PSYCHOGRAPHY.

Indirect psychography: baskets and planchettes. — Direct or manual psychography.

Indirect psychography: baskets and planchettes.

Spiritist science has progressed like all the others, and more rapidly than they.

Only a few years separate us from the time when those primitive and incomplete means were employed, to which the trivial name of “talking tables” was given, and already we find ourselves in a condition to communicate with the Spirits as easily and rapidly as men do among themselves and by the same means: writing and speech.

Writing, above all, has the advantage of marking, in a more material way, the intervention of an occult force, and of leaving traces that may be preserved, as we do with our correspondence. The first means that was used was that of the boards and baskets fitted with pencils, with the arrangement we now proceed to describe.

We have already said that a person, endowed with a special aptitude, can impart a movement of rotation to a table, or to any other object whatever.

Let us take, instead of a table, a little basket of fifteen to twenty centimeters in diameter (of wood or of wicker, the substance matters little). If we pass a pencil through the bottom of this basket and fasten it well, with the point outside and downward; if we keep the apparatus thus formed in equilibrium upon the point of the pencil, this resting upon a sheet of paper, and rest our fingers on the edges of the basket, it will be set in motion; but, instead of turning, it will make the pencil run, in various directions, over the paper, tracing either strokes without meaning, or letters.

If some Spirit is evoked, and wishes to communicate, it will reply no longer by means of raps, as in typtology, but by writing words.

The movement of the basket is no longer automatic, as in the case of turning tables; it becomes intelligent. With this device, the pencil, on reaching the end of the line, does not return to the starting point to begin another; it continues to move circularly, so that the written line forms a spiral, making it necessary to turn the paper around many times to read what is written there.

The writing thus made is not always very legible, because the words do not remain separated. Nevertheless, the medium, by a kind of intuition, easily deciphers it. For economy, the paper and the common pencil may be replaced by a slate with its respective pencil.

We shall designate this kind of basket by the name of spinning-basket. Sometimes, in place of the basket, a piece of cardboard very similar to lozenge boxes is employed, the pencil forming its axis, as in the toy called a teetotum.

Many other devices have been imagined for obtaining the same result.

The most convenient is the one we shall call the beaked basket, and which consists in adapting to the basket an inclined wooden rod, extending ten to fifteen centimeters toward the outside, in the position of the bowsprit mast on a vessel. — Through a hole opened at the extremity of this rod, a pencil long enough for its point to rest on the paper is passed.

The medium placing his fingers on the edge of the basket, the whole apparatus stirs and the pencil writes, as in the previous case, with the difference, however, that, in general, the writing is more legible, with the words separated and the lines following one another parallel, as in ordinary writing, because the medium can easily carry the pencil from one line to another.

Thus dissertations of many pages are obtained as rapidly as if one were writing directly with the hand.

By still other unmistakable signs the intelligence that acts often manifests itself.

Reaching the end of the page, the pencil makes spontaneously a movement to turn the paper. If it wishes to refer to a passage already written, on the same page, or on another, it seeks it with the point of the pencil, as any person would do with the tip of the finger, and underlines it. If, finally, the Spirit wishes to address someone, the extremity of the wooden rod turns toward that someone.

To abbreviate, the words yes and no are frequently expressed by the signs of affirmation and negation that we make with the head. If the Spirit wishes to express anger, or impatience, it strikes repeated blows with the point of the pencil and not rarely breaks it.

Instead of a basket, some persons make use of a kind of very small table, made on purpose, having from twelve to fifteen centimeters in length, by five to six in height, and three feet, to one of which a pencil is adapted. The two others are rounded, or fitted with an ivory ball, to slide more easily over the paper.

Others use only a planchette of fifteen to twenty centimeters square, triangular, oblong, or oval. In one of the edges, there is an oblique hole for introducing the pencil. Placed in the position for writing, it remains inclined and rests by one of its sides on the paper; some have on that side casters to facilitate its movement.

It is to be seen, in short, that all these devices have nothing absolute about them. The best is the one that is most convenient.

With any of these apparatuses, it is almost always necessary that the operators be two; but it is not necessary that both be endowed with mediumistic faculties. One serves solely to maintain the equilibrium and to spare the medium an excess of fatigue. [See examples of psychographed messages with the use of a planchette in the book “Sementeira de luz”: Chapters 26 and 61.] [Direct or manual psychography.]

We call indirect psychography the writing thus obtained, in contrast to direct or manual psychography, obtained by the medium himself.

To understand this last process, it is necessary to take into account what takes place in the operation. The Spirit that communicates acts upon the medium who, under this influence, moves the arm and the hand mechanically to write, without having (it is at least the most common case) the slightest consciousness of what he writes; the hand acts upon the basket and the basket upon the pencil.

Thus, it is not the basket that becomes intelligent; it is nothing more than an instrument handled by an intelligence; it is, really, nothing more than a pencil-holder, an appendage of the hand, an intermediary, between the hand and the pencil.

Let this intermediary be suppressed; let the pencil be placed in the hand and the result will be the same, with a much simpler mechanism, since the medium writes as he does under ordinary conditions.

So that every person who writes with the aid of a basket, planchette, or any other object, can write directly.

Of all the means of communication, manual writing, which some call involuntary writing, is, without dispute, the simplest, the easiest, and the most convenient, because it requires no preparation and lends itself, like ordinary writing, to the greatest developments. We shall speak of it again, when we treat of mediums. [n.º 178.]

In the first times of the manifestations, when as yet no one had exact ideas on the subject, many writings were published with this title: Communications from a table, from a basket, from a planchette, etc.

Today, one well perceives how improper, or erroneous, such expressions are, leaving aside the little serious character they reveal.

Effectively, as we have just seen, tables, planchettes, and baskets are nothing more than unintelligent instruments, although animated, for moments, by a factitious life, which can communicate nothing by themselves. To say the contrary is to take the effect for the cause, the instrument for the principle.

It would be the same as for an author to declare, in the title of his work, that he had written it with a metal pen or with a quill pen.

These instruments, moreover, are not exclusive. We know someone who, instead of the spinning-basket that we have described above, made use of a funnel, into whose neck he introduced the pencil. One could then have received communications from a funnel just as from a saucepan or from a salad bowl.

If they are obtained by means of raps or with a chair or a cane, there is no longer a talking table, but a talking chair, or a talking cane.

What matters that it be known is not the nature of the instrument but, rather, the manner of obtaining.

If the communication comes by means of writing, whatever be the apparatus that holds the pencil, what there is, for us, is psychography; typtology, if by means of raps.

Spiritism taking on the proportions of a science, a scientific language becomes indispensable to it.