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The “form interpretation test” devised by Hermann Rorschach is the most famous form of the use of inkblots in psychological investigation. There are many sources of inspiration for this test. The most obvious are the influence of fellow psychiatrists Carl Gustav Jung (word association test), Herbert Silberer (lechanomancy) and Szymon Hens (inkblots and imaginative function). However, other sources can be identified in the mantic practices which, since ancient times, have stimulated sensory and motor automatisms. These practices were reappropriated during the nineteenth century, as part of the first dynamic psychiatry, until, in the path established by the Englishman Frederic Myers and his studies of automatic writing and of vision in the crystal, the “psychoscope” (term designating any device that allows the emergence of motor or sensory automatisms) is proposed as an essential instrument of experimental psychology. We provide a backstory that identifies these possible influences for Rorschach in developing his material and the interpretation system for his test. The epistemological opposition between adherents of the “psychoscope” and the “chronoscope” seem to play out again in contemporary controversies over the evaluation of the psychometric properties of projective tests.