Automatic Writing, Spiritualism and Their Psychological Implications

Leviathan Press:

In the late period when automatic writing was popular, there were actually many masters in the field of psychology who used it to reveal hidden memories and subconscious fixed ideas. Researchers at the time believed that it would be more practical to regard it as a manifestation of the practitioner's potential personality rather than a supernatural phenomenon. In this way, researchers can have a dialogue with the potential personality and then reintegrate the personality. This concept deeply influenced Jung, and he was also keen to use automatic writing to explore the secrets hidden in himself, or to have a dialogue with his unconscious - Jung believed that a person must present the unconscious as something outside of himself, so that he can get rid of the unconscious.

All of this may be in line with the classic quote of 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal: the heart has its own logic, of which the mind knows nothing. We've all seen it in a movie or read it in a book: someone's mind wanders off, daydreaming, until they look down and realize they've written or drawn something horrible? This behavior is called automatic writing, and it's ubiquitous in both ancient and contemporary horror stories. However, these stories don't always explain how automatic writing works - and, as it turns out, what it means depends a lot on your perspective.

Automatic writing, also known as psychography, spirit writing, or trance writing, is closely associated with the Spiritualism movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is loosely defined as "a type of divination in which the pen appears to guide the writer rather than the writer guiding the pen," according to the Paranormal Encyclopedia.

However, most people understand automatic writing as a means for spirits to communicate with the physical world. It’s not just words, by the way: drawings, blurry images, and even doodles are important to those who believe in automatic writing. (In fact, during a sleepover in a haunted house in the fall of 2018, the medium I spoke with kept drawing what she called “doodles” throughout the reading.)

But of course, not everyone believes in it, so how it works varies from person to person. We'll take a look at both sides of the story, but first, a little history lesson: Let's look at the origins of automatic writing.

A brief history of automatic writing

The exact origins of automatic writing are unclear, but one of the earliest precursors dates back to China's Liu Song Dynasty (also known as the Southern Song Dynasty) - from 420 AD to 479 AD. We talked about this when we reviewed the history of the Ouija board, but in case you've forgotten, here's a refresher: this is a spirit-writing divination technique called Fuji, which uses a short stick attached to a sieve to create a planchette-like object. Two people place the device on a pile of sand or ash, and the short stick traces out characters in the sand and ash - these characters are believed to be messages from the spirits. Fuji and the planchette were further developed during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD).

In the West, the Enochian language, discovered (or invented, depending on how you look at it) in England in the 16th century by John Dee and Edward Kelley, is considered an early example of automatic writing. Dee was a mathematician, scientist, alchemist, occultist, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I; often referred to as a magician, he may have been the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Kelley, meanwhile, was an occultist and self-proclaimed medium. The two met in the early 1580s, and Kelley became Dee’s regular fortune-teller (Kelly’s preferred divination tools were mirrors and crystals—they were called “shew-stones” at the time). Later, the two co-wrote several works outlining what became known as Enochian magic—a system of magic they said was dictated to them by angels.

In March 1583, during one of Kelly and Dee's routine communications with angels, Kelly reportedly began to have visions of an alphabet with which he was unfamiliar; then, during another communication shortly afterwards, he received the first text written in that alphabet.

To be clear, Kelly and Dee’s experience was not automatic writing as it has since been understood; Dee did not write with a pencil or a planchette. Rather, the two worked as a team, with Kelly receiving messages through the stone and Dee transcribing what Kelly dictated to him. As the blog Skepsisartikler summarizes:

"At first, Kelly had visions of square tables, each with 49 rows and 49 columns. Angels instructed him to fill these tables with letters to form words. According to John Dee's account of the event, Kelly appears to report 'seeing' the text that filled the rows of the tables, and then reading aloud to Dee: 'Palce duxma ge na dem oh elog...' The texts obtained from these actions in the spring of 1583 constitute the first of only two sets of texts in the very limited Enochian textual corpus, which Dee called 'the Word of God' in his Liber Logaeth."

However, automatic writing really began to flourish in the 19th century, especially in North America and Europe. In 1848, the Fox sisters claimed to have communicated with the spirit of a peddler who was murdered in their home in Hydesville, New York, which largely sparked the Spiritualism movement, which saw seances, divination, and mediumship become popular - automatic writing became one of the most common means of communicating with the otherworld. Famous mediums such as Leonora Piper, Pearl Curran, Helen Smith, William Stainton Moses, and Helen and Margaret Verrall all used automatic writing frequently. The parapsychological study of automatic writing also emerged during this time, as reflected in the work of Frederic WH Myers, Edmund Gurney, Morton Prince, and many others.

A typical séance during this period would go something like this: a group of people and a medium would gather in a dark room, usually around a table. Participants might hold hands, or not. After the appropriate atmosphere had been created, the medium would enter a trance, and then the action would begin: tapping, tilting, ringing, ectoplasmic discharge, possession, and automatic writing were all on the table (literally), and they could all happen. Séances were both social and religious events, and Jill Tracy, a musician with the improvisational musical The Musical Séance, said in a 2014 interview with Collector's Weekly that they "brought people together." Tracy added:

"It enabled them to face their fears because it was positioned as a collective entertainment rather than a terrifying experience where you sit alone in your room and try to communicate with a spirit. Séances were also sensual experiences; they were really sensual acts. Men and women sat in the dark in close proximity, often holding hands or touching each other, and they had no idea what was going to happen next. For the Victorians, it was almost an acceptable moment of indulgence."

Although spiritualism fell out of fashion after the 1920s, it still has adherents today; in fact, it has split into three distinct sects, many of which have their own churches. Automatic writing may also have declined in popularity, but it still has adherents around the world; admittedly, as Ian Stevenson points out in his paper “Some Comments On Automatic Writing,” published in the Journal Of The American Society For Psychical Research in 1978, “frenzy over automatic writing emerges in irregular cycles.”

So how does automatic writing work? As always, there are two arguments for this: the believer's argument and the skeptic's argument. Let's look at both sides in turn.

Believers' Argument

Automatic writing is simple to practice: you simply go into a quiet room, sit at a desk or table, prepare a sheet of paper, hold a pen or pencil loosely in your writing hand, relax, clear your mind, and let your hand write or draw whatever it wants. Before the advent of the talking board or Ouija board, planchets with wheels and writing implements were commonly used by individuals and groups. But like many forms of divination, even among believers in automatic writing, there is no consensus on what exactly happens during the process.

Automatic writing falls under the larger category of automatism, which the parapsychologist Frederick W. H. Meyers defined in his posthumous book Human Personality And Its Survival Of Body Death (1903) as "the production of mental images and movements without, and usually in harmony with, the inspiration of conscious thought or will."

Meyers describes two types of automatism: sensory automatism, which generally involves visual and/or auditory hallucinations, and motor automatism, which involves "unconscious written messages and spoken words (automatic text, trance speech, etc.)". Meyers writes that automatic writing, as a motor automatism, can arise from one of five sources: "conscious intention, unconscious deliberation, the higher functions of one's own mind, telepathic contact with other living minds, (or) telepathic contact with disembodied spirits and superhuman intelligences." According to the Psi Encyclopedia.

There are several different schools of thought when it comes to discussing exactly how automatic writing works. One school of thought holds that a spirit acts as an external source of the medium's movements: that is, the spirit moves or manipulates the medium's hands or the pen/pencil itself to write - a bit like an adult placing their own hand over a child's hand to guide and help them form the letters when they are learning to write.

Another school of thought holds that the spirit places information directly into the medium's mind, and the medium then conveys the information to others using pen and paper - in other words, the medium essentially transcribes the information that the spirit conveys to them.

A third school of thought explains that the spirit actually possesses the medium, replacing the medium's own personality and "driving" their body like a car for a period of time.

The fourth school of thought holds, as Troy Taylor puts it in The Haunted Museum (formerly Prairie Ghosts), that “the medium writes unconsciously, and the information he writes comes from material in the subconscious or from a secondary personality with extrasensory perception”—that is, the medium displays a second personality, which is not the result of possession by an outside force but an existence that has long been hidden deep in their hearts.

There is some debate as to whether mediums are aware of what they are doing when they are writing automatically, or whether they must be detached from themselves. Some even think the answer may be a combination of both – as Ian Stevenson writes in A Brief Discussion of Automatic Writing:

“The term ‘automatic writing’ is used to refer to writing in which the writer is unaware of what he or she is writing, or (sometimes) even of the act of writing. Perhaps I should say ‘not fully aware’, since automatic writers may be vaguely aware of what they are writing as they write.”

Moreover, in her 1992 paper “Skirting The Abyss: A History Of Experimental Explorations Of Automatic Writing In Psychology,” published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Wilma Koutstaal details a series of experiments conducted at the height of the spiritualist movement in which the hand of an automatic writer was supposed to have a “sensory connection” to the “personality” that produced the writing.

(wkmbe.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/koutstaal_journal_histbehscience_1992.pdf)

It is worth noting that, in either case, different schools of thought can explain why the actual handwriting style may vary from session to session and from medium to medium. For example, if spirits are moving the medium's hands or pen/pencil, or if they have directly possessed the medium, then the handwriting may look completely different from the medium's own. However, if the medium is acting more like a transcriber, then the automatic writing may be their own handwriting.

But whatever one believes the process of automatic writing is like—and, by the way, different mediums may play different roles in the process—believers in automatic writing are convinced that the technique has the power to convey information we would otherwise miss—messages from another world.

As for the skeptics? They don't quite believe this.

Skeptic's Argument

Most skeptics attribute the results of automatic writing during channeling to something that regular readers of the "How It Works" section of TGIMM should be familiar with: our old friend, the ideomotor effect.

We’ve discussed this well-documented phenomenon several times; we touched on it in our study of Ouija boards and our understanding of water dowsing. To review: According to the Critical Thinking Association, telekinesis involves “unconscious, involuntary motor movements” that are “made by a person because of prior expectations, suggestions, or preconceptions.” In the case of a Ouija board, these movements push the planchette to point to answers to our questions that we already know deep down. In water dowsing, the dowsing stick points to locations where we unconsciously believe we might find what we’re looking for. And in automatic writing, we write or draw thoughts and images that are already hidden in our minds.

By the way, I find it interesting that William Benjamin Carpenter first observed the telekinetic effect in 1852—right around the time when spiritualism was really starting to become popular.

However, as David Derbyshire pointed out in The Guardian in 2013, before his death in July 2013, psychologist Dan Wegner, who did extensive research on the rebound effect (the phenomenon whereby if you tell someone not to think about a particular thing, they become preoccupied with that thing), proposed an alternative view: that automatic writing arises not from the subconscious but from “the illusion of free will.”

Derbyshire wrote:

"Wegener concluded that our deliberate, thinking brain—the inner self that makes decisions—is an illusion. In reality, when the brain decides to raise its arm, it does two things. First, it sends a message to the part of the inner self that is responsible for creating the conscious mind. Second, it delays the signal from reaching the arm by a fraction of a second. This delay creates the illusion that the conscious mind has already made the decision."
"Wegner believed that automatic writing occurs when something goes wrong in this process. The brain sends a signal to the arm to write - but fails to successfully alert your inner self."

Here, automatic writing is not even a psychological phenomenon, but a physiological one.

Of course, there is also the possibility that those who claim to be able to communicate with spirits through automatic writing are frauds.

During the height of the Spiritualist movement, many freelance mediums and other psychic “experts” were revealed to be frauds: Maggie Fox publicly recounted in 1888 the techniques she and her sister Kate used to create tapping noises, which they said were the work of spirits. William H. Mumler’s psychic photographs were revealed to have been created using in-camera editing techniques such as double exposure, and in 1869 he was tried for fraud. Although he was ultimately acquitted, his career and reputation were shattered by the lawsuit, and he never recovered. Slate writing—a common technique for producing spirit writing—was also revealed to be little more than a trick.

Obviously, not everyone who says they can write automatically is lying; however, some of them probably are. Even if you believe it, it's best not to take everything at face value.

What do you believe in?

People either believe in automatic writing or they doubt it, and it is generally difficult to convince a person with strong beliefs that there are other views worth considering. But I would like to offer one point for you to think about:

The neat thing about the telekinetic effect is that even if the messages it produces don't necessarily come from actual ghosts, there's still something eerie about it. It's a bit like a window into your innermost thoughts and feelings—things you've buried so deeply that you don't even realize they're yours. Automatic writing, Ouija boards, and other so-called psychic phenomena that can be explained by the telekinetic effect bring those thoughts and feelings to light, where you can see them clearly—perhaps for the first time.

The so-called ghosts are not ghosts at all.

The ghost is you.

By Lucia

Translated by Kushan

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article / theghostinmymachine.com/2019/04/15/how-does-it-work-automatic-writing-motor-automatism-and-the-unconscious-mind-psychography-spirit-writing-medium-seance-spiritualist-spiritualism/

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