Ouija

The Ouija, also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words "yes", "no", and occasionally "hello" and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, which is moved about the board to spell words. The name "Ouija" is a trademark of Hasbro, but is often used generically to refer to any talking board.
Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits. Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891, 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 criticized by the scientific community and are characterized as pseudoscience. The action of the board can be most easily explained by unconscious movements of those controlling the pointer, a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect.
Mainstream Christian denominations, including Catholicism, have warned against the use of Ouija boards, considering their use in Satanic practices, while other religious groups hold that they can lead to demonic possession. Occultists, on the other hand, are divided on the issue, with some claiming it can be a tool for positive transformation, while others reiterate the warnings of many Christians and caution "inexperienced users" against it.

Etymology

The popular belief that the word comes from the French and German words for yes is a misconception. In fact, the name was given from a word spelled out on the board when medium Helen Peters Nosworthy asked the board to name itself. When she asked what the word meant, the answer she found was "Good Luck".

History

Precursors

One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song dynasty.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 "planchette writing". The use of planchette writing as an ostensible means of necromancy and communion with 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.

Talking boards

As a part of the spiritualist movement, mediums began to employ various means for communication with the dead. Following the American Civil War in the United States, mediums did significant business in allegedly allowing survivors to contact lost relatives. Use of talking boards was so common by 1886 that news reported the phenomenon taking over the spiritualists' camps in Ohio. The Ouija was named in 1890 in Baltimore, Maryland by medium and spiritualist Helen Peters Nosworthy.

Commercial parlor game

Charles Kennard, the founder of Kennard Novelty Company, claims to have invented the board with his business partner, Elijah Bond, who patented it with help from his sister-in-law, spiritualist and medium Helen Peters Nosworthy. The local patent office at first refused a patent. Bond and Nosworthy then traveled to Washington, D.C. where they were also denied a patent until the chief patent officer asked the board to spell out his name, which it allegedly did.
In 1901, an employee of Bond, William Fuld, took over the talking board production under the name "Ouija".

Scientific investigation

The scientific community considers the Ouija phenomenon to be the result of the ideomotor phenomenon. Michael Faraday first described this effect in 1853, while investigating table-turning.
Various studies have been conducted, recreating the effects of the Ouija board in the lab and showing that, under laboratory conditions, the subjects were moving the planchette involuntarily. A 2012 study found that when answering yes or no questions, Ouija use was significantly more accurate than guesswork, suggesting that it might draw on the unconscious mind. Skeptics have described Ouija board users as "operators". Some critics have noted that the messages ostensibly spelled out by spirits were similar to whatever was going through the minds of the subjects such as where a knife was hidden in the room by one of the participants. In one study, researchers used cameras to monitor the eye movements of board users, noting eye direction predicted where the board would go in what the researchers called "voluntary conditions." According to professor of neurology Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal :

The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object 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.

Some involuntary movements are known as "Automatism".
This correlates with the ideomotor phenomenon because both rely on unconscious movement. The difference is that the ideomotor phenomenon is based on the idea that just the idea that something can happen tricks the brain into doing it. For example, thinking about not moving the planchette leads to the possibility of the planchette moving, which then makes someone unconsciously move the planchette. Studies also show a strong correlation between the action of the board and prior belief in its authenticity.
Ouija boards were already criticized by scholars early on, being described in a 1927 journal as vestigial remains' of primitive belief-systems" and a con to part fools from their money. Another 1921 journal described reports of Ouija board findings as 'half truths' and suggested that their inclusion in national newspapers at the time lowered the national discourse overall.

Religious responses

Since early in the Ouija board's history, it has been criticized by several Christian denominations. The Catholic Church in the Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly forbids any practice of divination, which includes the usage of Ouija boards. Catholic Answers, a Roman Catholic Christian apologetics organization, claims that "The Ouija board is far from harmless, as it is a form of divination."
In 2005, Catholic bishops in the Chuuk State of the Federated States of Micronesia called for the boards to be banned and warned congregations that they were talking to demons when using Ouija boards. In a 1995 pastoral letter, The Dutch Reformed Churches encouraged its communicants to avoid Ouija boards, as it is a practice "related to the occult". The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod forbids its faithful from using Ouija boards as a violation of the Ten Commandments.
In 2001, Ouija boards were burned in Alamogordo, New Mexico, by fundamentalist groups as "symbols of witchcraft". Religious criticism has 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.
These religious objections to use of the Ouija board have given rise to ostension type folklore in the communities where they circulate. Cautionary tales that the board opens a door to evil spirits turn the game into the subject of a supernatural dare, especially for young people.

Notable users

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 was dictated by Mark Twain's spirit through the use of a Ouija board after his death
Pearl Lenore Curran, 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
Much of William Butler Yeats's later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board
In late 1963, Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts started experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for a book on extra-sensory perception. According to Roberts and Butts, on 2 December 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 titled 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 and Scripts for the Pageant in 1980.