Crystal Gazing

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Crystal gazing is the practice of staring into a crystal ball, a polished stone, or another reflective surface in order to see visions — images understood by those who practised it to reveal what is hidden, distant, or to come. The wider name for the technique is scrying, from an old word for descrying or making out; the formal term crystallomancy marks it as one branch of a much larger family of reflective divination, which also worked with mirrors, still water, ink, and polished metal.

The impulse is ancient. Antiquity knew lecanomancy, divination by gazing into a bowl of water or oil, and catoptromancy, divination by mirror, and related techniques recur across the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds. What scrying offered, in every setting, was a surface blank enough to hold an image that did not come from the surface itself — and the long argument, never settled, over where the image did come from. Some held that spirits or angels were summoned to appear; others that the gazer’s own mind supplied the figures; the practice rarely required its users to choose between the two.

The best-documented episode in the Western record belongs to the Elizabethan scholar John Dee, mathematician and adviser to the queen, who from the 1580s conducted a long series of sessions with a polished stone he called a shewstone and a “speculum” of obsidian. Dee himself reported seeing little; the visions were described aloud by his scryers, chiefly Edward Kelley, while Dee recorded them. Out of these sittings came the elaborate angelic revelations and the so-called Enochian language that later occultists would treasure. Whether Kelley was a genuine visionary, a fraud, or something less tidy than either remains contested; the surviving diaries are voluminous and have supported every reading.

In the later nineteenth century crystal gazing was taken up again in two quite different keys. The occult revival absorbed it into ceremonial magic and into the kit of the practising medium, while the early psychical researchers treated it as a controlled way of eliciting hallucinatory imagery from ordinary subjects — evidence, they argued, less of spirits than of how the mind externalises material below the threshold of waking attention. That second reading is roughly the one experimental psychology has carried forward: the blank reflective field as a screen onto which suggestion, memory, and expectation are projected.

The traditions that practised scrying did not, on the whole, share that explanation. They held that the world is denser than it appears, that it can be read by those who know how to look, and that a clear surface rightly prepared is one of the places the unseen consents to show itself. The claim and its disproof have circled each other for a very long time, and the crystal has outlasted most attempts to settle which is right.

→ Related: Divination · Belomancy