thumb|A piece of automatic writing produced by trance medium [[Leonora Piper, claimed to be a message from the spirit of Richard Hodgson|upright=1.35]]
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. Claims associated with automatic writing are unfalsifiable, while some documented examples result from the ideomotor phenomenon. The spread of Chinese cultural techniques, such as printing and painting, introduced the influence of "spirit writing", practised by Japanese Zen Ōbaku monks, who were said to communicate with an ancient Taoist sage credited with creating the kung fu system.
13th-century Spanish Kabbalists engaged in automatic writing, which may have been the method that produced the Zohar. Joseph Karo (1488-1575)'s angelic mentor communicated via automatic writing on at least one occasion, dictating laws of Kiddush levana.
Another early Western 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. Dee also claimed that the Enochian instruction included information regarding the elixir of life in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Approach
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'." Automatic writing can happen in a trance or waking state.
Shortly after his 1917 marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees, the poet W. B. Yeats came to be heavily influenced by her delving into what they referred to as "the automatic script". In 1997, "The Magnetic Fields" was also the title of a compilation of surrealist writing of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and others. It included the authorized translation of Breton's "The Automatic Message" in English by the poet David Gascoyne, whose Man's Life is This Meat (1936, a collection of his own surrealist writings and translations of the French surrealists) and Hölderlin's Madness (1938) established Gascoyne's reputation as one of a small group of English surrealists. Gascoyne's 1935 A Short Survey of Surrealism for the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition also expanded the movement to the English-speaking world. The Surrealist poet Robert Desnos claimed he was among the most gifted in automatic writing.
The medium Pierre L. O. A. Keeler had an alleged spirit writing communication from Abraham Lincoln currently exhibited at the Lily Dale Museum. Despite Lincoln being well-known for his skepticism and Keeler having been known to employ magician's tricks, this is used as one of the many examples of skeptics purportedly endorsing Spiritualism posthumously.
There was an apocalyptic cult led by a lapsed Scientologist named Dorothy Martin. She and her followers were waiting for an alien ship to take them to the nonexistent planet Clarion and save them from a worldwide flood that was to commence at midnight on 20 December 1954. When that did not occur, Martin allegedly got an automatic writing message from God calling the whole thing off.
Scientific analysis and skepticism
Scientists and skeptics consider automatic writing to be the result of the ideomotor effect.
Scientific studies
In an 1890 paper on hypnotism, Morton Prince claims, "automatic writing is not a purely unconscious reflex act, but, the product of conscious individuality," and further claims that the hand that is writing is under the control of a separate hypnotic personality during trances.
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Further reading
- (The document is in English but the linked website is in German.)
External links
de:Medium (Person)#Schreibmedien