Never was one to actually believe in their power, but love most movies about them.
As a teenager one of my son's favorite games was Dungeons and Dragons. Back then it was
sitting around the dining room table with three or four friends with book, pads and pencils and strategy plans.
The origins of the Ouija board actually lie at the intersection of two other American phenomena, neither of which has anything to do with the devil or the Catholic Church.
The first is Spiritualism, a major 19th-century religious movement in which people believed that it was possible to communicate with the dead. By many accounts, this phenomenon began with two teenage girls in upstate New York. In 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox told a neighbor of theirs that something crazy was happening in their house. When the neighbor came over, the girls began to talk to the house, and they heard knocking sounds in response. The girls said this was happening every evening, and they had come to believe that spirits of dead people were communicating with them.
(Now, as Smithsonian Magazine points out, the girls brought their neighbor over on March 31st, the night before April Fool’s Day, and they were teenagers, so…)
Soon after, the family moved out of the house, and the two girls were sent to live with their older sister in Rochester. That might have been the end of the story, except for the fact that their sister retained a strong interest in what they were doing, and Rochester at the time was a community with a lot of interest in unusual religious experiences. Joseph Smith is said to have received from the Angel Moroni the golden plates that led to the founding of Mormonism in the area just a couple decades before. More recently the Millerite movement, which predicted that Jesus would return to cleanse the Earth on Oct. 22, 1844, had also been very popular in the region. When Jesus didn’t show up, one of its members had a vision of him working in heaven that would become a foundation of the Seventh Day Adventists, who wait for Jesus to return.
As it turns out, two girls who claimed they could speak to the dead went over really well—not just in town but everywhere else. Before long they were touring the United States. Their act got more and more complex: Rather than just “knock one for yes, two for no” type questions, they began to have the spirits spell out words, by reading through the letters of the alphabet and waiting for the spirits to knock. “Talking boards,” in which spirits were able to spell out words via letters on a board, was an outgrowth of that.
Years later, younger sister Maggie would recant the whole thing, showing in public demonstrations how she and her sister had made the sounds using apples on string and the crack of their own knuckles and joints. Still, it’s important to note that the attraction to Spiritualism was an outgrowth of something very real: the grief and disconnection people felt at the loss of their loved ones. The movement really took off after the Civil War, during which so many across the country had lost parents and children far away and without any real knowledge of how they died. Con artists like the Foxes and devices like talking boards offered a way for people to get some closure and say goodbye. There was a similarly inspired resurgence in the 1920s after the Spanish flu pandemic. Somewhere along the way talking boards became such a common part of life that President Grover Cleveland was given one for his wedding to Frances Folsom in 1886.
The Ouija board itself was far more a product of capitalism than Spiritualism. Charles Kennard was a failed Baltimore fertilizer salesman who read about the popularity of talking boards and got a local attorney to invest in a business of selling one of their own. The name “Ouija” is often explained as the French and German for “yes” put together, but in fact it came from Kennard’s sister-in-law, a self-professed medium, who said she had asked the spirits what they should call the board and had been given the word “Ouija,” which they said meant “good luck.” (Baltimore Magazine notes the word was also on the locket she was wearing at the time.)
When asked if he believed the Ouija board actually had the capacity to contact the dead, longtime head of the company William Fuld replied, “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian.”
So Wait, How did a Kid’s Toy Get Connected to the Devil?
While many Christians were Spiritualists, the Catholic Church had never supported these forms of talking to the dead. In 1898 a decree of the Holy Office condemned automatic writing, which included any practices in which spirits were believed to guide the hand of the living. In 1917 it likewise condemned any sort of participation in séances, including just watching.
Intriguingly, as Spiritualism expert Herbert Thurston points out, in neither decree did the church fully shut the door on such practices. “To genuine students who are well grounded in theological principles and sufficiently versed in psychology to deal with these manifestations in a scientific spirit,” Mr. Thurston explains, “permission may be accorded to experiment with a medium and attend seances.” The church wanted to protect the young, the uneducated, the idle—those who were most vulnerable to the potential dangers of these practices. But they allowed for the possibility of genuine, scientifically informed research.
Still, there were stories of Ouija boards leading to strange and terrible things, like the Cincinnati couple who tore their home to shreds and threatened to kill their children because, they said, American journalist and politician Horace Greeley had told them to do it on a Ouija board. In another Ohio story, an entire community went on a massive treasure hunt as a result of information “learned” from a Ouija board. A woman in Buffalo, N.Y., was beaten to death by a local widow after the widow’s dead husband supposedly spoke to her on a board claiming the woman was a witch who had killed him.
But the key moment in our current understanding of the Ouija board seems to be the 1971 book The Exorcist and the 1973 film adaptation. “The Exorcist” tells the story of a girl who has been using a board to communicate with a spirit known as “Captain Howdy” and is then nightmarishly possessed. Across the country and beyond, the book and movie were a sensation. The lines to get into the film were endless, the flight of terrified viewers out of the theaters frequent, its power over the popular imagination almost immediate.
A decade later, the Catechism of the Catholic Church would condemn “all forms of divination,” saying “all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.” (No. 2116)
As you might imagine, there has been a lot of investigation into how exactly a Ouija board works. How is it possible that you can place your fingers on a little plastic planchette and have it start moving at all?
It turns out, it’s actually a lot less surprising than you might think. The “ideomotor effect” is a scientifically established phenomenon in which the body unconsciously creates tiny involuntary physical movements based upon our mental images. Put simply: If we visualize a person or event, our bodies will sometimes respond with small muscle movements. For instance, you know how we sometimes suddenly jerk awake out of a dream? That’s a dramatic version of the same thing. (This BBC article has a great little experiment to prove this is in fact a real thing that is happening in all of us all the time.)
When it comes to automatic writing or talking boards, what’s going on is that kind of subconscious conversation between your brain and your body. Your brain sends out certain images as you ask a question; your fingers unconsciously respond with movement.
If we do think that a spiritual plane of existence might include forces that are malevolent or just plain indifferent to humanity, why would we want to do anything that might see us tangling with them?
As Vox points out in its study of the Ouija board, there are some very good reasons to accept this explanation over the idea that spirits are speaking through us. For instance, when people are blindfolded, the answers they get from the board are often gibberish. It makes sense: If you can’t see the board, your fingers can’t guide your hands correctly. But why would a spirit need you to be able to see? In fact, why would a spirit need to use your hands at all? Why couldn’t it just move the planchette on its own?
So from a scientific point of view, the Ouija board has nothing to do with spirits or the devil. It’s just a toy that plays upon a natural but little-known process of the body, just like the Fox sisters were not actually talking to the dead; they were playing havoc with their joints. (Oy, the arthritis they must have had later.)
Explainer: What Catholics need to know about Ouija boards | America Magazine
As a teenager one of my son's favorite games was Dungeons and Dragons. Back then it was
sitting around the dining room table with three or four friends with book, pads and pencils and strategy plans.
The origins of the Ouija board actually lie at the intersection of two other American phenomena, neither of which has anything to do with the devil or the Catholic Church.
The first is Spiritualism, a major 19th-century religious movement in which people believed that it was possible to communicate with the dead. By many accounts, this phenomenon began with two teenage girls in upstate New York. In 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox told a neighbor of theirs that something crazy was happening in their house. When the neighbor came over, the girls began to talk to the house, and they heard knocking sounds in response. The girls said this was happening every evening, and they had come to believe that spirits of dead people were communicating with them.
(Now, as Smithsonian Magazine points out, the girls brought their neighbor over on March 31st, the night before April Fool’s Day, and they were teenagers, so…)
Soon after, the family moved out of the house, and the two girls were sent to live with their older sister in Rochester. That might have been the end of the story, except for the fact that their sister retained a strong interest in what they were doing, and Rochester at the time was a community with a lot of interest in unusual religious experiences. Joseph Smith is said to have received from the Angel Moroni the golden plates that led to the founding of Mormonism in the area just a couple decades before. More recently the Millerite movement, which predicted that Jesus would return to cleanse the Earth on Oct. 22, 1844, had also been very popular in the region. When Jesus didn’t show up, one of its members had a vision of him working in heaven that would become a foundation of the Seventh Day Adventists, who wait for Jesus to return.
As it turns out, two girls who claimed they could speak to the dead went over really well—not just in town but everywhere else. Before long they were touring the United States. Their act got more and more complex: Rather than just “knock one for yes, two for no” type questions, they began to have the spirits spell out words, by reading through the letters of the alphabet and waiting for the spirits to knock. “Talking boards,” in which spirits were able to spell out words via letters on a board, was an outgrowth of that.
Years later, younger sister Maggie would recant the whole thing, showing in public demonstrations how she and her sister had made the sounds using apples on string and the crack of their own knuckles and joints. Still, it’s important to note that the attraction to Spiritualism was an outgrowth of something very real: the grief and disconnection people felt at the loss of their loved ones. The movement really took off after the Civil War, during which so many across the country had lost parents and children far away and without any real knowledge of how they died. Con artists like the Foxes and devices like talking boards offered a way for people to get some closure and say goodbye. There was a similarly inspired resurgence in the 1920s after the Spanish flu pandemic. Somewhere along the way talking boards became such a common part of life that President Grover Cleveland was given one for his wedding to Frances Folsom in 1886.
The Ouija board itself was far more a product of capitalism than Spiritualism. Charles Kennard was a failed Baltimore fertilizer salesman who read about the popularity of talking boards and got a local attorney to invest in a business of selling one of their own. The name “Ouija” is often explained as the French and German for “yes” put together, but in fact it came from Kennard’s sister-in-law, a self-professed medium, who said she had asked the spirits what they should call the board and had been given the word “Ouija,” which they said meant “good luck.” (Baltimore Magazine notes the word was also on the locket she was wearing at the time.)
When asked if he believed the Ouija board actually had the capacity to contact the dead, longtime head of the company William Fuld replied, “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian.”
So Wait, How did a Kid’s Toy Get Connected to the Devil?
While many Christians were Spiritualists, the Catholic Church had never supported these forms of talking to the dead. In 1898 a decree of the Holy Office condemned automatic writing, which included any practices in which spirits were believed to guide the hand of the living. In 1917 it likewise condemned any sort of participation in séances, including just watching.
Intriguingly, as Spiritualism expert Herbert Thurston points out, in neither decree did the church fully shut the door on such practices. “To genuine students who are well grounded in theological principles and sufficiently versed in psychology to deal with these manifestations in a scientific spirit,” Mr. Thurston explains, “permission may be accorded to experiment with a medium and attend seances.” The church wanted to protect the young, the uneducated, the idle—those who were most vulnerable to the potential dangers of these practices. But they allowed for the possibility of genuine, scientifically informed research.
Still, there were stories of Ouija boards leading to strange and terrible things, like the Cincinnati couple who tore their home to shreds and threatened to kill their children because, they said, American journalist and politician Horace Greeley had told them to do it on a Ouija board. In another Ohio story, an entire community went on a massive treasure hunt as a result of information “learned” from a Ouija board. A woman in Buffalo, N.Y., was beaten to death by a local widow after the widow’s dead husband supposedly spoke to her on a board claiming the woman was a witch who had killed him.
But the key moment in our current understanding of the Ouija board seems to be the 1971 book The Exorcist and the 1973 film adaptation. “The Exorcist” tells the story of a girl who has been using a board to communicate with a spirit known as “Captain Howdy” and is then nightmarishly possessed. Across the country and beyond, the book and movie were a sensation. The lines to get into the film were endless, the flight of terrified viewers out of the theaters frequent, its power over the popular imagination almost immediate.
A decade later, the Catechism of the Catholic Church would condemn “all forms of divination,” saying “all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.” (No. 2116)
As you might imagine, there has been a lot of investigation into how exactly a Ouija board works. How is it possible that you can place your fingers on a little plastic planchette and have it start moving at all?
It turns out, it’s actually a lot less surprising than you might think. The “ideomotor effect” is a scientifically established phenomenon in which the body unconsciously creates tiny involuntary physical movements based upon our mental images. Put simply: If we visualize a person or event, our bodies will sometimes respond with small muscle movements. For instance, you know how we sometimes suddenly jerk awake out of a dream? That’s a dramatic version of the same thing. (This BBC article has a great little experiment to prove this is in fact a real thing that is happening in all of us all the time.)
When it comes to automatic writing or talking boards, what’s going on is that kind of subconscious conversation between your brain and your body. Your brain sends out certain images as you ask a question; your fingers unconsciously respond with movement.
If we do think that a spiritual plane of existence might include forces that are malevolent or just plain indifferent to humanity, why would we want to do anything that might see us tangling with them?
As Vox points out in its study of the Ouija board, there are some very good reasons to accept this explanation over the idea that spirits are speaking through us. For instance, when people are blindfolded, the answers they get from the board are often gibberish. It makes sense: If you can’t see the board, your fingers can’t guide your hands correctly. But why would a spirit need you to be able to see? In fact, why would a spirit need to use your hands at all? Why couldn’t it just move the planchette on its own?
So from a scientific point of view, the Ouija board has nothing to do with spirits or the devil. It’s just a toy that plays upon a natural but little-known process of the body, just like the Fox sisters were not actually talking to the dead; they were playing havoc with their joints. (Oy, the arthritis they must have had later.)
Explainer: What Catholics need to know about Ouija boards | America Magazine
