Crystal-Gazing
W. Rider & Son: London
1924
This electronic edition, J. H. Peterson, esotericarchives.com/besterman, Copyright © 2005.
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Before Miss Goodrich-Freer's paper in the fifth volume
(1888-9) of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research nothing of any importance had been written
about scrying. Miss Freer was the first to study the
matter scientifically, and the first also to study its history.
During the following years Frederic Myers, Andrew Lang,
and other investigators tried to give the subject its place in
the whole field of psychical phenomena. Only one serious
book has as yet been published about scrying, that by Mr
N.W. Thomas, and that is unfortunately marred by
much hasty writing and by much padding — it remains
useful principally for Andrew Lang's Introduction. Needless
to say, a number of unscientific works have been
printed round and about the subject.1
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1. I think the following list is complete: W. W. Atkinson, Practical Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing (Chicago, 1908); "Carolus Rex," The Magnetic Mirror Bayswater [1906]); "Frater Achad" [i.e, C. Stansfeld-Jones], Crystal Vision through Crystal Gazing (Chicago, 1923); W. Goldston, Crystal Gazing (London, 1905); J. Melville, Crystal-Gazing and the Wonders of Clairvoyance (London, 1920); Modern Crystal Gazing (London, [1903]); Recollections of a Society Clairvoyant (London, 1911); "Sepharial" [i.e., Walter R, Old], How to Read the Crystal (London, 1922); C. Thorpe, Practical Crystal-Gazing (London, 1916); A. Verner, Clairvoyance and Crystal Gazing (Bolton, 1903). |
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I have tried to make this book equally useful to all those
to whom scrying is of interest; it is my hope that the
anthropologist and the folklorist as well as the psychical
researcher and the scryer will find matter of interest in
the following pages. Several points have naturally arisen
in the course of my study that I have not been able to
discuss, that have not indeed properly come within the
scope of my subject. I hope that other students will make
use of this material; they are referred to several articles
in the Subject Index. It is with regret that I have
been unable to include any new experimental results;
this is due to bad luck, for though I have conducted
numerous experiments with several scryers, I have not
obtained any results worth including in this book.
I shall always be glad to receive well-authenticated
accounts of scrying visions.
Chapters IX. and XI. were sketched in an article "On Crystal-Gazing," in The Occult Review for January 1924 (xxxix. 19-29), and part of the section on "Dr. Dee's Shew-Stone" has already appeared in Notes and Queries, cxlvi. 223-225. I am grateful to the Council of the Society for Psychical Research for permission to quote from their Journal and Proceedings. I had intended to reproduce as a Frontispiece Mr. Henry Pegram's Sibylla Fatidica. Unfortunately the authorities at the Tate Gallery have placed the statue in a corridor which is so dark as to make a good photograph impossible. TH. B. |
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