Ouija

The Ouija board as we know it was patented on February 10, 1891 in the United States by Elijah Bond, in Baltimore, with the investor Charles Kennard. The Kennard Novelty Company organized its manufacture. The name Ouija, registered as a trademark, is said according to one legend to come from a spiritualist seance in which the instrument itself spelled out its name. The most commonly accepted hypothesis, however, remains the contraction of the French oui and the German ja. The Ouija capitalized on the spiritualist wave sweeping across America since the Fox sisters in 1848. In 1966, William Fuld sold the brand to Parker Brothers; today Hasbro owns the intellectual property.

Use exploded during and after World War I, a period of mass bereavement when families sought to communicate with their dead. Pearl Curran, in St. Louis (Missouri), claimed from 1913 onward to receive through the Ouija the complete works of Patience Worth, a seventeenth-century spirit. In the United States, the object gradually shifted from a serious practice to a parlor game, and then to a symbol of horror — particularly after the film The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), which turned it into a trigger of demonic possession. The Catholic Church has firmly condemned the use of the Ouija since the 1920s. Conversely, popular culture has trivialized it: Hasbro sells it in the toy aisle.

A typical session brings together two or more participants seated around the board, with their index fingers resting lightly on the pointer (planchette). After a phase of concentration, a participant asks a question aloud. The pointer then slides toward the letters and composes a response. To close, tradition has it that you bring the pointer back to goodbye. Many esoteric practitioners advise against using the Ouija without preparation, for fear of energetic attachments. On Tarotoui, we favor better-defined tools and do not encourage this practice without informed guidance.

The scientific explanation of the Ouija is clear: it is a textbook case of collective ideomotor effect. The psychologist Ray Hyman demonstrated as early as the 1970s that the movements come from the participants themselves, without their being aware of it. Ronald Rensink's experiment (2012, University of British Columbia) confirms that the Ouija mainly reveals implicit knowledge of the subject. Fears of open doors to malevolent entities rest on no scientific data, but are part of modern folklore. The practice is nonetheless inadvisable for psychologically fragile individuals, because of its suggestive potential.