Interfacing with the Spirit World

The Ouija Board and Playful Occulture

Howard, Jeff ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9077-1025 (2025) Interfacing with the Spirit World. [Conference]

Preview	Slideshow (The slides for my presentation at the 2025 Dark Economies/Haunted Modernities conference) Interfacing with the Spirit Worldv9.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives. Download (6MB) | Preview
	Text (The accompanying paper for my presentation at the Dark Economies/Haunted Modernities conference) OuijaBoardPaperv11.docx - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (57kB)

Abstract / Summary

This talk explores the Ouija board as an artefact mediating between games and occulture, a term coined by Genesis P-Orridge and brought into academia by Christopher Partridge to describe manifestations of the occult in popular culture. Historically, the Ouija board is a novelty invented by nineteenth century investor Elijah Bond, manufactured by a modern board game corporation (Milton Bradley), and marketed as solely for entertainment purposes. Yet, the more that its creators insisted that the Ouija board was “just a game” purely for entertainment, the more it became a genuine piece of spiritual technology operating as a compelling divinatory tool and a powerful occult artefact. This talk investigates the material affordances and cultural contexts that have allowed the Ouija board to flourish as a manifestation of what Howard calls “playful occulture” (a term for the ways in which historical occultism influences games, and magical practice manifests as a form of play). How does play facilitate the evocation of spirits in a way that both imitates the divinatory devices of the ancient world and captured the imagination of the modern world? Howard argues that the Ouija board is an interface, a physically rendered UI whose back-end code is the spirit world. Three words, 10 numbers, and 26 letters of the Roman alphabet yield a combinatorial system for channelling myriad messages, promising both spiritual enlightenment and demonic menace. Howard will demonstrate that play liberates seekers from the constraints of ritual gravitas, thereby energizing the spontaneous spirit contact at the heart of mysticism.

Item Type:	Conference
Uncontrolled Keywords:	ouija, occultism, occulture, divination, magic, magick, games, interface
Subjects:	Computing & Data Science > Game Design Philosophy & Psychology
Department:	Games Academy
Depositing User:	Jeff Howard
Date Deposited:	07 Aug 2025 08:50
Last Modified:	07 Aug 2025 08:50
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6127

View Record (staff only)