Scrying

Ancient and medieval accounts

A 1905 history of crystal gazing by Northcote W. Thomas notes that few accounts of the practice survive from Greece and Rome and warns against inferring from this that it was rare. He cites Pausanias on a fountain oracle near the temple of Demeter at Patrae, where a mirror was lowered toward the water and the reflections were read, mainly for the sick. Thomas himself doubts whether this was mirror gazing or another form of divination.

The same history reports, with caution about the sources, a Roman tradition that King Numa practiced hydromancy, and a later author's account of a woman who saw future events in a vessel of water. It lists medieval Christian writers who condemned seeing images in mirrors, cups, basins or bright swords, including John of Salisbury, who called such practitioners specularii. These are early twentieth-century summaries of older texts, and the original passages were not checked for this page.

John Dee and Edward Kelley

John Dee lived from 1527 to 1608 or 1609. A 2021 archaeological study in Antiquity states that by the 1580s he had taken scryers, most notably Edward Kelley, into his service to communicate with angels through mirrors or crystals. The British Museum holds an obsidian mirror associated with Dee, catalogued as Aztec in origin, with analysis in 2019 confirming the obsidian came from Pachuca in Hidalgo, Mexico.

The Antiquity authors write that how and when Dee obtained the mirror is uncertain, and that documentation linking it to him is limited. Support comes from an eighteenth-century label by Horace Walpole and from a 1624 deposition describing a round flat stone like crystal that an angel was said to have brought to Dee. The study concerns the object's provenance, not whether any vision seen in it was real.

Nineteenth-century psychical research

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) published an early study titled "Recent experiments in crystal vision" in its Proceedings in 1889 (volume 5, pages 486 to 521) by Ada Goodrich Freer, who wrote as Miss X. The SPR's Psi Encyclopedia says that F. W. H. Myers became interested in her crystal gazing and that she joined the Society in 1888.

The same entry records that contemporaries questioned her reliability as a witness, and that her standing in the Society ended after a later investigation. Thomas's 1905 book, with an introduction by Andrew Lang, reviews crystal gazing in this period and describes crystal visions as akin to daydreams and to the faculty of visualizing, rejecting the view that gazers are necessarily neurotic.

Names for gazing practices

Scrying is the general term for gazing at a surface to see images. Names in older and modern sources are often tied to the medium: crystal gazing or crystallomancy for crystal or glass, catoptromancy for mirrors, and hydromancy for water. A 1994 paper by Alexander Fodor describes bowl divination, or lecanomancy, as a specific kind of hydromancy, with origins traced by scholars to ancient Mesopotamia and later spread through Egypt, Greece, Persia, the Arab world and Europe.

Thomas also uses the terms gastromancy for gazing at the belly and speaks of earlier English objects called shew-stones, a name applied to Dee's stone. The Society for Psychical Research used the phrase crystal vision. The terms overlap, and no standard definition appears in the sources reviewed.

Related terms in research

Psychology papers on mirror gazing use their own vocabulary. The term strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion was introduced by Giovanni Caputo in a 2010 report in Perception, and later papers describe it as the perception of strange faces when a person gazes at their own face in a mirror for a few minutes at low illumination. The 2010 PubMed record has no abstract, so the later abstracts are the basis for this description.

These laboratory terms describe experimental tasks and are not synonyms for scrying. Neither the Perception report nor the later papers reviewed here frame their tasks as divination.

What the practice is described as involving

In the sources reviewed, scrying is described in general terms as fixing the gaze on a reflective, polished or translucent object, such as a crystal, a mirror, a dark stone, water in a bowl, or a flame, until images or impressions appear that the viewer interprets. Thomas describes a crystal vision as seen by a person who is awake and usually sees it as an image appearing in or beside the crystal. This page does not describe methods.

Historical accounts differ on who sees the images. Thomas notes that in medieval times children were used as scryers, and that Dee employed intermediaries instead of looking himself in the Antiquity account. Practices varied by period, place and tradition, and the sources do not describe a single standard form.

Related Machipedia pages

Scrying is one of the forms of divination covered on the Divination page. Related pages include Tasseography, Psychic Reading, Mediumship, Pendulum Healing and Aura Reading, which share some vocabulary or claimed purposes. Meditation is sometimes compared with gazing practices because both involve sustained attention, although the sources reviewed here do not examine that link.

Divination and spirit communication

Historical sources attribute several purposes to scrying. The Patrae fountain mirror was consulted about the outcome of illness, medieval authors condemned seeing demons or learning the replies of spirits, and Dee's circle used crystals and mirrors to communicate with angels. Thomas also discusses stories about locating lost objects or distant people, which he treats as claims to be weighed against the evidence.

Persian writers cited by Thomas describe a cup or mirror of the legendary ruler Jamshid in which the whole universe could be seen. These are traditional accounts reported secondhand, and they are not evidence about what any viewer actually saw.

Psychical research claims

Early psychical researchers asked whether crystal visions could carry information not otherwise available to the viewer. Thomas's 1905 book is subtitled as a discussion of the evidence for telepathic scrying and reports experiments in which scryers tried to see specified persons or pictures. The sources reviewed do not report controlled tests that established predictive accuracy.

Studies of gazing at a mirror

Controlled laboratory work exists on mirror gazing, but it studies perception, not divination. Caputo and colleagues describe strange-face illusions in healthy observers: individuals see distortions of their own faces and sometimes monstrous beings, faces of relatives or deceased people, and animals. In a 2012 comparison of 16 patients with schizophrenia and 21 healthy controls using a 7 minute task, the apparitions were more intense in patients.

A 2015 study of 110 community adolescents aged 12 to 19 found that 45.5 percent reported own-face deformation, 27.3 percent saw another identity and 7.3 percent saw a non-human identity, with illusion patterns related to schizotypy scores. A 2023 study of 21 young adults found that mirror fixation increased scores for derealization, depersonalization and dissociative identity compared with fixating on a non-reflective panel, and that a few people reported face pareidolia during the panel task.

These studies are small, use specific low-light protocols and were not designed to test scrying. They show that unusual perceptual experiences can arise during sustained gazing in laboratory conditions. They do not show that scrying visions are or are not meaningful.

Ganzfeld and imagery research

Ganzfeld research exposes people to unstructured uniform stimulation. A 2008 review in Cortex states that it elicits pseudo-hallucinatory percepts in most observers, ranging from simple forms to vivid dream-like imagery, and that the authors' EEG analysis did not support a hypnagogic origin and instead pointed to an activated state. The review also describes a section on ganzfeld telepathy research, which it says relies partly on unsupported assumptions about ganzfeld states.

Ganzfeld is a different procedure from crystal or mirror gazing, and the review is cited here for context on induced imagery. A PubMed search for scrying and crystal gazing returned no controlled study of scrying practice, and no test of predictive accuracy was found in the sources reviewed.

Attribution and framing

Scrying appears in several cultural and religious settings, and framings differ. Medieval Christian authors condemned it, nineteenth-century psychical researchers studied it as a psychological and possibly paranormal faculty, and Fodor traces bowl divination through Middle Eastern sources up to a modern Arabic book of magic. Beliefs about what is seen, such as angels, spirits or the viewer's own imagination, belong to the traditions and observers who hold them.

The Dee mirror and cross-cultural movement

The Dee mirror illustrates cross-cultural movement of objects: scholars date the obsidian to the Aztec world, and it was later used within a European esoteric context. The Antiquity authors discuss the object's provenance, not Aztec ritual meaning, and the sources reviewed do not speak for Aztec or other living traditions.

Dissociative and perceptual effects

Research on sustained mirror gazing reports effects that some participants experience as dissociative. Caputo's 2012 paper on two people gazing at each other found that the illusions were always dissociative of the subject's self and were accompanied by a temporary loss of self-agency. The 2023 study measured derealization and depersonalization after mirror fixation. These were short experimental sessions with volunteers, and the papers do not report long-term outcomes.

Patients with schizophrenia showed more intense strange-face apparitions than healthy controls in the 2012 comparison, and schizotypy traits were associated with illusion patterns in adolescents. The authors propose these tasks as assessment tools. The studies do not establish that scrying causes or worsens a psychiatric condition, and they do not offer guidance on who should or should not gaze.

Care boundaries

No source reviewed assessed harms from scrying as practiced by diviners, so frequency and seriousness of harm outside laboratories are unknown. People who find that gazing leads to distressing images, a changed sense of self or fear may wish to stop and talk with a doctor or mental health professional. Scrying should not replace or delay mental health care, medical care or crisis support, and predictions made by scryers have not been shown to be reliable in the sources reviewed.

Historical sources also note concerns about credibility, including contemporaries who questioned the reliability of one early SPR scryer's testimony. Readers weighing any reading or vision offered by a practitioner can treat it as the practitioner's interpretation.