The idea of spiritualism in American culture is not new. One of the longest lasting board games, Ouiji, came from American spiritualism craze of the 1800s.
The Ouija board was created out of the American 19th century obsession with spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living. Spiritualism, which had been around for years in Europe, hit America hard in 1848 with the sudden prominence of the Fox sisters of upstate New York. The Fox sisters became celebrities because of their claims that they could receive messages from spirits, who rapped on the walls in answer to questions. By recreating this feat of channeling spirits, these gatherings started in parlors across the state. Aided by the stories about the celebrity sisters and other spiritualists in the new national press, spiritualism reached millions of adherents at its peak in the second half of the 19th century.
Spiritualism worked for Americans: it was compatible with Christian dogma, meaning one could hold a seance on Saturday night and have no qualms about going to church the next day. It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at seances, through automatic writing, or table turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a small table and watch it begin shake and rattle, while they all declared that they weren’t moving it. Spiritualism also offered solace in an era when the average lifespan was less than 50 years: young women died in childbirth; children died of disease; and men died in war. During the Civil War, spiritualism gained adherents in droves, people desperate to connect with loved ones who’d gone away to war and never come home.
People wanted to believe that they could communicate with the dead loved ones. No one considered that the process could open the gates of hell. They wanted comfort from their troubled times.
In 1886, the Associated Press reported on a new phenomenon taking over the spiritualists’ camps in Ohio, "the talking board." it was, for all intents and purposes, a Ouija board, with letters, numbers and a planchette-like device to point to them.
The Kennard Novelty Company, the first mass producers of the Ouija board seized upon the spiritualism movement's frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits; calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication such as the telegraph had been around for decades—people began to wonder why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? On February 10, 1891, the U.S. Patent Office awarded a patent for the Ouija board as new “toy or game.” The first patent offers no explanation as to how the device works, just asserts that it does.
When people want something badly, their innate common sense can be lost in the moment. When desperate people want answers, they may throw their entire being into the unknown.
Perhaps, this was the ribbon that tied LOST's characters together. The island represented a transparent spirit board that allowed the characters to try to re-connect to their pasts. We observed that Hurley and Miles had abilities to communicate with the dead. Jacob had the ability to cast ghostly apparitions of himself as a child and as an adult. The smoke monster could create dead people to confront their loved ones, like Yemi to Mr. Eko.
Except, how did the island work its spiritual code on the characters? Locke used his vision quests to try to connect to the island. Desmond, through massive dose of radiation, began to mentally time flash to apparent future events. But they were not asking the island for answers; it was more that the island was telling or guiding them down certain paths.
If spiritualism is a key to LOST, then the series was more like a game than we were led to believe.
