Each year I look forward to the Halloween issue of RUE MORGUE magazine. This year’s was a real treat given its cover story “Spirits, Demons, Superstition: 125 Years of the Ouija Board.” There are several elements included in their coverage, including an overview, “Take Me to the Other Side” by April Snellings that also includes an interview with three folks with ouija board expertise, “Ghost Writers” also by April Snellings that involves a discussion with Brandon Hodge on the history of talking boards like the ouija, and “Cinema Ouija” by Ronni Thomas that looks at the portrayal of talking boards in film.

I appreciate that RUE MORGUE covered this topic, and the various aspects of their coverage. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the religious dimension of ouija boards, however. While the magazine did mention it in connection with Spiritism, there is much more they could have mentioned. This would have included things like Jane Roberts, a medium who used the ouija board early on in her communication on behalf of an entity named Seth who would go on to reveal a whole body of teachings called the Seth Material, and which helped usher in the New Age Movement.  Then there is the importance of the ouija board to various forms of American folk magic and teen rights of passage, which has been discussed by Bill Ellis in his books Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University of Kentucky Press, 2000), and Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (University of Kentucky Press, 2004).

Regardless of the perspective in which the ouija board and other talking boards are discussed, they represent an important part of understanding American religion and the paranormal.