Messages through psychography, also known as automatic writing, usually have different handwriting in each session. This is the unpublished perception of mediums and relatives participating in psychography seances. One can venture two possible explanations for this finding: (A) conventional materialistic reasoning: the medium produces and sustains a disguised handwriting with each new communication; or (B) unconventional spiritual premise: each spirit produces different calligraphy when driving the medium’s fist.

Explanation (B) cannot be proven directly but its acceptance could be greater if the other proposal proves to be untenable. Indeed, Explanation (A) may be the least likely one since there are limits for handwrite disguising ability. Any attempt to overwrite the automatic writing motor program produces vicious movement patterns (Caligiuri & Mohammed, 2012). A graphotechnical analysis can point out inconsistencies of the disguise, as the writer inadvertently includes elements of one’s handwriting finer structure and some forger’s characteristics will “leak out” (Mirić & Aranđelović, 2020; Upadhyay & Chandravanshi, 2021).

Some attempts to validate psychographed texts using graphoscopy are found in lay books and non-peer-reviewed journals. Although successful, they are often retrospective analyses on writings of the exceptional medium Chico Xavier (1910 – 2002), written in Portuguese (Oliveira, 2020; Henn, 2021). Chico was one of the very rare mechanical mediums, those who remain unconscious during trance; in these cases, the handwriting is almost identical to that of the deceased communicator. Today, some semi-mechanical mediums (conscious during the phenomenon) active in Brazil produce quite variable calligraphy, sometimes resembling the deceased’s ones.

This ongoing research aims to document, through graphotechnic analysis, the level of variation of writing parameters in psychographed texts. The working hypothesis follows the spiritual premise that each text would have its own handwriting characteristics, different from one manuscript to another.

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Published on September 18, 2023