Spirit writing is the practice, found in Chinese religion and in modern Western spiritualism alike, of producing written messages held to come from gods, spirits or the dead through a medium or a device rather than from the conscious mind of any living author. In the Chinese tradition the classic method is fuji, the "planchette writing" in which a suspended stylus or a forked implement, held by one or two entranced mediums, traces characters in a tray of sand or incense ash as a deity is believed to guide it, the characters then read off and recorded by attendants. Through this means gods and immortals were consulted for guidance, healing and moral instruction, and whole scriptures and moral tracts were produced and circulated as revealed texts; spirit-writing altars and the pious societies gathered around them have been an important channel of popular Chinese religious creativity.
In the West, the analogous practice of automatic writing emerged prominently within nineteenth-century Spiritualism, in which a medium, in a trance or a state of relaxed passivity, allowed the hand to write without conscious direction, the resulting text attributed to a spirit communicator. The phenomenon drew serious investigation from early psychical researchers and psychologists, some of whom accounted for it in terms of unconscious mental processes, the writing hand expressing thoughts below the threshold of awareness, rather than external spirits, a naturalistic explanation that remains the mainstream scientific view. Across its cultural settings, spirit writing raises in a sharp form the question of the boundary between religious revelation, the workings of the unconscious mind, and deliberate or unwitting fabrication.