Mormon Ouija
May 16th, 2007 by Glenn
I had a seminary teacher my last two years in high school who really took me under his wing and made me feel special. He was a really good guy who took a personal interest in his students and was able to see past my hot-shot cockiness to recognize the sincere desire I had to explore and understand the gospel – despite my frequent irreverent and occasionally disruptive sense of humor.
One day he gave some kind of object lesson in class – I don’t remember anything about it except that he brought in some real diamonds. After class I went in to his office and the two of us spoke for a while. He had the diamonds locked in a hard leather briefcase and I playfully asked him if he would give me the diamonds if I correctly guessed the combination. With a twinkle in his eye he agreed and then smirked at me as I stood up, shut the door, closed the window blinds, and drew the following numbers on a blank piece of paper:
I asked him to remove his wedding ring. He did. I placed the ring over the paper and held it with both hands the way I imagined a planchette would be used on a Ouja-board. Then I closed my eyes and started humming – simulating, in jest, what I imagined a medium would do in a séance.
His eyes were a little less-sparkly as I stopped the ring on the paper and opened my eyes: Five. I closed my eyes again and moved the ring around, humming. I stopped a second time: Three. His eyes narrowed slightly. I went through the process one last time and this time stopped over nothing – I was off the chart, but closest to 9, so I wrote down: 5-3-9. He was looking securely confident at this point. I picked up the briefcase and turned the combination. It clicked open. We were both completely dumbfounded (and I, at least, was more than a little freaked out). I opened the door and the window blinds to get the beloved light back into the room. My teacher shook his head and told me that the real combination was 5-3-0 – that it really freaked him out to see that I got the first two numbers correct, but that he wondered what would happen for the third as I had not drawn a zero. The fact that it opened even with the wrong combination made it all the more creepy (of course we never stopped to think it was just a cheap combination).
So how would you interpret this experience if it happened to you? What does something like this have to say about Mormon worldview? What does it have to do with Mormon folklore?
Did you get the diamonds?????
The home-made ouija board was evidently a tool used to focus your spiritual energies, much like a seer-stone might be used by others.
I hope you tithed on the diamonds you were given.
Seriously, Glenn. How could you leave out the diamonds!?!
That is a pretty freaky story. What made you come up with the idea of a ouiji board, let alone use his wedding ring? I bet he still tells that story, although I’m not sure what the moral is. . .
Oh, right — the diamonds. I was hoping you all wouldn’t bring that up. All I am saying is that they can’t prove a thing. And when he tells the story today he ends with, “the immoral of this story is…”
What made me think of doing it? Who knows — what makes me think of doing anything. I was mainly just playing around with traditional ideas and enjoying one of those spur of the moment jokes with my teacher.
• I knew he had diamonds in his briefcase and that he locked it so no one would steal them (which I thought was funny for some reason — incongrous with my young naive idea that no good LDS boy or girl would steal from their teacher).
• I knew about oujia boards because I had an English teacher who kept one in her classroom. We all thought she was a witch (in the Wiccan sense). She quite enjoyed that we had that perception of her, and would do subtle things from time to time to reinforce that image (but that is another story altogether)
• I had heard stories about ouija boards and knew that I had been taught it was evil, or at least dangerous as a way of inviting evil (although I had also heard stories that a group of kids played ouija and when it wouldn’t work the leader asked “is anyone here Mormon?” and that’s why it didn’t work — the evil spirits couldn’t get in because the Mormon goodness was blocking them out).
• I knew a ouiji needed something to move over the top of the symbols and I thought his wedding ring would be a funny makeshift planchette (because I expected it was a sacred object to him — and the thought that he would allow a sacred object to be used for an “evil” ouija was funny to me).
I guess you could say that I saw many potential incongruities and exploited them for the sake of humor — this is the “(appropriate) incongruity theory” of humor studies (that I learned for the dissertation on Mormon Humor that I stopped writing several years ago). I could be wrong, but I see this as a very normal example of the way we use the information we have been given to do certain things based on certain expectations and views of the world. In this case it was a joke about ouijas. But I think this sort of thing (processing traditional information) happens all the time.
As long as Captian Howdy didn’t show up!
boo
that is a seriously creepy picture. it’s like the last thing I want to see before I go to bed in an empty house tonight. ugh.
Sorry Jess. Is this one any better?