Scrying

What it is

Gazing into a reflective or translucent surface until images appear: a crystal ball, a black mirror, a bowl of water, a pool of ink in the palm, polished obsidian, a flame, or a fingernail coated with oil.

The practitioner does not interpret marks on the surface. The surface is a screen. The images are seen in it, and are understood as coming from elsewhere.

Where it came from

The practice is ancient and geographically widespread.

Mesopotamian lecanomancy read the behaviour of oil poured on water. Greek and Roman hydromancy and catoptromancy used water and mirrors respectively. Egyptian sources describe ink-pool scrying, a method that persisted in Egypt into the nineteenth century, where European travellers recorded boys being used as seers to gaze into ink poured into the palm.

The most documented European case is John Dee, mathematician, navigator and adviser to Elizabeth I, who from 1582 worked with the scryer Edward Kelley to receive what they took to be angelic communications — the Enochian material. Dee did not scry himself; he recorded while Kelley gazed.

Two of Dee's instruments survive in the British Museum, and one carries a striking history: his black mirror is a piece of polished Aztec obsidian, a Mexican ritual object associated with the god Tezcatlipoca, "smoking mirror", brought to Europe after the Spanish conquest and eventually used by an English magus to talk to angels. Few objects carry the collision of traditions so literally.

How it is done

Low, even light. A surface with as little detail as possible. Prolonged, softly focused gazing, often for twenty minutes or more, with the practitioner relaxed and not trying. Practitioners describe the surface first clouding or darkening, then images forming.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the visual phenomena are real, reliable and understood — which is unusual in this section. Scrying is essentially a technique for inducing hallucination through perceptual deprivation, and it works.

Two well-documented effects do the work. Troxler fading: when the eyes hold a steady fixation on an unchanging low-contrast field, stimuli in the periphery fade from awareness within seconds. The visual system reports changes, and where there are none it stops reporting. Sustained, this produces a field of nothing for the brain to interpret, and the brain fills it.

The second is more directly on point. In 2010 the psychologist Giovanni Caputo published a simple experiment: subjects sat alone in dim light and looked at their own reflection in a mirror for ten minutes. The great majority reported striking distortions — their face changing, becoming a stranger's, an animal's, or a dead relative's. The effect appeared in ordinary participants with no unusual traits, quickly and reliably. Caputo called it the strange-face illusion, and it is replicable in a bathroom.

Related evidence comes from Ganzfeld conditions — uniform undifferentiated visual and auditory input — which reliably produce imagery and drifting quasi-hallucinatory experience in normal subjects within minutes.

So the tradition's technique is sound. Everything it prescribes — dim light, featureless surface, steady gaze, patience, a relaxed and unforced attitude — is a recipe for producing exactly this state. Practitioners worked out empirically how to generate hallucination, and were right about the method.

We can say the informational claim is unsupported. That images appear is established; that they come from anywhere but the seer is not, and no test of scryed information has produced results above chance.

We can say the honest position leaves something interesting. If the images arise from the practitioner's own visual and associative systems in an unconstrained state, they are still their images — closer to a waking dream than to a broadcast. What that is worth is the same question the dream article ends on.

We cannot say what Kelley saw, or whether he believed it. Dee plainly did.

Further reading

• Giovanni Caputo, "Strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion" (Perception, 2010) — two pages, and you can replicate it yourself tonight.
• Deborah Harkness, John Dee's Conversations with Angels (1999) — the scholarly treatment of Dee and Kelley.