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Concept
Automatic writing
Summary
Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or a ouija board.
Religious and spiritual traditions have incorporated automatic writing, including Fuji in Chinese folk religion and the Enochian language associated with Enochian magic. In the modern era, it is associated with spiritualism and the occult, with notable practitioners including W. B. Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle. There is no evidence supporting the existence of automatic writing, and claims associated with it are unfalsifiable. Documented examples are considered to be the result of the ideomotor phenomenon.
Spirit writing, later called Fuji (扶乩/扶箕), has a long tradition in China, where messages from various deities and spirits were received by mediums since the Song dynasty. In the 19th century, messages received through spirit writing led to the foundation of several Chinese salvationist religions. The spread of Chinese cultural techniques, such as printing and painting, introduced the influence of "spirit writing", practiced by Japanese Zen Ōbaku monks, who were said to communicate with an ancient Taoist sage credited with creating the kung fu system.
In the West, an early example of the practice is the 16th-century Enochian language, allegedly dictated to John Dee and Edward Kelley by Enochian angels and integral to the practice of Enochian magic. The language is said to be extremely detailed and complex with its own grammar and rules. Dee also claimed that the Enochian instruction included information regarding the elixir of life in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Parapsychologist William Fletcher Barrett wrote that "automatic messages may take place either by the writer passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper, or by the planchette, or by a 'ouija board'.
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