AUTOMATIC WRITING: “I did not say it was possible; I only said it was true”
I have observed, it may be enough to say in this place, that the result of my inquiries and researches, has left me no alternative but the belief, that they have resulted from the working or upheaving of the great spirit-world, and from an acting of spirit-power and intelligence, apparently exterior, upon the spirit and intelligence which is within.
(M. Wilkinson, Spirit Drawings).
If spirits could communicate, and even speak through mediums, what was it they wanted to say? As it turns out, a great deal of spooky poetry. Throughout the century, spirits acted through mediums to write all sorts of works about the nature of the afterlife, historical events, personal histories, and even descriptions of life on Mars. Mediums realized in some cases, it was far more efficient to write their words rather than dictate them out loud.
When mediums would channel spirits, they often fell into what can be described as trance. Their eyes closed or glazed over, their body became perfectly still, and they spoke with a voice or wrote with handwriting that was not their own. This trance state can be traced back to one of spiritualism’s early influences, mesmerism. Before Europeans were obsessed with talking to ghosts, they enjoyed channeling their magnetic fluids.
A mesmeric practitioner would run their hands along people’s body to direct “magnetic fluids” to areas of illness, causing them to fall into a healing trance.
Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), a German scientist, first proposed the existence of these fluids in 1776 and called the phenomenon animal magnetism. His ideas grew immensely popular in France around the time of the French Revolution, where his student, the Marquis de Puységur (1751-1825) discovered many of his patients fell into a trance while he was healing them. He described that his patients could answer questions about their own illnesses and others but could not remember anything when they awoke. Later in 1842, English physician James Baird coined the term hypnotism and experimented with it as a form of anesthesia.
Many of the earliest supporters of spiritualism were already mesmerists and saw the movement as a continuation of Mesmer’s ideas and discoveries. Supporters used similar theories to discuss the movement of magnetic fluids in the body and the channelling of spiritual energies
Automatic writing, however, gets its name from another wonderfully creepy invention, automatons. Clockwork automatons that moved, danced, played chess, and drew pictures, were a popular spectacle since the late 18th century. They epitomized both the showmanship and technological innovations of the era. The same way electricity flowed through these machines to create automatic responses, spiritual energy flowed through the medium to write macabre poetry, overlapping mechanism and human agency.