Ouija

The ouija (/ˈwiːdÊ'É™/ WEE-jÉ™), also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0â€"9, the words "yes", "no", "hello" (occasionally), and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to indicate a spirit's message by spelling it out on the board during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words. "Ouija" has become a trademark that is often used generically to refer to any talking board.

In 1886, Associated Press reported on a new phenomenon that was being widely used in spiritualists' camps in Ohio, the talking board, which was very similar to a modern Ouija board and was seen as a faster method for communicating with spirits of the deceased. Following its commercial introduction by businessman Elijah Bond on July 1, 1890, the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American Spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.

Paranormal and supernatural beliefs associated with Ouija have been harshly criticized by the scientific community, since they are characterized as pseudoscience. The action of the board can be parsimoniously explained by unconscious movements of those controlling the pointer, a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect.

Some mainstream Christian denominations have "warned against using Ouija boards", holding that they can lead to demonic possession. Occultists, on the other hand, are divided on the issue, with some saying that it can be a positive transformation; others reiterate the warnings of many Christians and caution "inexperienced users" against it.

History

China

One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song Dynasty. The method was known as fuji (扶乩), "planchette writing". The use of planchette writing as an ostensible means of contacting the dead and the spirit-world continued, and, albeit under special rituals and supervisions, was a central practice of the Quanzhen School, until it was forbidden by the Qing Dynasty. Several entire scriptures of the Daozang are supposedly works of automatic planchette writing. According to one author, similar methods of mediumistic spirit writing have been practiced in ancient India, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.

Talking boards

Spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living, was in vogue during the 19th century and people desired a better method of communicating with spirits than the ones in existence. And to fill that need talking boards were created. By 1886 the practice had become so common to the point of being reported in the news as a phenomenon that was taking over the spiritualists' camps in Ohio.

Commercial parlor game

Businessman Elijah Bond had the idea to patent a planchette sold with a board on which the alphabet was printed, much like the previously existing talking boards. The patentees filed on May 28, 1890 for patent protection and thus is credited with the invention of the Ouija board. Issue date on the patent was February 10, 1891. They received U.S. Patent 446,054. Bond was an attorney and was an inventor of other objects in addition to this device.

An employee of Elijah Bond, William Fuld took over the talking board production and in 1901, he started production of his own boards under the name "Ouija". Charles Kennard (founder of Kennard Novelty Company which manufactured Fuld's talking boards and where Fuld had worked as a varnisher) claimed he learned the name "Ouija" from using the board and that it was an ancient Egyptian word meaning "good luck." When Fuld took over production of the boards, he popularized the more widely accepted etymology: that the name came from a combination of the French and German words for "yes".

The Fuld name would become synonymous with the Ouija board, as Fuld reinvented its history, claiming that he himself had invented it. The strange talk about the boards from Fuld's competitors flooded the market, and all these boards enjoyed a heyday from the 1920s through the 1960s. Fuld sued many companies over the "Ouija" name and concept right up until his death in 1927. In 1966, Fuld's estate sold the entire business to Parker Brothers, which was sold to Hasbro in 1991, and which continues to hold all trademarks and patents. About ten brands of talking boards are sold today under various names.

Scientific investigation

The Ouija phenomenon is considered by the scientific community to be the result of the ideomotor response.

Various studies have been produced, recreating the effects of the Ouija board in the lab and showing that, under laboratory conditions, the subjects were moving the planchette involuntarily. Skeptics have described Ouija board users as 'operators'. Some critics noted that the messages ostensibly spelled out by spirits were similar to whatever was going through the minds of the subjects. According to Professor of neurology Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003):

The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object (table or planchette) is moving under its own control is often extremely powerful and sufficient to convince many people that spirits are truly at work... The unconscious muscle movements responsible for the moving tables and Ouija board phenomena seen at seances are examples of a class of phenomena due to what psychologists call a dissociative state. A dissociative state is one in which consciousness is somehow divided or cut off from some aspects of the individual’s normal cognitive, motor, or sensory functions.

In the 1970s Ouija board users were also described as "cult members" by sociologists, though this was severely scrutinised in the field.

The National Geographic show Brain Games ran an episode that clearly showed the board did not work when all participants were blindfolded.

Ouija boards have been criticized in the press since their inception, having been variously described as "'vestigial remains' of primitive belief-systems" and a con to part fools from their money. Some journalists have described reports of Ouija board findings as 'half truths' and have suggested that their inclusion in national newspapers lowers the national discourse overall.

Use in creation of literature

Ouija boards have been the source of inspiration for literary works, used as guidance in writing or as a form of channeling literary works. As a result of Ouija boards' becoming popular in the early 20th century, by the 1920s many "psychic" books were written of varying quality often initiated by Ouija board use.

Emily Grant Hutchings claimed that her novel Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board (1917) was dictated by Mark Twain's spirit through the use of a Ouija board after his death.

Pearl Lenore Curran (February 15, 1883 â€" December 4, 1937), alleged that for over 20 years she was in contact with a spirit named Patience Worth. This symbiotic relationship produced several novels, and works of poetry and prose, which Pearl Curran claimed were delivered to her through channelling Worth's spirit during sessions with a Ouija board, and which works Curran then transcribed.

In late 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts started experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for the book. According to Roberts and Butts, on December 2, 1963 they began to receive coherent messages from a male personality who eventually identified himself as Seth, culminating in a series of books dictated by "Seth".

In 1982, poet James Merrill released an apocalyptic 560-page epic poem entitled The Changing Light at Sandover, which documented two decades of messages dictated from the Ouija board during séances hosted by Merrill and his partner David Noyes Jackson. Sandover, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, was published in three volumes beginning in 1976. The first contained a poem for each of the letters A through Z, and was called The Book of Ephraim. It appeared in the collection Divine Comedies, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977. According to Merrill, the spirits ordered him to write and publish the next two installments, Mirabell: Books of Number in 1978 (which won the National Book Award for Poetry) and Scripts for the Pageant in 1980.

Religious responses

Most religious criticism of the Ouija board has come from Christian right organizations, primarily Roman Catholics and evangelicals in the United States. Catholic Answers, a Christian apologetics organization, states that "The Ouija board is far from harmless, as it is a form of divination (seeking information from supernatural sources). The fact of the matter is, the Ouija board really does work, and the only "spirits" that will be contacted through it are evil ones." In 2001, Ouija boards were burned in Alamogordo, New Mexico by fundamentalist groups alongside Harry Potter books as "symbols of witchcraft." Religious criticism has also expressed beliefs that the Ouija board reveals information which should only be in God's hands, and thus it is a tool of Satan. A spokesperson for Human Life International described the boards as a portal to talk to spirits and called for Hasbro to be prohibited from marketing them.

Bishops in Micronesia called for the boards to be banned and warned congregations that they were talking to demons and devils when using the boards.

Notable users

Dick Brooks, of the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, uses a Ouija board as part of a paranormal and seance presentation.

Jane Roberts contacted Seth initially through the Ouija board an 'energy personality essence no longer focused in the physical world'. The book Seth Speaks was an explanation of reality by Seth.

G. K. Chesterton used a Ouija board in his teenage years. Around 1893 he had gone through a crisis of scepticism and depression, and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with the occult.

Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier's stage and band name "Alice Cooper" was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch with that name. Alice Cooper later revealed that he just thought of the first name that came to his head while discussing a new band name with his band.

Poet James Merrill used a Ouija board for years and even encouraged entrance of spirits into his body. Before he died, he recommended that people must not use Ouija boards.

On the July 25, 2007 edition of the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM, host George Noory attempted to carry out a live Ouija board experiment on national radio despite the objections of one of his guests. After recounting a near-death experience in 2000 and noting bizarre events taking place, Noory canceled the experiment.

Former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi claimed under oath that, in a séance held in 1978 with other professors at the University of Bologna, the "ghost" of Giorgio La Pira used a Ouija to spell the name of the street where Aldo Moro was being held by the Red Brigades. According to Peter Popham of The Independent: "Everybody here has long believed that Prodi's Ouija board tale was no more than an ill-advised and bizarre way to conceal the identity of his true source, probably a person from Bologna's seething far-left underground whom he was pledged to protect."

The Mars Volta wrote their album Bedlam in Goliath (2008) based on their alleged experiences with a Ouija board. According to their story (written for them by a fiction author, Jeremy Robert Johnson), Omar Rodriguez Lopez purchased one while traveling in Jerusalem. At first the board provided a story which became the theme for the album. Strange events allegedly related to this activity occurred during the recording of the album: the studio flooded, one of the album's main engineers had a nervous breakdown, equipment began to malfunction, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala's foot was injured. Following these bad experiences the band buried the Ouija board.

In the murder trial of Joshua Tucker, his mother insisted that he had carried out the murders while possessed by the Devil, who found him when he was using a Ouija board.

Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used a Ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead.

Much of William Butler Yeats's later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board. Yeats himself did not use it, but his wife did.

In London in 1994, convicted murderer Stephen Young was granted a retrial after it was learned that four of the jurors had conducted a Ouija board séance and had "contacted" the murdered man, who had named Young as his killer. Young was convicted for a second time at his retrial and jailed for life.

Aleister Crowley had great admiration for the use of the ouija board and it played a passing role in his magical workings. Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley at his infamous Abbey of Thelema, also used the Ouija board. She credits some of her greatest spiritual communications to use of this implement. Crowley also discussed the Ouija board with another of his students, and the most ardent of them, Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones): it is frequently mentioned in their unpublished letters. In 1917 Achad experimented with the board as a means of summoning Angels, as opposed to Elementals. In one letter Crowley told Jones: "Your Ouija board experiment is rather fun. You see how very satisfactory it is, but I believe things improve greatly with practice. I think you should keep to one angel, and make the magical preparations more elaborate." Over the years, both became so fascinated by the board that they discussed marketing their own design. Their discourse culminated in a letter, dated February 21, 1919, in which Crowley tells Jones, "Re: Ouija Board. I offer you the basis of ten percent of my net profit. You are, if you accept this, responsible for the legal protection of the ideas, and the marketing of the copyright designs. I trust that this may be satisfactory to you. I hope to let you have the material in the course of a week." In March, Crowley wrote to Achad to inform him,"I'll think up another name for Ouija." But their business venture never came to fruition and Crowley's new design, along with his name for the board, has not survived. Crowley has stated, of the Ouija Board that,

In popular culture

Books

• In his book, Possessed, author Thomas B. Allen discusses the Exorcism of Robbie Mannheim, in which the aunt of Mannheim introduces him to a Ouija board. The story of the possession and exorcism formed the basis for the film The Exorcist discussed below.

Films

• The Exorcist (1973 horror film). A Ouija board figures prominently in this horror film about 12-year-old Regan McNeil (played by Linda Blair), who becomes possessed by a demon she calls "Captain Howdy".

• Witchboard (1986 horror film), in this first film in the Witchboard trilogy, a gathering of friends using a Ouija board channels an evil entity impersonating the spirit of a little boy. At certain theaters, Paragon Arts International distributed complimentary Witchboards to those who watched the film on opening night.

• Ouija (2007 filipino horror-thriller film). Half-sisters Aileen and Romina, along with their first cousins Sandra and Ruth, reunited for their grandmother's burial. Accompanied by Sandra’s friend, Lucy, the five girls dare to call on the spirits of the dead after they found their old Ouija board from when they were kids. But the Ouija board was burned by accident before they were able to finish the ritual, trapping a murderous entity around them.

• Ouija (2014 supernatural horror film), as described by Rotten Tomatoes: "a group of friends must confront their most terrifying fears when they awaken the dark powers of an ancient spirit board".

See also

• Ideomotor phenomenon
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
• Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, season 1 episode "Ouija Boards / Near Death Experiences"

Notes

References

• Cain, D. Lynn, "OUIJA â€" For the Record" 2009 ISBN 978-0-557-15871-3
• Carpenter, W.B., "On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and directing Muscular Movement, independently of Volition", Royal Institution of Great Britain, (Proceedings), 1852, (12 March 1852), pp. 147â€"153.
• Cornelius, J. Edward, Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board. Feral House, 2005. ISBN 1-932595-10-4
• Gruss, Edmond C., The Ouija Board: A Doorway to the Occult 1994 ISBN 0-87552-247-5
• Hunt, Stoker, Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game. 1992 ISBN 0-06-092350-4
• Hill, Joe, Heart-Shaped Box
• Murch, R., "A Brief History of the Ouija Board", Fortean Times, No.249, (June 2009), pp. 32â€"33.
• Schneck, R.D., "Ouija Madness", Fortean Times, No.249, (June 2009), pp. 30â€"37.

External links

Information on talking boards

• Museum Of Talking Boards
• The Official Website of William Fuld and home of the Ouija board

Skeptics

• Ouija board helps psychologists probe the subconscious from New Scientist
• The Skeptics' Dictionary: Ouija
• An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
• How does a Ouija board work? from The Straight Dope

Trade marks and patents

• Trade-Mark Registration: "Ouija" (Trademark no. 18,919; 3 February 1891: Kennard Novelty Company)
• "Ouija or Egyptian Luck Board" (patent no.446,054; 10 February 1891: Elijah J. Bond â€" assigned to Charles W. Kennard and William H. A. Maupin)
• "Talking-Board" (patent no.462,819; 10 November 1891: Charles W. Kennard)
• "Game Apparatus" (patent no. 479,266: 19 July 1892: William Fuld)
• "Game Apparatus" (patent no. 619,236: 7 February 1899: Justin F. Simonds)
• "Ouija or Talking Board" (patent no.1,125,833; 19 January 1915: William Fuld)
• "Design for the Movable Member of a Talking-Board" (patent no.D56,001; 10 August 1920: William Fuld)
• "Design of Finger-Rest and Pointer for a Game" (patent no. D56,085; 10 August 1920: John Vanderkamp â€" assigned to Goldsmith Publishing Company)
• "Message Interpreting Device" or "Psychic Messenger" (patent no.1,352,046; 7 September 1920: Frederick H. Black)
• "Design for the Movable Member of a Talking-Board" (patent no.D56,001; 10 August 1920: William Fuld)
• "Ouija Board" (patent no.D56,449; 26 October 1920: Clifford H. McGlasson)
• "Psychic Game" (patent no.1,370,249; 1 March 1921: Theodore H. White)
• "Ouija Board" (patent no.1,400,791; 20 December 1921: Harry M. Bigelow)
• "Game Board" (patent no.1,422,042; 4 July 1922: John R. Donnelly)
• "(Magnetic) Toy" (patent no.1,422,775; 11 July 1922: Leon Martocci-Pisculli)
• "Psychic Instrument" (patent no.1,476,158; 4 December 1923: Grover C. Haffner)
• "Game" (patent no.1,514,260; 4 November 1924: Alfred A. Rees)
• "Amusement Device" (patent no.1,870,677; 9 August 1932: William A. Fuld)
• "Amusement Device" (patent no.2,220,455; 5 November 1940: John P. McCarthy)
• "Finger Pressure Actuated Message Interpreting Amusement Device" (patent no.2,511,377; 13 June 1950: Raymond S. Richmond)
• "Message Device With Freely Swingable Pointer" (patent no.3,306,617; 28 February 1967: Thomas W. Gillespie)

Other

• "'Ouija board' appeal (against second guilty verdict) dismissed" â€" R. v. Young (1995)
• BBC video on Ouija Board
• Ouija at DMOZ