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A Ouija board is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and perhaps other symbols and graphics. Participants in a séance place their fingers on a planchette or upturned glass, which is moved about the board to spell out words in response to questions from those in attendance.[1]
SpiritualistsSystem of beliefs and practices intended to establish communication with the spirits of the dead. 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, to allow faster communication with spirits. The Ouija board was patented by the American lawyer and inventor Elijah Bond on 10 February 1891, and the Kennard Novelty Company was set up to exclusively manufacture and market these new talking boards.[2]
The Ouija board was initially regarded as an innocent parlour game, until the American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularised its use as a divining tool during the First World War.[3]
Etymology
The popular belief is that the word Ouija comes from the French (oui) and German (ja) words for yes, but in reality it is a name given to the board by itself. The manufacturers needed a name for their new product, and Bond asked his sister-in-law Helen Peters, herself a medium, to consult the board and ask what they should call it. The name “Ouija” came up, and when asked what that word meant, the board responded with “good luck”.[2]
Reactions
Mainstream Christian denominations have warned against the use of Ouija boards, considering their use in Satanism; other religious groups hold that they can lead to demonic possession.[4][5] Some occultists claim they can be a tool for positive transformation, while others urge “inexperienced users” to be cautious in their use.[4]
Scientific interpretation
The Ouija phenomenon is generally considered by the scientific community to be the result of the ideomotor response,[6][7] first described by Michael Faraday in 1853 while investigating table-turning.[8] He developed a simple apparatus to record the muscle movements of the sitters, and concluded that the movements of the table were caused by the non-conscious movements of the sitters themselves.[9]
In 1888 the English physiologist William Carpenter (1813–1885) coined the term “ideomotor effect” to describe these unconscious muscular actions, and argued that such phenomena might also underpin the apparently uncanny behaviour of other objects, such as dowsing rods, pendulums and the planchettes of Ouija boards. Carpenter’s experiments demonstrated that those instruments could only provide accurate results if the operators already knew the correct answers.[9]