Squared Anagrams

Okay, so continuing on from yesterday’s post. I’m going to talk about Squared Anagrams. This is a way of getting a lot more information from seemingly fewer questions. Today I’ll describe it as you would use it with a Ouija board as your oracle, and then probably next week I’ll explain how you’d do it with no props and a more typical mind-reading presentation.

Back in 2004ish, on my old site, I wrote about using a Ouija board as the source of the letters in your anagram routine. And I gave the basic information on a routine I use with a hand-drawn Ouija board and a pen as the planchette. At the time I wrote:

“This will take some thought, but you can finagle it so that when the pen points to a letter it is slightly askew so that a miss on that letter can be explained away by your own misinterpretation of where the pen is pointing. For example, if the next letter in the progressive anagram is an T, the pen can point to it in sort of a cockeyed way so a hit will be taken at face value, but a miss can be corrected by stating, "Maybe I'm wrong, perhaps it's pointing to the G behind the T. There must be a G in your word." So when you figure out the construction of the board you can make it so any miss will point in the general direction of a letter that IS in the word that a miss would indicate what the thought of word is.”

The idea was that you could build your anagram and draw your Ouija board in such a way that you could do an anagram without any apparent misses, because a miss could be explained by the inexactness of where the pen was pointing.

15 years ago, I didn’t like the idea of getting a “No” response. I’ve come around on that completely. Now I like “No” responses because they feel like they’re not giving me information and they give me an excuse to change tactics.

Once I stopped caring about NOs, I realized that each move of the planchette that covered more than one letter could give us four pieces of information. Not just two.

If the planchette is split between A and B and I say, “It looks like it’s indicating an A… or maybe a B.”

I can find out :

• There’s an A in your word

• There’s a B in your word

• Both letters are in your word

• Neither are in your word

By doing this twice, we get 16 options rather than just the four you’d get with two purely binary guesses.

By adding another “clarification” type of question on top of that, we get 32 options from just two movements of the planchette.

There are a few other ambiguities a Ouija board allows, insofar as the orientation of the letters compared to the orientation of the planchette (which can change) and the orientation of the letters compared to each other (which doesn’t change). By using these two different orientational ambiguities, I can suggest the board is working uniformly in both letter guesses. (This will make more sense if you dig into the the details later on.)

So I’d have you look at the poem (the one posted yesterday) and have you think of a word. Maybe I say that this poem was written by a guy who passed on, and one of the ways to connect with his spirit is to concentrate on one of the words in the poem and repeat the word in your mind until it becomes a metaphysical doorway for his spirit to walk through. Or whatever.

So you think of the word “lasting.”

I tell you that the way it works is that the spirit moves the planchette while we touch it gently, whatever the hole is over is the letter the spirit is trying to send us. “Restless spirits—the kind that are contactable on a Ouija board—usually communicate in something known as ‘devil’s tongue.’ They will jumble up the order of the letters in the word. So that makes it a little more complicated.” When people use a Ouija board, they expect it just to spell out the words. You need some rationale as to why it’s not doing that here. I say something like, “That’s just how it works on TV.” The implication being that that’s fake, but this is real.

So you’re thinking of one of the words, the first move of the planchette is here:

Let’s say we’re both facing the board and I’m on the right.

“Hmm… it’s kind of between those two. From my perspective it’s an S. Is there an S in the word?”

“Yes.”

“And a T?”

“Yes.”

The planchette then moves to here.

“Okay, again it’s kind of splitting those letters. I mainly see an L. Is there an L?

“Yes.”

“And an M too?”

“No.”

“Okay, so this seems to be drifting to the right a bit. We’ll keep that in mind go forward.”

I now know your word is either “constellations” or “lasting.”

“Let’s try something different. Is the word you’re thinking of an object you can picture in your mind? Or is more of, like, a concept?”

“A concept, I guess.”

I now know the word is “lasting.”

“Okay, that’s going to make this more difficult.”

[If the word is something a person can visualize, then I’d have them focus on that image (to justify why I asked the question).]

From here, now that I know the word, I could continue with the Ouija, change it up and go into “automatic writing,” or maybe just become possessed and start screaming the word from deep in my throat.

So that’s how it would work for one of the 32 words. The 31 others would be slightly different. But for the most part, my process would follow these rules.

• If I get a “neither” in the first position, I would stop and say, “Okay, he might not have come through yet. Let’s stop and read the poem out loud as an invitation to him.”

• If I get a “neither” in the second position, I would abandon the Ouija board as “not working” and go into automatic writing (where they hold my wrist and my hand moves in scribbles and the word is found in those scribbles).

• If I get one letter in the first position and one letter in the second, then one of these things will be true:

  • Both letters were on the left side of the circle.

  • Both letters were on the right side of the circle.

  • Both letters were on the point side of the planchette

  • Both letters were on the round side of the planchette.

  Once I determine this “pattern” the ghost is speaking in and how the planchette is oriented, then the rest of the letters (which I now know) can follow the same pattern

I’ve written down all 32 ways this could play out here, so you can see how I’d handle each possibility if this is unclear. You wouldn’t need to memorize what to say (it would be obvious), but you’d need some sort of crib somewhere for the possible outcomes.

But again, this was just a demonstration effect, not one I’d expect anyone to use. I just wanted to explain the concept of the Squared Anagram. (If this idea already has a name, let me know.)

At first I thought it might be obvious to the spectator that you were “double dipping” with each guess, but my friend who has his own routine using this technique says he hasn’t found that to be the case. The planchette stopping between letters might feel more like a truly random happening than something you’re purposely manipulating, I don’t know. Like if you had a poster with the letters of the alphabet on it across the room and you threw a dart at it. If the dart landed between some letters, I think that would feel somewhat innocent, but would still allow you the chance to say, “Well I guess it’s closest to either this one or this one.” And that would seem pretty fair and natural.

I’ve seen my friend use this technique, with a Ouija board and without, and he’s been getting great reactions. At the very least, two paired guesses can’t seem any more suspicious than four single guesses.

The downside of this style of anagram is you really have to generate your word list working backwards from two different letter pairs. You’ll have to establish the conditions and then find things in a certain category that meet those conditions. You’re unlikely to just stumble upon a category of items that would work with this.

This whole thing isn’t quite a polished concept yet, obviously. That’s why it’s here on the site rather than hidden in one of my books. But I think it’s something that has merit. I’ll share some more ideas with it next week sometime, including a way to use it without a Ouija board.