Among objects used are a pool of ink in the hand (Egypt), the
liver of an animal (tribes of the North-West Indian frontier),
a hole filled with water (Polynesia), quartz crystals (the Apaches
and the Euahlayi tribe of New South Wales), a smooth slab of
polished black stone (the Huille-che of South America), water
in a vessel (Zulus and Siberians), a crystal (the Incas), a mirror
(classical Greece and the middle ages), the finger-nail, a sword-blade,
a ring-stone, a glass of sherry, in fact almost anything.
Much depends on what the “seer” is accustomed to use, and
some persons who can “scry” in a glass ball or a glass water-bottle
cannot “scry” in ink.
The practice of inducing pictorial hallucinations by such methods as these has been traced among the natives of North and South America, Asia, Australia, Africa, among the Maoris, who sometimes use a drop of blood, and in Polynesia, and is thus practically of world-wide diffusion. This fact was not observed (that is, the collections of examples were not made) till recently, when experiments in private non-spiritualist circles drew attention to crystal-gazing, a practice always popular among peasants, and known historically to have survived through classical and medieval times, and, as in the famous case of Dr Dee, after the Reformation.
The early church condemned specularii (mirror-gazers), and Aubrey and the Memoirs of Saint-Simon contain “scrying” anecdotes of the 17th and 18th centuries, while Sir Walter Scott’s story, My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, is based on a tradition of about 1750 in a noble Scottish family. The practice, in all times and countries, was used for purposes of divination. The gazer detected unknown criminals, or described remote events, or even professed to foretell things future. Sometimes the supposed magician or medicine man himself did the scrying; occasionally he enabled his client to see for himself; often a child was selected as the scryer. The process was usually explained as the result of the action of a spirit, angel or devil, and many unessential formulae, invocations, “calls,” written charms with cabbalistic signs, and fumigations, were employed. These things may have had some effect by way of suggestion; the scryer may have been brought by them into an appropriate frame of mind; but, as a whole, they are tedious and superfluous.
A person can either induce the pictorial hallucinations (he may discover his capacity by accident, like George Sand, as she tells in her Memoirs—and other cases are known), or he cannot induce them, though he stare till his eyes water. It is almost universally found, in cases of successful experiment, that the glass ball, for example, takes a milky or misty aspect, that it then grows black, reflections disappearing, and that then the pictures emerge. Some people arrive at seeing the glass ball milky or misty, and can go no further. Others see pictures of persons or landscapes, only in black and white, and motionless. Others see in the glass coloured figures of men, women and animals in motion; while in rarer cases the ball disappears from view, and the scryer finds himself apparently looking at an actual scene. In a few attested cases two persons have shared the same vision. In experiments with magnifying glasses, and through spars, the ordinary effects of magnifying and of alteration of view are sometimes produced; sometimes they are not. The evidence, of course, is necessarily only that of the scryers themselves, but repeated experiments by persons of probity, and unfamiliar with the topic, combined with the world-wide existence of the practice, prove that hallucinatory pictures are really induced.
It has not been found possible to determine, before experiment, whether any given man or woman will prove capable of the hallucinatory experiences. Many subjects with strong powers of “visualization,” or seeing things “in the mind’s eye,” cannot scry; others are successful in various degrees. We might expect persons who have experienced spontaneous visual hallucinations, of the kind vulgarly styled “ghosts” or “wraiths,” to succeed in inducing pictures in a glass ball. As a matter of fact such persons sometimes can and sometimes cannot see pictures in the way of crystal-gazing; while many who can see in the crystal have had no spontaneous hallucinations. It is useless to make experiments with hysterical and visionary people, “whose word no man relies on”; they may have the hallucinatory experiences, but they would say that they had in any case.
The nearest analogy to crystal visions, as described, is the common experience of “hypnagogic illusions” (cf. Alfred Maury. Les Rêves et le sommeil). With closed eyes, between sleeping and waking, many people see faces, landscapes and other things flash upon their view, pictures often brilliant, but of very brief duration and rapid mutation. Sometimes the subject opens his eyes to get rid of an unpleasant vision of this kind. People who cannot scry may have these hypnagogic illusions, and, so far, may partly understand the experience of the scryer who is wide awake. But the visions of the scryer often endure for a considerable time. He or she may put the glass down and converse, and may find the picture still there when the ball is taken up again. New figures may join the figure first seen, as when one enters a room. In these respects, and in the awakeness of the scryer, crystal pictures differ from hypnagogic illusions. In other ways the experiences coincide, the pictures are either fanciful, like illustrations of some unread history or romance, or are revivals of remembered places and faces.
Occasionally, in hypnagogic illusions, the observer can see the picture develop rapidly out of a blot of light or colour, beheld by the closed eyes. One or two scryers think that they, too, can trace the picture as it develops on the suggestion of some passage of light, colour or shadow in the glass or crystal. But, as a rule, the scryer cannot detect any process of development from such points de mire; though this may be the actual process.
On the whole there seems little doubt that successful crystal-gazing is the exertion of a not uncommon though far from universal faculty, like those of “chromatic audition”—the vivid association of certain sounds with certain colours—and the mental seeing of figures arranged in coloured diagrams (Galton, Inquiry into Human Faculty, pp. 114-154). The experience of hypnagogic illusions also seems far more rare than ordinary dreaming in sleep. Unfortunately, while these phenomena have been carefully studied by officially scientific characters, in England orthodox savants have disdained to observe crystal-gazing, while in France psychologists have too commonly experimented with subjects professionally hysterical and quite untrustworthy. Our remarks are therefore based mainly on considerable personal study of “scrying” among normal British subjects of both sexes, to whom the topic was previously unknown.
The superstitious associations of crystal-gazing, as of hypnotism, appear to bar the way to official scientific investigation, and the fluctuating proficiency of the seers, who cannot command success, or determine the causes and conditions of success and failure, tends in the same direction. The existence, too, of paid professionals who lead astray silly women, encourages the natural scientific contempt for the study of the faculty.
The seeing of the pictures, as far as we have spoken of it, appears to be a thing unusual, but in no way abnormal, any more than dreams or hypnagogic illusions are abnormal. Crystal pictures, however, are commonly dismissed as mere results of “imagination,” a theory which, of course, is of no real assistance to psychology. Persons of recognized “imaginativeness,” such as novelists and artists, do not seem more or less capable of the hallucinatory experiences than their sober neighbours; while persons not otherwise recognizably “imaginative” (we could quote a singularly accurate historian) are capable of the experiences. It is unfortunate, as it awakens prejudice, but in the present writer’s opinion it is true, that crystal-gazing sometimes is rewarded with results which may be styled “supra-normal.” In addition to the presentation of revived memories, and of “objectivation of ideas or images consciously or unconsciously in the mind of the percipient,” there occur “visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of knowledge by supra-normal means.”[1]
A number of examples occurring during experiments made by the present writer and by his acquaintances in 1897 were carefully recorded and attested by the signatures of all concerned.
- ↑ Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, v. 486.
