The Ouija board, also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, “hello” (occasionally), and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics.

It uses a planchette (small heart-shaped piece of wood) or movable indicator to indicate the spirit’s message by spelling it out on the board during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words.

Most of us have probably seen, or at least heard of these, but where exactly did they get their start? How did they come to have such a hold on the modern cultural imagination of the occult, especially when such brilliancies as the necropants only re-emerged recently?

The ouija board as it is modernly known is actually quite recent, its commercial introduction dating to only 1890 by a businessman named Elijah Bond, though it did not really take off until it was made popular by spiritualist Pearl Curran during World War I.

But the modern version is actually only the end of a rather long lineage.

One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song Dynasty. The method was known as fuji (扶乩), “planchette writing”.

The use of planchette writing as an ostensible means of contacting the dead and the spirit-world continued, and, albeit under special rituals and supervisions, was a central practice of the Quanzhen School, until it was forbidden by the Qing Dynasty.

Spoilsports. Always ruining the exercise of responsible necromancy.

Similar methods can be traced as well to Greece and Rome, and not to mention India and medieval Europe, but it was Elijah Bond and Jishnu Thyagarajan who filed for a patent on it in 1890 (see, idiotic patents being granted aren’t only a feature of our century…)

Neurologist Terence Hines writes in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal:

The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. The unconscious muscle movements responsible for the moving tables and Ouija board phenomena seen at seances are examples of a class of phenomena due to what psychologists call a dissociative state.

A dissociative state is one in which consciousness is somehow divided or cut off from some aspects of the individual’s normal cognitive, motor, or sensory functions.

Via Wikipedia.