Just make sure I'm around when you've finally got something to say.--Toad the Wet Sprocket

Thursday, October 26, 2017

The Ouija Board


In the late 1880s and early 1890s, spiritualism is sweeping the United States.  There had been huge losses of life during the Civil War and people wanted to get in touch with loved ones who had passed. Also, children died at early ages and they wanted reassurances from beyond the grave.  Around the nation, there was known as a Talking Board among the people where you could draw letters on paper and use a pointer to have spirits move to the letters to spell out the message.

Baltimore Civil War vet, Elijah Bond, wants to take it from rustic to refined and the law school grad sees an opportunity to capitalize on the craze. He designs his own board on polished wood with letters, numbers, and yes and no and a planchette to move across the board.  HIs sister-in-law, an avid spiritualist, has a vision in which she sees the name of this new kind of spectral transmitter: the Ouija board.

But first, he must patent the device.  on February 10, 1890, along with a spiritualist medium named Helen Peters, presents it to the patent officer and explains what it does. The patent officer is skeptical. He is used to seeing inventions with gears, levers, and currents.  The only way to get the patent was if they could demonstrate how the device works. Since neither Bond nor Peters knew the name of the officer before they met him that day the officer asks that the board spell out his name and it spells out Charles Mitchell--the patent officer's name.  The Ouija board was given a patent and it became a huge success.  However, it started off as a parlor game and did not begin to really be taken seriously as a way to talk to the dead until after World War I when American Spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a diving tool.

Ouija Trivia Thanks to Wiki:
1.G. K. Chesterton used a Ouija board in his teenage years. Around 1893, he had gone through a crisis of scepticism and depression, and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with the occult.
 2.Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier's stage and band name "Alice Cooper" was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch with that name. Alice Cooper later revealed that he just thought of the first name that came to his head while discussing a new band name with his band
3.In the murder trial of Joshua Tucker, his mother insisted that he had carried out the murders while possessed by the Devil, who found him when he was using a Ouija board
 4.Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used a Ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead
 5.Much of William Butler Yeats's later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board. Yeats himself did not use it, but his wife did.
 6.In London in 1994, convicted murderer Stephen Young was granted a retrial after it was learned that four of the jurors had conducted a Ouija board séance and had "contacted" the murdered man, who had named Young as his killer.[50] Young was convicted for a second time at his retrial and jailed for life.
 7.Aleister Crowley had great admiration for the use of the ouija board and it played a passing role in his magical workings.[54][55] Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley at Abbey of Thelema, also used the Ouija board. She credits some of her greatest spiritual communications to use of this implement. Crowley also discussed the Ouija board with another of his students, and the most ardent of them, Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones): it is frequently mentioned in their unpublished letters. In 1917 Achad experimented with the board as a means of summoning Angels, as opposed to Elementals. In one letter Crowley told Jones: "Your Ouija board experiment is rather fun. You see how very satisfactory it is, but I believe things improve greatly with practice. I think you should keep to one angel, and make the magical preparations more elaborate." Over the years, both became so fascinated by the board that they discussed marketing their own design. Their discourse culminated in a letter, dated February 21, 1919, in which Crowley tells Jones, "Re: Ouija Board. I offer you the basis of ten percent of my net profit. You are, if you accept this, responsible for the legal protection of the ideas, and the marketing of the copyright designs. I trust that this may be satisfactory to you. I hope to let you have the material in the course of a week." In March, Crowley wrote to Achad to inform him,"I'll think up another name for Ouija." But their business venture never came to fruition and Crowley's new design, along with his name for the board, has not survived. Crowley has stated, of the Ouija Board that,
There is, however, a good way of using this instrument to get what you want, and that is to perform the whole operation in a consecrated circle, so that undesirable aliens cannot interfere with it. You should then employ the proper magical invocation in order to get into your circle just the one spirit you want. It is comparatively easy to do this. A few simple instructions are all that is necessary, and I shall be pleased to give these, free of charge, to any one who cares to apply.
8.E. H. Jones and C. W. Hill, whilst prisoners of the Turks during the First World War, used a Ouija board to convince their captors that they were mediums as part of an escape plan.