The Ouija Board

Harmless Fun; Just a Game? Only You Can Decide!

Ouija Board   …  1890 Edition

It’s October and as tradition would have it, since the early days of Stonehenge and the beliefs of the ancient Druids, dating back as early as 3000 BC, worldly contact, by those among the living, with ghosts or spirits from the “other side” are most frequent during Halloween which is slated every year on the last day of this month.

So what topic could be better for research / discussion than the “wicked” Ouija Board?

What does the name Ouija Board mean?  It’s technically a combination of the French and German words for “yes”. As the above photograph shows, the device is usually a wooden / plastic board including the letters of the printed alphabet displayed upon it; with the numbers 1 through 9; the words “yes” and “no”; plus the term “good-bye”.

Furthermore, it is a registered trademark of the toy manufacture Hasbro Inc., which markets the Ouija Board as part of its long line of board games.  It uses a planchette which is a small heart-shaped piece of wood / plastic (see above image) or movable indicator to select a spirit’s message by spelling it out on the board during a séance. The fingers of each of the séance participants or “players” are placed on the planchette, which then proceeds to move about the board to spell out writings or messages, in theory from ghosts or spirits of the other side, some of which are said to be demonic beings.  

Following its commercial introduction on July 1, 1890, by Elijah Bond, the Ouija Board was considered to be a harmless parlor game unrelated to the occult until an American Spiritualist, named Pearl Curran, suggested it was being used as a tool for contacting un-known spirits sometime between 1914 and 1918 during the First World War.

It is not uncommon for mainstream religions and some occultists to associated use of the Ouija Board with the threat at least of demonic possession; therefore some of these folks or believers have cautioned their followers not to use Ouija Boards at all.

This type of thinking didn’t just pop up during the past hundred years or so. In fact, one of the first mentions of such a writing method being used as in that of the Ouija Board can be found first in China around 1100 AD during the Song Dynasty which reigned from 960 AD to 1279 AD. This writing method was known as Fuji or “planchette writing”. The use of planchette writing was a means for allegedly contacting the dead and the spirit-world and it continued, until it was forbidden by the Qing Dynasty which ruled from 1644 until 1912.

We have seen most religious criticism of the Ouija Board coming from the Christian community, primarily evangelicals in the USA.  As recently as 2001 Ouija Boards were burned in Alamogordo, New Mexico by fundamentalist groups along with Harry Potter books as being “symbols of witchcraft”.  Religious criticism has also theorized that the Ouija Board reveals information which should only be in God’s hands, and thus quite naturally must be a tool of Satan.  A spokesperson for Human Life International has described the boards as a portal to talk to spirits and has even called for Hasbro, Inc. to be prohibited from marketing them.

Ouija Boards have been criticized in the press since their inception; having been described as “remains of a primitive belief-systems” as well as a “con” to part fools with their money.

The author / writer Emily Grant Hutchings claimed that her 1917 novel Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board was dictated by none other than Mark Twain’s spirit through the use of a Ouija Board after his passing.

As for the scientific community, The Ouija phenomenon has been criticized by many as a hoax.  In fact several studies have been produced, recreating the effects of the Ouija Board in the lab that show, at least under laboratory conditions, that the subjects or participants were moving the planchette willingly though perhaps subconsciously but to be sure without the help of spirits or demons.

Sources …                                                                            http://www.spotlightministries.org.uk/ouija.htm                                                                       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija                                                                            http://tgsfree4allinfo.blogspot.com/2011/08/stonehenge.html

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