Spirit Writing — Pros and Cons

Automatic writing was once a thing: a big thing. Everyone was doing it. At the end of the 19th Century and up to the First World War, everybody was talking to the spirits. This was through raps, voices, apports, or many other apparent manifestations, but what I want to focus on in this article is the art and science of automatic writing.

At that time, rather famous people dabbled in this method of extracting information from the spirit world. W B Yeats, the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a friend of Harry Houdini and creator of Sherlock Holmes, were both great believers in automatic writing.

I don’t want to get hung up on what these “spirits” are. For this article, we will suspend disbelief and accept that the recipients of the automatic writing believed them to be some kind of discarnate, intelligent and independent intelligence.

The main question is whether Automatic Writing can produce valuable, actionable information that is reliable, then automatic writing would become a useful tool for all sorts of research. Some practitioners (see Bligh-Bond below) claim to have used it for that very purpose. The critical point is: can the spirits tell us anything useful?