Scrying

Scrying is the practice of gazing into a reflective or translucent surface to receive visions, guidance, or knowledge of hidden or distant things. The tools are various, the polished crystal ball most famously, but also black mirrors (such as the obsidian mirror), still or darkened water (hydromancy), a flame or the embers of a fire, ink pooled in the palm, and polished stones or metals. The practitioner fixes the gaze on the surface and allows the eyes to relax, so that shapes, scenes, or symbols seem to form in or beyond it, which are then interpreted.

The practice is ancient and cross-cultural, water-gazing and mirror-gazing appear in the Greco-Roman world, in Mesopotamia, and across many folk traditions, and it had a notable place in Renaissance ceremonial magic: the Elizabethan scholar John Dee famously worked with a "shewstone" or crystal, through which his associate Edward Kelley reported the visions and angelic communications that produced the Enochian system. Psychologically, scrying is understood to work by providing an unstructured visual field, like clouds or inkblots, onto which the mind projects imagery arising from the imagination and the unconscious, a state aided by the light trance the steady gazing induces. As a discipline it thus functions as a technique for accessing intuitive or unconscious material through visual reverie, framed within the practitioner's tradition as the perception of spirits, distant events, or the future.

Scrying needs a surface that gives the eye nothing to fix on, and traditions have found many: still water in a bowl, ink pooled in a palm, polished metal, rock crystal, black glass. The instrument is a means of occupying vision while leaving attention free, and the mechanism most often proposed for what follows is the same one that produces shapes in clouds and faces in wood grain, running without an object to correct it.

The best documented European case is John Dee. Dee did not scry himself; he employed others, and from 1582 he worked with Edward Kelley, recording in detail what Kelley reported seeing in the stone. The results are the Enochian material: an angelic language, a system of tables, and a hierarchy of governors and aethyrs, set down across years of sittings in Dee's own hand. Whatever one concludes about their source, they are a remarkable record of the practice as it was actually conducted, because Dee wrote down the sessions rather than only the results.

Among the objects associated with him is a circular mirror of black obsidian. Geochemical analysis has confirmed that its stone comes from Mexico, which makes it an Aztec object that reached England through the Spanish conquest and was taken up in an English magical practice. It is a compact illustration of how instruments travel between traditions and acquire new uses.

The atlas records the tradition, its instruments and its documented cases.