History
Automatic writing as a spiritual practice was reported by Hyppolyte Taine in the preface to the third edition of his "De l'intelligence, published in 1878. Besides "etherial visions" or "magnetic auras", bilingual writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) claimed to have mediunic experiences of automatic writing. In his own words, he felt "sometimes suddenly being owned by something else" or having a "very curious sensation" in the right arm which "was lifted into the air without" his will. George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats, claimed that she could write automatically. In 1975, Wendy Hart of Maidenhead claimed that she wrote automatically about Nicholas Moore, a sea captain who died in 1642. Her husband, who did research on Moore, affirmed that this person had resided at St Columb Major in Cornwall during the English Civil War.
William Fletcher Barrett wrote that "Automatic messages may take place either by the automatist passively holding a pencil on a sheet of paper, or by the planchette, or by the 'ouija board'." In spiritualism, spirits are claimed to take control of the hand of a medium to write messages, letters, and even entire books. Automatic writing can happen in a trance or waking state. Arthur Conan Doyle in his book The New Revelation (1918) wrote that automatic writing occurs either by the writers subconscious or by external spirits operating through the writer. As a spiritualist Doyle chose to believe in the spirit hypothesis. Many psychical researchers however such as Thomson Jay Hudson have claimed that no spirits are involved in automatic writing and that the subconscious mind is the explanation.
Alleged examples of automatic writing via external spirits include Helen Schucman's A Course in Miracles (1975) and Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God (1996).
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