Spirit Pendulum: Ask Spirits

Hold your phone still over the board. Let the chain settle. Then ask.

Spirit Pendulum hangs a heavy brass bob on a fine chain over an old divination board, lit by two candles. The pendulum is not an animation: it is a real physical model of a pendulum, and your phone's motion sensors are the hand that holds it. Tilt the phone and it drifts downhill. Move your hand and it swings. Breathe, and it trembles.

Then the spirit takes over. The swing stops, as if caught in mid air. It turns, slowly, onto a new line, and begins to build: YES on the far and near arcs, NO across, MAYBE and ASK AGAIN on the diagonals, the digits, and the letters of your own alphabet around the rim.

THE SITTING
• Cleanse: hold the phone still until the chain is quiet.
• Calibrate: "Show me YES." "Show me NO." Watch the swing find each axis.
• Ask: three questions. Yes or no, how many, when, or anything else. Same sitting, same question, same answer.
• Close: thank the spirit and let it go. The chain comes to rest. A sitting left without thanks stays in the journal as not closed.

THE BOARD
• Answer ring with YES, NO, MAYBE and ASK AGAIN, digits 0 to 9, and a letter ring in your language: Latin, Cyrillic, Korean jamo that join into syllables as they are spelled, Japanese kana, Devanagari.
• Answers written in a hand on the screen as the pendulum spells them.

THE ROOM
• Photographic table, aged parchment board, turned wooden rim with a brass inlay, two pillar candles whose flames gutter when the spirit takes hold.
• Shadows of the bob and the chain cast by both flames.
• Synthesized sound: room tone, candle crackle, the chain's metallic clinks, and a low drone that rises when the pull gets stronger. Use headphones.
• Haptics only when the pendulum answers.

THE JOURNAL
• Every sitting is written down: when, how long, each question and what the pendulum showed.
• Share a sitting as a card.

Free questions in every sitting; when the candle burns low you can keep it lit for three more by watching a short video, if you want to.

No account. Your questions and your journal stay on your phone. Nine languages.
For entertainment purposes. The answers are generated by the app.