One of the first things I remember hearing from the Warrens when I was a kid was that Ouija boards are very dangerous because they are “blind communication” and open doors to the demonic. Well, if that didn’t scare me nothing did. I remember going through the toy department in stores and going to the other side of the aisle to even walk by them. Yeah, they sell them in toy stores. Parker Brothers, I think was the manufacturer of the most popular one. They make them in pink now, too, because demons are fluffy and cute.
When I was in high school we had a British Lit class or something and we were reading the play, “Blythe Spirit”, by Noel Coward. I was psyched about this because the summer before I’d done the play with a local town theatre group, so I knew all the lines, and I was certain to get a good grade on it. The play, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is about a widower who is remarried and he and his wife host a seance at their home and the ghost of his first wife comes back and hilarity ensues, etc. So, there was no Ouija board in the play, however my high school teacher thought it would be fun to bring one in for us at the end of the quarter for us to play with. I saw her take that board out and I freaked. I wasn’t participating, in fact I wasn’t even gonna sit in the same room with it. I got up and walked out. To the best of my knowledge nothing happened, but that doesn’t mean that invitations weren’t issued – just because something didn’t immediately take anyone up on them doesn’t mean they wouldn’t respond ten years later.
So, being so afraid of Ouija boards, you’d think I’d be smart enough to stay away from dowsing rods, right? Right? No. Apparently not. Dowsing rods are thin metals rods, with handles and they used to be used to find water or wells on property and that was called Water Witching or something like that. The theory is that the metal rods will react to certain energies, including spirit energy. So you can sit there with the rods pointed straight out and if there’s a spirit in the near vicinity the rods will move in your hands to point at it. You can also ask the spirit to cross the rods to answer a question with Yes, or push them apart to answer with No. Kind of like… a Ouija board, only with fewer options. I guess I didn’t see it that way when I bought my first set of rods.
There are so many little gateways to the demonic that we don’t even really think about because they’re dressed up pretty or cloaked in New Age Enlightenment. Tarot cards. Angel cards. Ascended Master cards. Dowsing rods.
In the Garden of Eden the devil came to Eve and asked her, “Did God REALLY say…?” He didn’t make a direct accusation at first, he just planted a seed of doubt in her mind, and then showed her something shiny. Isn’t he still doing that today? “Did God really say that you shouldn’t try to contact the dead?”
Yeah. He really did say.
Tracy Petry 