Scrying: The Ancient Art of Seeing Beyond — Crystal Balls, Mirrors, and Water
In a darkened room, a woman gazes into a bowl of still black water. The surface reflects nothing but shadow — and then, slowly, images begin to form. A face she doesn't recognize. A landscape. A scene that makes no sense until three weeks later, when its meaning suddenly becomes clear. In another time, in another place: a Renaissance scholar kneels before a smoky, dark stone — a shew-stone , he calls it — and an associate speaks aloud the symbols and visions that arise in the stone's depths. The scholar is John Dee . His associate is Edward Kelley . Between them, they claim to receive messages from angels in a language they call Enochian. And in yet another place and time, an 11th-century Arabic scholar writes a systematic treatise on the use of polished mirrors and water bowls for prophetic vision, drawing on centuries of tradition from Egypt, Persia, and the ancient Near East. Scrying — from the Old English descry (to see, to perceive) — is the practice of gazing into a ...