Hello everybody! Wanted to share a small article with you that concerns Rumor panics and Ouija boards. It seems they go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or wine and cheese. Or Halloween and candy. Ok, enough of the wry comparisons. Suffice to say, the Ouija makes Conservative Christians weep and rage. Read on. :)
Is Ouija a gateway to hell?
In an unprecedented turn of events, conservative Christians are crying foul over Toys-R- Us decision to promote sell of Ouija boards to children as young as eight years old!
This version of the popular board game is marketed towards eight-year-old girls and comes in a pink edition. OneNewsNow correspondent Charlie Butts reports that a representative of Human Life International has visited the Toys-R-Us website and “finds it troubling that these things are treated as casually as any other game, like monopoly or anything else – and I think its something Christians should be aware of and really not support.” The Communications Manager of HLI goes on to note that “we’re supposed to deal with the truth only. We’re supposed to have nothing to do with dark spirits. We’re not supposed to have nothing to do with dark spirits. We’re not supposed to dabble in anything that would compromise our souls, and that’s exactly what this does.”[1]
The suggestion that Ouija boards are a quick way to enter the seventh circle of hell is common in popular media of the occult. In both films and television, accounts of young people meddling with dark forces usually ends up with the poor kids locked in a bitter struggle with the demonic over their very souls. Sometimes things are flung across the room by unseen hands; sometimes pea soup is flung in the face of an exorcising priest. And the folklore of the occult reinforces these perceptions of the Ouija board. For example, a narrative collected by a BYU student and preserved at the Utah State University folklore archives describes:
In John Hall, at BYU, a boy got hold of a Ouija board and had his friends come over so they could try it out. They asked the board if it was controlled by the devil and the marker went to YES. They asked him if he would appear to them, and the marker went to NO. They then asked him if he would appear to just one of them and the marker went to YES. All but one of the boys left the room, and after they had been outside a few minutes they heard a lot of banging around and commotion in the room. They also heard the roommate crying out “Get away from me!” They tried to get back in the room, but found the door locked. After a few minutes, it was silent and they found that the door was now open. When they went inside, they found the furniture scattered all over the room and their roommate was all cut up and laying unconscious.
The fear of the Ouija board as commodified and disseminated through popular culture takes the form of what folklorists call ‘rumor panic’. In a typical rumor panic, irrationality begets collective delusions in a given populace. These panics have taken the form of anything from cattle mutilations to UFO abductions. The occult has had numerous incidences where anxieties of its ‘dark forces’ has led to rumor panic. In fact, in the 1960’s “communities were shocked by rumors that Satanists were holding occult ceremonies and exhuming graves for the purposes of black magic” (Barham 1973). [2] Much like fears of rampaging Satanists running amok through cemeteries and digging up the recently deceased, the Ouija board instills a very real fear in conservative Christians. Whether the rumor panic is unfounded is beside the point because the ‘panic’ itself feeds off of irrationality. With that said, although it is the opinion of this scholar that the phenomena is absurd to the point of laughability, I’m still not gonna be talking to any spirits via the Ouija any time soon.
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