Crystal Ball Reading: The History of Scrying and How It Is Done

From still water to polished glass

Looking into a reflective or transparent surface to see something beyond the ordinary has a name, and it is old. Bowls of water, dark mirrors, oil, flames and polished stone were all used long before glass spheres were made. Gazing into a ball of quartz or glass became a fixture of European occult practice in the late medieval and early modern period.

The practice acquired its stereotypical image later. In the nineteenth century, seaside fortune tellers and travelling shows gave the crystal ball its association with a turbaned figure and a velvet table, and films have kept that picture in circulation.

John Dee and the shew stone

The best-documented early scrying sessions were organised and recorded by the Elizabethan mathematician and adviser John Dee. Dee did not scry himself: the scryer was a medium, first Barnabas Saul and then, from 1582, Edward Kelley, who gazed into a crystal that Dee called his shew stone and reported angelic communications, which Dee wrote down in detailed diaries. Dee's polished obsidian mirror is linked with his name, though it is not the stone those sessions used.

Those diaries are a valuable record of what a scrying session looked like in practice, and they raise a question that applies to every later reader: when a gazer describes what he sees, how much belongs to the gazer? Dee relied on Kelley, whose earlier history, by several accounts, included a punishment for forgery. Historians still debate whether Kelley believed his visions.

How people say they read the ball

Practitioners describe a few stages, which differ between schools but follow a similar rhythm.

1. Choose a dim, quiet room with no direct light shining on the sphere, so that you see no hard reflections.
2. Set the ball on a dark cloth and sit comfortably at arm's length.
3. Soften your gaze, looking at the sphere rather than into a point on it, and blink naturally.
4. Wait. Gazers often describe the surface seeming to cloud or glow before images appear.
5. Note impressions without interpreting them in the moment, then reflect afterwards on what they might mean to you.

What the images probably are

Perception research has an account for much of what gazers report. When the eyes stare at an unchanging surface, the visual system stops responding to constant input and begins to fade it, a process known as Troxler fading, and the brain fills in. In 2010 the psychologist Giovanni Caputo found that people gazing at their own faces in a dim mirror for a short time often saw faces change, distort or become another person, and he called it the strange-face illusion.

The same mechanisms are available in a crystal ball. The images may feel sudden and external, but they are made by the viewer's visual system working with a blank field. Faces, landscapes and symbols are what the mind is especially good at producing, which is why they dominate gazers' reports.

Reading a reading

A crystal ball session with a professional is usually an interpretive conversation. The reader describes impressions and asks questions, and the client's responses steer where it goes. A good session is one in which the client leaves with something to think about.

• Impressions are metaphors rather than forecasts, so ask what a symbol brings up for you
• Specific predictions about dates, deaths or other people's feelings go beyond anything the method can support
• Be wary of a reader who sees a curse or a problem that only further payment can remove