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Spirit Communications

Mike Garabedian

Early Ouija Advertisement, Lippincott Monthly Magazine, 1891 (Jesse R. Erickson)

Early Ouija Advertisement, Lippincott Monthly Magazine, 1891 (Jesse R. Erickson)


9:30-11:00 am saturday, october 8

Jesse R. Erickson: The Magical and Mysterious Faces of Ouija: The Aesthetic History of the Ouija Board  ♣  Art Seto: A Tale of Chinese Oracle Bones, Emperors, Superstitions, the Invention of Paper, and Printing: Their Relation to Playing Cards ♣  Sally Hildreth: Electric Mysticism: Astrology and the Gutenberg Galaxy

Jessse Erickson offered an ethnobibliographical approach to the aesthetic history of the Ouija Board, arguing that the materiality and material production of texts like the Ouija Board influence how we perceive things like race and culture. Following a brief consideration of the nineteenth-century ideological and artifactual antecedents of the device (i.e., spiritualism, theosophy, and the occult; planchettes and “The Witch Board”), he surveyed instantiations of Ouija Boards from the late nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to different modes of printing and production and the ways in which ever-shifting typography and designs conveyed specific meanings about certain ethnic and racial categories in particular social-historical moments.  [Read more]