How Do You Know if Your Talking to a Demon on a Oija Board
Past now, most have vague notions of the Ouija board horror narrative, in which demonic spirits communicate with – fifty-fifty possess – kids. Managing director Mike Flanagan furthers this trope in his new moving picture "Ouija: Origin of Evil." Ready in 1967, a widow and her daughters earn a living scamming clients seeking to contact dead loved ones. The family unit business is relatively harmless until the youngest daughter discovers an old Ouija lath, attempts to contact her deceased father and instead becomes possessed past evil spirits.
The Ouija board, yet, didn't ever have this sinister reputation.
In fact, the Ouija board developed out of Spiritualism, a 19th-century movement known for its optimistic views about the hereafter and the afterlife. As Spiritualism'south popularity waned, the Ouija board emerged every bit a pop parlor game; information technology was only in the 20th century that the Cosmic Church building and the horror moving picture industry rebranded the game every bit a doorway to the demonic.
Spiritualist origins
The Spiritualist movement is often said to have begun in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, when two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, reported hearing a series of mysterious raps in their tiny home. No one could discern where the raps were coming from, and they manifested in other houses the sisters visited. With no apparent source, the raps were attributed to spirits, and they appeared to respond to the sisters' questions.
The Fox sisters became overnight celebrities, and Spiritualism, a religious movement based on communicating with the dead, was born. Spiritualism spread beyond the Atlantic and into South America, but its popularity surged in the wake of the Civil War. The bloodiest war in American history had left many grieving families longing for ways to speak with their lost loved ones, and many sought comfort from spirit "mediums" – people similar the Flim-flam sisters who could allegedly talk to the dead. In 1893, Spiritualism became an official religious denomination, and in 1897, The New York Times reported that Spiritualism had eight million followers worldwide.
From the get-go, Christian critics claimed Spiritualism was just thinly disguised witchcraft. Just Spiritualists were rarely nighttime or morbid. Spiritualist writer Andrew Jackson Davis even challenged the very idea of hell, asserting that all spirits tin enter a blissful "Summerland" in the afterlife. Spiritualists also supported progressive causes, including abolition, temperance and women'southward suffrage.
In their heyday, the Spiritualists developed numerous techniques and devices for talking to the dead. Early Spiritualists engaged in a practice called "alphabet calling," in which someone rattled off the alphabet until the spirit rapped to indicate a specific letter. This labored method created a demand for more efficient means of communicating with the dead.
Some mediums engaged in "automatic writing." The medium would enter a trance country and allow the spirits to guide their hand every bit they wrote messages (a miracle that's likewise featured in the moving picture). French Spiritualist Allan Kardec reported that during an 1853 séance (literally "a sitting" or session talking to spirits), the spirits suggested that the participants stick a pencil through an upside-downward basket. This allowed everyone to place their hands on the basket to help the spirits guide the pencil across the paper. The handbasket evolved into a device called a planchette (from the French planche, meaning board).
Past 1886, Spiritualists had developed the planchette further. The pencils were discarded and the planchette was paired with a lath with the alphabet written on it. There were numerous models of these "talking boards." Brandon Hodge is the foremost historian of these automatic writing devices, with a private collection of over 200 planchettes, besides as talking boards and other séance apparatus.
The design that most Americans know today was patented by the Kennard Novelty Company in 1891. Helen Peters, a sis-in-law of one of the visitor'due south founders, asked the board what information technology should exist named and received the cryptic answer "Ouija." In 1882, William Fuld became supervisor of the company. Fuld made a fortune on the Ouija lath and opened several new factories. Eerily, he died in 1927 when he fell from the roof of a factory he claimed the board had instructed him to build.
From parlor game to portal into hell
By the 20th century, Spiritualism's popularity had begun to wane, partly due to the piece of work of frauds.
While most mediums claimed subjective experiences of spirits during trance states, so-called "physical mediums" engaged in increasingly elaborate chicanery to convince audiences they were having a genuine encounter with the supernatural. Some of these tricks, such as concealing children inside cabinets where they could brand noises or move objects, are depicted in Flanagan's film. In the 1940s, the National Clan of Spiritualism banned physical mediumship. But by then the damage had been done. Near people idea you were a sucker if y'all believed you could talk to the expressionless.
The Ouija board was mostly regarded as a parlor game with little connexion to the occult. But during World War I, the Ouija board's popularity spiked, especially on college campuses. Folklorist Bill Ellis reports that by 1920, ane professor had declared it "a serious national menace."
Meanwhile, many American Catholics who already prayed to the saints had been attracted to Spiritualism. Church regime moved quickly to counter this.
J. Godfrey Raupert was a "psychic investigator" who hoped to scientifically "testify" Spiritualism before he converted to Catholicism and renounced it. Pope Pius X deputed Raupert to warn Catholics most the Ouija lath. In 1919 he published a book called "The New Black Magic and the Truth Well-nigh the Ouija Board."
"For more than reasons than one," Raupert inveighed, "the board should not be tolerated in any Christian household or placed inside the achieve of the immature."
Despite such warnings, sales continued to grow. They peaked during 1960s, when, boosted by counterculture and popular involvement in the occult, the Ouija board outsold Monopoly.
But information technology was William Peter Blatty'due south 1971 novel "The Exorcist" – together with its 1973 motion-picture show adaptation – that cemented the the Ouija board'southward sinister reputation in the popular imagination. Blatty based his story on an bodily case of an allegedly possessed boy that occurred in Maryland in 1949. According to a "diary" seen past Jesuit priests Blatty met at Georgetown Academy, the boy had been introduced to the Ouija lath by an aunt who was interested in Spiritualism; the start signs of the boy's possession began shortly after the aunt died. Blatty's story took these details and filled in the gaps.
The effect was a national obsession with exorcism and the demonic.
"Ouija: Origin of Evil" pays homage to the film adaptation of "The Exorcist." The trailer shows a immature girl in the so-called "hysterical curvation," recalling the famous contortions in the film. This pose was first popularized by early French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who photographed women in "hysteria" and suggested this condition was the truthful crusade of demonic possession.
Paradoxically, this demonic reputation but enhanced the Ouija board'southward popularity with adolescents. The board wasn't just a way to talk to a dead relative; it also became a fashion to conjure upwards nighttime forces and dismiss them from the safety of i'due south basement. Ellis suggests that as a window to the demonic, the Ouija board allows teenagers to "participate directly in myth." In this sense, it'southward a quasi-religious experience, in which the board conjures up a demonic "anti-world" that brave adolescents tin can challenge and refuse.
Meanwhile, thrill-seekers who don't want to go so personal with the demonic tin merely watch the movie.
Source: https://theconversation.com/how-the-ouija-board-got-its-sinister-reputation-66971
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