by Suzy Charnas

Created on: June 28, 2008

That depends on what is meant by "work".

If you mean, does the board foretell the future, the answer is no. There is no occult tool that can foretell that which has not yet been formed, since the future is woven of all of our interacting and interdependent choices, fruits of the exercise of our free will. Until those choices are made, the future does not exist to be "read", or else free will is a *really* bad joke and life is completely meaningless, which I choose not to believe is true. Any "psychic", using any tool, who claims to foretell the future or your specific future is, at worst, a fake and a con artist, or at best a person with a talent for catching the flavor of your own wishes, fears, and intentions for the future and feeding them back to you; and we all know how reliable our own takes on the future turn out to be.

If you mean, does the board have some kind of magic or spirits in itself that can be summoned to answer your questions, the answer again is no. The board is a commercial product, designed and created by a games company, made in a factory turning out thousands of copies of the same pattern, and bought and sold as a commercial product for fun and profit. At what point in this process would the "magic" be instilled into a hunk of plastic-coated cardboard? Are there malicious gnomes secretly spitting on the board in the factory, demons in the printing press, witches delivering cartons of the finished product to "Toys R Us"? Ya think? This is on the level of believing that the UN is ruling the world by means of mysterious black helicopters that fly around doing - I dunno, some nefarious mischief or other. And if you believe that, this article is not for you; it will only make you crazier than you already are, trust me.

So, what *is* the capacity of the ouija board, if any?

Like any tool, the answer depends on the user. In the hands of giggling school kids, it does nothing but enable them to entertain themselves, flirt with the exotic, give themselves a slight thrill. In the hands of the fearful, primed by religious mania to be scared out of their wits by "spirits", it will provide the means for them to scare themselves just as much as they desire. In the hands of the talented, whether self-aware or not, it can actually open a door to whatever can be learned from the lower non-physical planes of existence to which, some say, we all repair between lifetimes, or maybe just where spirits hang out until the Day of Judgment.

IT'S JUST CARDBOARD, folks.

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