Scrying

Scrying is seeing into a medium rather than at it. The instrument varies more than almost any other divination, a quartz sphere, a black mirror, a bowl of water, ink in the palm, fire, smoke, even the surface of a cup of tea, and the practice underneath is one: the eyes rest in a soft focus on the depth of the surface, and images arise within it. Practitioners describe the medium as a screen the inner eye projects onto, and the classic crystal-gazing manuals describe a distinct sequence to the experience. The ball first clouds, taking on a milky, misty aspect; the cloud may darken until reflections vanish; and then figures, scenes, or symbols appear within, sometimes still as paintings, sometimes moving like a scene watched from a window. The scryer stays fully conscious throughout, and the discipline is to report the images as they come, aloud if working for another, and only afterward to translate them into meaning.

The record of the practice runs deep and wide. A 1911 survey in the Encyclopaedia Britannica gathered scrying's forms from around the world: a pool of ink in the hand in Egypt, quartz crystals among the Apache and in Peru, polished black stones in South America, water vessels among the Zulu and in Siberia, mirrors in classical Greece and medieval Europe. The mirror oracle at Patrae that Pausanias describes lowered a mirror on a cord into a sacred spring, and the sick read their own reflected face for what it foretold. Chinese mirror divination has its own long documented history, and in Mesoamerica the obsidian mirror belonged to the regalia of rulers, the object of Tezcatlipoca, whose name means Lord of the Smoking Mirror.

The episode that shaped Western learned magic most deeply belongs to Elizabethan England. From 1582, the mathematician John Dee sat with the scryer Edward Kelley before a crystal and an obsidian mirror, Dee asking, Kelley seeing, and the sessions recorded in Dee's diaries produced the angelic system now known as Enochian: its language, its calls, its watchtowers. Whether Kelley saw, invented, or something in between has never been settled, and the records survive for anyone who wants to weigh them. Dee's obsidian mirror, itself an Aztec artifact carried to Europe, sits in the British Museum.

The black mirror carries its own tradition. Dark glass, obsidian or glass painted black, gives a depth that silvered mirrors cannot: the gaze falls into the glass rather than bouncing off it. Victorian practitioners worked with both crystals and black mirrors, keeping to quiet rooms and regular sittings, and the black mirror became associated with a particular use, contact with the departed, the face in the glass changing from one's own reflection into something else. That spirit-portal use and the symbol-reading use coexist in the modern practice, which teaches them as different work.

The practice travels across traditions easily. It belongs to folk magic, the Halloween mirror ritual that shows a future husband, or in some tellings a skull, is scrying in a darkened room, and is the ancestor of the mirror dare most people know by another name. It belongs to learned magic, where the crystal sits consecrated on a table within the full apparatus of ceremonial work. It belongs to modern witchcraft as a standard divination method, and to the séance era, where crystal-gazing mediums sat among the spiritualists. What unites them is the trained soft gaze, and the understanding, common across all of them, that the images come from somewhere the scryer participates in choosing how to see.