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Liber VII · Divination

Liber VII · Divination · Chapter XII: Talking Boards & Spirit Communication

Automatic Writing: History of Spirit Writing and the Planchette

Automatic writing explained: the planchette, Spiritist psychography, the cross-correspondences, Yeats's A Vision, Chinese spirit writing and the psychology.

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Automatic writing is writing produced, as the writer experiences it, without conscious direction: the hand moves and words appear that seem to come from elsewhere. Spiritualists and Spiritists have treated it as a channel for messages from the dead or from spirits, Chinese religious groups have used a similar practice to receive scriptures from gods, and psychologists since the 1880s have studied it as a window onto unconscious mental activity.

The Planchette and the Spiritualist Séance§

Modern Spiritualism began in 1848 with the rappings reported around the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, and its first methods of communication were slow: knocks counted out against the alphabet, or a table that tilted at the right letter (see our guide to Spiritualism). Writing offered a faster channel. Some mediums simply held a pencil and let the hand move; others used a basket or a small board with a pencil fixed to it, on which one or two sitters rested their fingers.

The heart-shaped board on two castors and a pencil point, called a planchette ("little plank"), is recorded in France in the 1850s. Stories naming its inventor as a man called Planchette are not reliable. By the late 1860s planchettes were being manufactured and sold in large numbers in the United States as a novelty, and newspapers debated whether they were toys, scientific curiosities or doors to the spirit world. The talking board with a printed alphabet, patented in 1891 and marketed as the Ouija board, grew directly out of the planchette: the pencil was removed and the pointer was set to glide over letters instead.

Psychography in Spiritism and Spiritualism§

Kardec and the Brazilian tradition§

In France, Hippolyte Rivail, writing as Allan Kardec, compiled The Spirits' Book (1857) from answers he said were received through several mediums, some of them writing with planchettes or baskets. Kardec's Spiritism treated writing mediums as one class among many and gave the practice a name, psychographie. In Brazil, where Spiritism became a large religious movement, psychography remains central. Francisco Cândido "Chico" Xavier (1910–2002) produced more than four hundred books that he attributed to spirit authors, including poems in the styles of dead Portuguese and Brazilian poets and letters from the deceased to their families. Such letters have occasionally been read in Brazilian courts, which has caused legal and public controversy.

English-speaking mediums§

In England the clergyman and teacher William Stainton Moses (1839–1892) filled notebooks from 1872 onwards with scripts signed by a band of spirit guides led by one called "Imperator"; they were published as Spirit Teachings (1883) and became a classic of Spiritualist theology. In St Louis, from 1913, Pearl Curran received through a Ouija board, and later by rapid dictation, the voice of "Patience Worth," a seventeenth-century Englishwoman who produced poems and novels in an archaic English. The case attracted psychologists, literary critics and journalists, and remains unexplained in the sense that no fraud was ever demonstrated, though most researchers attribute the texts to Curran's own gifts working below the level of awareness.

Psychical Research and the Cross-Correspondences§

The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, made automatic writing a major subject of study. Its leading theorist, F. W. H. Myers, coined the term "automatism" for actions performed without conscious will and argued that they revealed a "subliminal self" far larger than ordinary consciousness. His posthumous Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) set out the theory (see our history of clairvoyance and psychical research).

After Myers died in 1901, several women associated with the society began producing scripts that seemed to allude to one another. The best known were the classicist Margaret Verrall, "Mrs Holland" (Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling, who wrote in India) and "Mrs Willett" (Winifred Coombe Tennant, whose identity was revealed only after her death). Investigators found fragments in different scripts that made sense only when combined, often through obscure classical allusions, and some concluded that the dead Myers and his colleagues were designing a test that telepathy between the living could not explain. Critics replied that the women knew one another and shared a classical education, and that patient interpreters can find patterns in any large body of text. The "cross-correspondences" were studied for about three decades and remain a disputed chapter in psychical research.

Chinese Spirit Writing: Fuji§

A practice with an independent history flourished in China. In fuji (扶乩, "supporting the planchette"), usually one or two people hold a forked wooden stick or a brush, which traces characters in a tray of sand or incense ash while assistants read out and record each character. Spirit writing is attested at least from the Song dynasty (960–1279). Literati used it to consult immortals about examinations and to compose poetry with deities; religious groups used it to receive moral scriptures.

From the nineteenth century, spirit-writing halls produced a large literature of "morality books" (shanshu), and several new religious movements of the twentieth century, including some in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, received their revelations this way. The "phoenix halls" of Taiwan, described by David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer, are well-documented modern examples. In this setting the practice is a form of revelation in a religious community rather than private divination, and it is still performed at some temples. It forms part of the wider world of Chinese popular religion.

Literature, Art and A Vision§

Automatic writing also entered modern literature. In 1896 the young Gertrude Stein, then a student at Harvard, co-wrote with Leon Solomons a paper on "normal motor automatism," testing whether ordinary people could write without attending to it. In October 1917, days after their marriage, Georgie Hyde-Lees began automatic writing with W. B. Yeats. Over several years the sessions produced thousands of pages of answers to Yeats's questions, from which he built the system of lunar phases, gyres and historical cycles in A Vision (1925, revised 1937). Yeats said the communicators told him they had come to give him metaphors for poetry.

In Paris, André Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote Les Champs magnétiques (published 1920) by writing as fast as they could without revision. Breton, who had studied medicine and read the French psychologists, made "psychic automatism" the definition of Surrealism in his 1924 manifesto. For the Surrealists the source of the writing was the unconscious, not the dead, but the technique was borrowed from the séance.

How Psychologists Explain Automatic Writing§

The main scientific explanation was developed in France and America in the 1880s and 1890s. The physiologist William Carpenter had described "ideomotor" action in 1852: muscles can move in response to an idea without the person being aware of willing it. The psychologist Pierre Janet, in L'Automatisme psychologique (1889), studied patients who wrote answers with one hand while conversing about something else, and interpreted automatic writing as a sign of dissociation, the splitting of mental activity into streams that do not share awareness. The Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, in From India to the Planet Mars (1900), studied the medium Hélène Smith, whose scripts included a "Martian" language that he showed was built on French; he popularised the term "cryptomnesia" for forgotten memories that return without being recognised as memories.

Modern research on hypnosis, dissociation and the sense of agency broadly supports these accounts. Experiences of writing "without willing it" are real and can be vivid, but they do not in themselves show where the content comes from. Clinicians also note that intense, solitary practice can be distressing for some people, and that anyone who feels controlled or frightened by such experiences should seek support rather than continue. The question of spirit communication itself remains, as with the talking board, a matter of belief rather than of evidence that all parties accept.

Frequently asked questions§

What is automatic writing?§

It is writing that the writer experiences as happening without conscious control, either by hand or with a device such as a planchette. Spiritualists interpret it as communication from spirits; psychologists interpret it as activity of the unconscious mind.

What is a planchette?§

A planchette is a small, usually heart-shaped board on two castors with a pencil forming the third support. One or two people rest their fingers on it and it writes as it moves. It appeared in France in the 1850s and was the forerunner of the Ouija board's pointer.

What were the cross-correspondences?§

They were automatic scripts written by several women connected with the Society for Psychical Research after 1901, which seemed to contain fragments that completed one another. Some researchers took them as evidence of communication from F. W. H. Myers and other dead members; critics attributed them to shared knowledge and selective interpretation.

Did Yeats use automatic writing?§

Yes. His wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, practised automatic writing with him from 1917, and the material became the basis of his book A Vision, which influenced much of his later poetry.

Sources and further reading§