Chinese Life in the Tibetan Foothills/Book 4/The Planchette
The "Planchette."
To seek the counsel of the spirits by the aid of the stylus, k‘ung chung hsüan pi (空中懸筆). Various forms of this cult have been in use for many centuries. The present mode is to make a string of silk thread or human hair and suspend it from the roof, with a pen made of peach or willow twig. Directly under this pen is placed a table covered with fine dry river-sand. Incense and paper are burned before the tablet of the stylus house god, the attention of the spirits called and their help besought.
When the spirits come the pencil moves and writes characters on the sand. If nonsense is written, the manager, chi shou (乩手), further invokes the spirits by the k‘o t‘ou (kotow) and more incense and paper burning, and when the pencil writes real characters one man reads aloud and another makes a record. Enquiring from a converted chi shou as to the possibility of falsifying these pencil motions, he declares that with this kind of stylus there is no trickery, but the pencil does not move without being invited and not always then, and seldom moves to advantage, but he has known it to write wonderfully true things.
The tablets written in the stylus house are of two different sorts, one to the celestials, the other to lü tsu (呂祖). They are as follows:
天上地下蓬萊洞府仙眞，純陽演正警化孚佑帝君.
The t‘ao chi liu pi (桃箕柳筆) is a forked branch of a peach tree with willow twig fastened to the lower side of the single point; it resembles a bird with outspread wings and beak, and is supposed to contain the essence of seminal power and divine influence. Two men grasp the prongs of the stylus and hold it over the table of sand; the spirits are invoked and the stylus writes. This is a more degraded method than the former, as the two men who hold the prongs, if of one mind, can write almost anything they please. This form of the stylus is also known fu luan chiang chi (扶鸞降乩).
The most degraded of magic pens is that used by one man, tu jên mei pi (獨人墨筆), who pleases himself what he writes.
Sometimes the magic pen will only write nonsense and then he has resort to the following charms to correct the trouble: chua-hsien fu (抓仙符), the grasp celestial charm; chan kuei fu (斬鬼符), behead-demon charm; chu yao fu (誅妖符) kill-demon charm. These charms are all burned before the tablet to the stylus house god.