arrived, the planchette spelled the reply that Madero would be president of Mexico. This glimpse of the future and its serious acceptance by Francisco produced great hilarity among the adults present."

From 1887 until 1892, Madero studied in France, first at the Lycée of Versaille and then in Paris, at the School of Advanced Comercial Studies.By this time, he had lost his religious beliefs. The year before his return to Mexico, Madero happened upon some copies of the Spiritist organ, La Revue Sprite, which had been founded by Spiritism's father, Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who had taken the name Allan Kardec, after his name in an earlier reincarnation as a Druid. Avid to read Kardec's works, Madero went straight to the Revue Sprite's offices, which had a bookshop. In Madero's words (my translation), "I did not read [Kardec's] books; I devoured them, for their doctrines were so rational, so beautiful, so new, they seduced me and ever since I consider myself a Spiritist."

In Paris, Madero attended various seances and met mediums who told him he had the power to channel written messages. Following Kardec's instructions in The Mediums' Book, he was nonetheless unable to do so, and he soon gave up. But when a relative fell ill, in long hours of silence while Madero held a bedside vigil, he once again attempted to channel, and this time, felt, in his words, "a strange power outside my will moved my hand with great speed." He kept at it and, in a matter of days, suddenly wrote, "Love God above all things and your fellow man as yourself." Soon he was channeling fluently, in his words, "about philosophical and moral questions, which were always treated with great competency and beautiful language which surprised me and surprised everyone who knew what scant literary talent I had."

After a brief return to Mexico, Madero left for eight months to study English and agriculture at the University of Caifornia, Berkeley. quote Tortolero / Krauze

Part of the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavadgita or "Song of God," is the Hindu holy book in which Kirshna explains the essential spiritual truths to the warrior Arjuna.

In 1893, Madero was back in northern Mexico. He took charge of one of his family's haciendas in San Pedro de las Colonias, where he demonstrated both industry and executive talent, introducing U.S. cotton to the region, and launching various enterprises, among them, soap and ice factories. He continued to study Spiritism and homeopathy. Though he prospered, he himself lived simply, and he treated his workers with an open-handed generosity unusual for the time and place. In 1903, he married Sara Pérez, and as a couple they continued to support various schools, hospitals, orphanages, and a soup kitchen for the poor.

For some years, in the evenings, Madero participated in seances with a small circle of friends and relatives, but it was not until 1909 that a spirit regularly visited their circle. This was Raúl, a younger brother who had died at the age of 4 when his clothes caught fire.

His mediumship, seances, circles... Australia.


As Yolia Tortolero argues in El espiritismo seduce a Francisco I. Madero, a deeply researched work on that ways in which Spiritism so profoundly influenced Madero's political career, (my translation), "Madero asserted that each human being's spirit should become more perfect with each reincarnation, but always considering the good of all. In this sense, Spiritism justified his political struggle for democracy."

Because he had accepted Spiritism, Madero believed himself to be a more highly developed spirit than most of his countrymen, and, by virtue of his considerable resources, both economic and social-- as well as messages he had channeled as a medium-- Madero determined that he had been placed by Providence to lead them toward Democracy, that it might benefit all.


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After his death, while the conception some people had of Madero as weak and "loco," did not entirely disappear, a predominating idea—one that has lendured many decades—was expressed by the Congressman Francisco Escudero before the House of Representatives in May 1913, when he said, about Madero's sacrifice, "And what have you gained by this? With this, gentlemen, you have caused an equal of Juárez, another man who has entered the hearts of millions and will always be considered a saint of liberty."* That is to say, alongside the president who had overcome the French Intervention of the 1860s, Madero had entered the pantheon of Mexican heroes.