A Practical Scrying Guide by Nefermose
Contents
Definitions
Preparation
Meditation
Creative Visualization
Free Association
Conceptualization
Integration
Spirit Sanctuary
Returning
Interpretation
Summary
Foresight is a spiritual manual for scrying divination. Through the scrying medium, using the various spiritual exercises provided in this book, you will learn how to develop deeper levels of mental and psychic awareness, and be able to perform readings with greater potency and accuracy.
Unlike other books written on this subject, there are no shortcuts or special tricks provided for the reader to learn. What is presented instead are the personal spiritual tools to help you explore an often misunderstood and under valued psychic medium. In this book, scrying is presented through the lens of trance induction, and deepening levels of conscious and unconscious imagining, to manifest fuller and more meaningful interaction with psychic ability – encouraging the reader to more confidently scry for themselves and their clients. If you are willing to put in the effort with these exercises, you will be able to scry effectively.
Definitions
Scrying, often called seeing or gazing, is a divination practice that involves gazing into an often semi-reflective physical medium called a speculum, with the plural being specula. There are various forms of scrying specula available to use, with the most ancient forms being water or oil scrying, smoke scrying, fire scrying, and stone scrying – comprising the Classical Greek elements of water, air, fire, and earth respectively. Though it’s likely that glass was used for scrying in developed societies in antiquity to a certain capacity, the more ubiquitous forms of scrying using clear crystal and especially dark mirrors are more recent developments, coming from esoteric practices in the Late Middle Ages and The Renaissance especially. Regardless, these would very easily be considered earth scrying, and are beautiful and effective forms of the technique.
I’d like to clarify a semantic misconception. Some divination literature has used the term scrying improperly to describe pattern-reading or synchronicity based divination techniques – most notably with wax and cloud reading in my experience. Synchronistic divination techniques include wax and lead or tin dripping (Molybdomancy), tea or coffee reading (Tasseography), sand or ash reading (Abacomancy or Amathomancy), and divination of the sky or clouds (Aeromancy or Nephelomancy). None of these qualify as a form of scrying because they rely on the external factors of divine synchronicity, instead of the internal factors of psychic ability. Though physical features of scrying specula can be used to induce the initial scrying effect, it is a very minor characteristic that is more of an aspect of personal temperament than the technique itself.
As a historical divination practice, scrying appears in a wide variety of cultures and time periods. Water, oil, and smoke scrying appears in both Ancient Egypt and Babylon, and was possibly used by the clergy to commune with gods and goddesses. Water and stone scrying was likely a common folk practice in the Greco-Roman world, and fire scrying is suggested among Celtic and Germanic peoples. In the places where scrying is not specifically attested, it is important to bear in mind that such a simple and ubiquitous practice is something that people, both in antiquity and now, is easily taken for granted. It is a practice that is so simple and unadorned that is one of the least anachronistic forms of divination one could engage in it outside of omen reading and dream interpretation. It is my belief that scrying divination, especially with water, smoke, fire, and stone, are essentially timeless.
The practice of scrying of course has developed considerably since ancient times, and though there are gaps in what we know, especially about folk practice, the use of scrying specula, most especially with crystals and dark mirrors, are replete throughout the classical grimoires of The Renaissance. The use of scrying in Ceremonial Magick is most well-known in the work of John Dee, where the scrying speculum is used for the purposes of evocation. Around the same time, we have the writings of Nostradamus, who was known to use water scrying to make prophetic predictions about the future. By the time of the Victorian Era, scrying was used in heavy association with spiritualism and early parapsychology research. One notable example of mirror scrying used in this manner was the Psychomanteum, which was essentially an isolated, dimly lit area where a mirror would be used to communicate with the dead. It is these darker associations which would continue to be associated with scrying, and modern cinema and literature have done little to challenge this perception in our culture.
Though there are of course more nuanced aspects of the history of scrying practice, especially by modern authors, a main characteristic of a lot of the writings about the subject is the vagueness of how it is described. Despite being an essentially culturally neutral and virtually timeless divination practice, there are very few clear descriptions of scrying as a technique, outside of the specific applications of a certain tradition, or the opinions of a specific author or historical figure. A lot of the reason for this is that people define scrying through the lens of its stereotypes in popular culture.
It has become heavily ingrained into our collective consciousness that scrying is something a strange, unhinged psychic – either naively or through nefarious intent, uses to discern vague, specious information about a client. Either the information is obtained through cold reading, or the biases of the psychic. When people attempt to explore actual scrying practice, they are quite often unconsciously imprinting the idea that scrying is simply glorified wish fulfillment, and that scryers are convincing themselves that they are seeing something in the speculum, instead of actually discerning where psychic impressions actually come from in the first place. With this in mind, I would like to ask you to suspend disbelief. Put aside your perceptions of scrying, as best you can, and allow me to help correct these misconceptions.
We are very imaginative people. Though we take this fact for granted as adults, it is something that we all know from a very early age. In everything we do, we are always thinking about the relationships between various ideas, actions, and scenarios. But often times, we aren’t thinking about anything in particular. When this happens, during our waking hours, we most often call this daydreaming. Though there are exceptions, this same process during our time asleep is given much more respect, but daydreaming is often actively stigmatized, especially as we enter into adulthood. Of course, there are situations where daydreaming is probably not practical, and may certainly even be dangerous. It is nonetheless a completely natural process that many of us engage in on a regular basis without even thinking about it.
I am here to tell you that if you have daydreamed before, you are engaging in the fundamental precursor of scrying practice, and can most definitely learn to scry, with the appropriate effort. There is no guarantee that your scrying technique will put you at the level of a professional diviner, but that is the case with every other form of divination. What I’m here to suggest to you is that the fundamental process of scrying is far simpler and more straight-forward than you’ve been told, or have read in nearly every book on scrying out there. Once you develop the fundamental techniques necessary to engage the creative faculties necessary for scrying, and build upon them with continued practice and experiences, you will be able to effectively scry and produce meaningful results that can be used to generate readings and spiritual insight. The real difficulty with scrying practice is ultimately two-fold. The first difficulty is inherent to all forms of divination. You must learn to trust yourself. But the ultimate difficulty with scrying is, because of its abstract nature, is learning to develop effective interpretations of both the symbols and concepts you receive – not just collective, cultural symbolism, but learning to understand your own personal symbolism. This is ultimately the lifelong process of every dedicated scryer.
With that in mind, I would like to explain in a bit more detail what scrying is. In order to do this, it is necessary for me to describe what scrying is not. Though a great deal of books and articles will tell you differently, it is important for you to understand this simple point: A scrying speculum is NOT a television set. The visions appear in your mind.
I have taught many people how to scry, and in the vast majority of circumstances, the reason why they fail is that they completely misunderstand this simple point about what scrying actually is. Scrying is not a method to encourage you to hallucinate strange shapes and shadows within the speculum. It is instead a trance induction device that helps you focus and amplify your own psychic abilities with your preferred medium. Results with different mediums will vary from person to person, but more importantly the kinds of impressions you will receive from scrying practice can vary even more significantly. Though many of us, myself included, are more visual in our psychic senses, there is an array of different psychic senses that you can receive during a scrying session, and with continued practice a scryer can most definitely expand the senses they experience as they improve their abilities. The important thing to focus on is not the specific kind of scrying medium you use, or its physical characteristics, but the trance state it helps to induce as you condition yourself to experience it more readily and effectively. Ultimately, as you improve your scrying ability, you can engage in this process without a physical speculum, though of course there are many advantages to using a focus.
Another common misconception of scrying is that it is essentially limited to only brief flashes and impressions during a session. Though early development of scrying practice may at first consist of shorter psychic impressions, deeper and more consistent scrying practice is not simply disparate psychic impressions, but will eventually yield a wide array of symbols in concert with each other. In other words, when you can get past the early stages of scrying development, you will not just see a few images, but entire environments – and not simply to witness from afar, but environments to explore, often from various different perspectives. As you improve your technique, the experiences will become more vivid, more enriched with symbolism, more accurate, and eventually you will even gain more control of where you go. Scrying in its fullest extent is a means to explore deeper spiritual worlds and connect with the divine.
Scrying practice is essentially a freeform, abstract, and highly personal technique of engaging and developing one’s own psychic abilities to their fullest extent, so it is important to form the necessary foundations of the scrying medium, meditative and trance states, visualization techniques, and both exploring and interpreting the visions you receive. The following chapters will focus on developing the necessary tools to have useful scrying sessions. I will also take time to explain certain pitfalls of scrying practice, and what to do when you are struggling during certain aspects of the whole scrying process. This book is designed to be read a short course for teaching you how to scry. Even if you are more advanced in your understanding of this kind of subject matter, I think it is still valuable for you to go through these exercises. That being said, feel free to adapt and modify them to suit your own purposes. My own personal spiritual traditions aside, scrying is a universal divination practice. It is meant for everyone to use.
Preparation
Before you can begin to engage in effective scrying practice, there is a myriad of things to consider – both as a beginner, and at every level of efficacy above it. Though there are many things you can look at as far as your psychic abilities are concerned, having a strong foundation, both in body, mind, and spirit, are essential to have effective results.
As far as the physical is concerned, it goes without saying that being in good physical health will make everything you do in life more effective and easier to accomplish. None of us are perfect, and it’s a constant process to keep ourselves accountable when it comes to diet and exercise. But it is also worth reflecting on why it is actually so important to have a healthy body in spiritual terms, and most especially when it comes to divination.
In many spiritual traditions, whether we are talking the polytheistic religions of the ancient world, Dharmic traditions, Abrahamic traditions, or most of the contemporary Pagan and Occult traditions, having a strong and healthy body not only was thought to strengthen fortitude, but also to strengthen character and mental faculties. As well, good health was also a sign of spiritual purity, and in many traditions it’s often believed that our spiritual body was made stronger, or given more energy, through physical health. All of these aspects are of great importance to any oracle, because divination practice can not only be draining, especially for a client with a heavy spiritual burden, but it also helps guard us against the spiritual effects of things we may interact with during our sessions. Though scrying is certainly not a dangerous practice, there are always exceptions, so it is important to be mindful.
Moreover, engaging in physical activity, in addition to interacting with other people, and getting out into nature, helps us connect spiritually, but also enlivens our senses. Having a variety of sensory experiences on a regular basis helps to better contextualize what we experience during our scrying sessions, and gives our unconscious mind more to work with when we are being sent messages. Having more physical energy also gives us sharper mental focus, better memory, and healthier sleep patterns. Those greatly benefit scrying practice by not only providing greater lucidity, but improve our ability to recall and interpret what we experience. In addition, dream divination (oneiromancy) is a natural extension of regular scrying practice. When you are physically and mentally more robust, and you have improved your scrying practice, your dream recall will also improve, and the likelihood that dream divination will enhance and even continue the insights discovered through deep scrying will greatly increase over time.
In addition to physical activity and a healthier diet, there may also be situations where fasting, even for a few hours, can be beneficial prior to scrying. For those who are inclined towards it, sexual fasting can also be beneficial. This of course is highly subjective, but fasting is a spiritual practice engaged in many ascetic spiritual traditions to great effect. It is also worth mentioning that having healthy relationships, whether intimate or platonic, are also an integral part of maintaining physical health. Similarly, to the raw sensory experiences, simple physical interaction is another layer of awareness that adds complexity to scrying sessions. Being aware of our relationship to others, quite literally in physical space, can make exploring our psychic visions more acute and focused. At the end of the day, we need to choose what is best for our bodies, but bodily awareness and physical autonomy should also be at the core of anything we do to build a strong physical foundation.
As scrying is rooted in a mental experience, having strong mental health can be a more complex and often difficult issue. As someone who copes with the daily reality of mental illness, I understand and sympathize with people who may be reading this and are going through some kind of psychological or psychiatric distress. It may go without saying for some of you, but I want you to know that there are support systems out there for you, regardless of how minor or severe your difficulties might be. I’m not going to try to tell you easy steps to feel immediately better – nor am I going to tell you that you need to just suck it up and deal with it. Being mentally healthy is a long process, and it involves a lot of different aspects to be effective. Just know that you are not alone, there are people that will listen, and we all have our own personal struggles.
I am talking about mental distress here not only out of genuine sympathy, both for others who have gone through the sort of things I and close friends and family have gone through, but because it is essential for you to be as calm and centered as possible before you engage in scrying. I say this not to pass judgment on you for attempting to scry when you’re not feeling your best emotionally, but as someone with very real experience, as both a gifted oracle and someone who experiences significant psychiatric difficulties I have to balance alongside it. All that being said, there are of course benefits to our negative emotions, and they should never be shunned from your divination practice. Divination is ultimately a creative process, and I think we all know that artists tend to be troubled people. We need to look at our mental health holistically, and be honest not only about our strengths, but be able to critically assess our weaknesses if we ever hope to overcome them in a meaningful way.
The first place you should always start is the place most affected by your mental habits, which for most people is your place of living. If your home, and especially your bedroom is not clean, start by cleaning and organizing your space. This not only improves your physical health, but is a great contributor to your spiritual health and purity. A great deal of our neurosis is an outgrowth of a bad living space, and in addition to hygiene, is the place where the mental and physical interact the strongest. From here it is much easier to see your bad emotional and social habits, such as constant self-doubt or sabotage, unregulated anger and anxiety, black and white thinking, and unhealthy relationships – either on their part, your part, or both.
Outside of simply correcting bad habits, there is also the issue of how well and how openly you express your thoughts and emotions, and engage in creativity – both your own creative expressions, and those of other people. A very essential part of being able to scry is being able to think creatively in a completely natural and instinctive way, like that of a child. A lot of us forget how to be creative, and we have experienced affective atrophy. This isn’t to say that we all need to be professional artists, but rather that we should find ways to express emotions in a way we can feel proud of – helping us to build and develop our ideas in a more abstract way. Being able to thinking abstractly allows us to better assess the spiritual meaning of symbols we interact with during our scrying sessions. Finding meaningful creative activities that are suitable to your temperament will also help you to expand the psychic senses you experience while scrying, and to better work on your own mental weaknesses and blockages as you progress.
Once you have had time to work on your ability to express yourself creatively, it is important to assess yourself as a person. Being able to know yourself is essential if you ever want to trust what you receive as an oracle. Trust is the main long-term struggle of every diviner, and you will be working on it to some degree for your entire life. A big part of knowing yourself, and being able to trust psychic ability, is being able to accept failure. In addition to misconception about scrying as a technique, a great deal of people who fail at scrying ultimately fail because they cannot accept their mistakes, and lack the patience to consistently challenge their own mental barriers. Though scrying has a great deal of potential, it can be very intimidating to people who are expecting the simplicity of a tactile divination technique like Tarot or Geomancy. But my own favoritism towards scrying aside, all forms of divination require a great deal of patience to be effective at it. It just so happens that the inefficacy of a scryer is perhaps more evident than with other divination forms.
Once you have had time to assess your own physical and mental health, it all comes down to your spiritual path. This of course is the most subjective part of the preparatory aspects of scrying technique. That being said, though I have specific spiritual traditions that I practice, I have also studied a wide variety of spiritual traditions over the years. You are completely within your right to take what I say with a grain of salt, and I expect you to. All I ask is that you consider a few of the things I have learned spiritually when it comes to scrying practice.
In my experience as an oracle, it is our deep connections to the divine that provide us the channels with which to use our abilities. Having strong connections not only helps us to maintain personal and domestic purity, but grants us the assistance of entities – be them deities or spiritual guides of some sort, who can help inspire and empower our work as oracles. They help to protect us against pernicious influences, be them material or temporal, and they help provide deep and important mythological language for our scrying sessions. This is especially the case if you are working with clients of a particular spiritual path – even more so if you are on a similar wavelength spiritually. This is also why I highly recommend that you study a wide variety of spiritual traditions outside of your own. This will help you to better assist clients, and will of course broaden your spiritual awareness as a whole. I say this not as an eclectic, but as someone who is a very traditional. It is to the benefit of every oracle to be well-versed in spirituality.
With all the appropriate physical, mental, and spiritual preparations done, the last preparation you need to do is to choose which speculum or specula you prefer. This is something that may take trial and error, at least at first. You may gravitate towards a single medium, or have different medium for different situations. I personally prefer water and crystal scrying, but I can also scry with a dark mirror. Fire and smoke scrying are things I have done during outdoor rituals, but they are not practical for me while I’m in my home.
As far as setting up your speculum for use is concerned, this is ultimately a very simple matter. For most scrying specula, especially with water, crystal, and mirror scrying, all you need to do is orient the candle in such a way that it provides a little light on the surface without the flame being clearly visible. Of course, scrying in a dimly lit space like this is ideal, even as an advanced diviner, but as you become more effective at the technique, you will eventually be able to scry rather effectively in brighter settings. After all, the oldest forms of scrying were likely done well before classical antiquity in completely natural settings.
Meditation
The foundation of all scrying practice, and divination in general, is the ability to get into a relaxed state with a quieted mind, and an inwardly focused attention. Though there will of course be many differences of opinion about what methods should be used to get there, being able to practice some sort of meditation is essential to cultivating a meaningful trance state.
Meditation, much like scrying and divination in general, has to contend with a lot of cultural baggage, stereotypes, and misconception. Outside of being heavily associated with the philosophies and practices of the Far East, which itself it not entirely unreasonable, the practice has often been labeled as the same kind of glorified wish fulfillment. It is also assumed that all forms of meditation are designed to eliminate the ego, and there are special tricks to get into a meditative state. The reality is that meditative practice is present in some form of another in every culture, and approaches vary significantly from tradition to tradition, as well as from person to person.
For the purposes of the spiritual practices that form the basis of effective scrying practice, meditation is any practice that allows one to get into a more relaxed physical and mental state by focusing one’s attention away from ordinary experience to more internal, personal, or spiritual experiences and states of consciousness – often times through some sort of passive awareness.
In most meditative traditions, the fundamental focus of the technique is on one’s breath. It helps to calm down the body and mind, and helps to slow down both one’s heartbeat and one’s brain state over time. To this end, before I share my personal meditation techniques, I would like to share with you my preferred method of breath control called threefold breathing.
Threefold Breathing
Start by getting into a relaxed physical and mental state, sitting in a comfortable chair or a seated position on the floor – the latter of which is of course more relevant to active scrying practice. Once you’re appropriately relaxed, start with a slow and steady inhalation. Once you’ve inhaled fully, gently hold your breath at the apex for a brief moment, and then gradually perform a slow and steady exhalation. The pace of each part will slow as you become more relaxed.
So essentially, threefold breath consists of an inhale, a hold, and an exhale. The inhalation is the receiving portion, the hold is the absorbing portion, and the exhalation is the releasing portion. When you engage in threefold breath, it is valuable to imagine your breath as a small, shallow hill, with the inhale as climbing from the bottom, the hold as the small apex of the hill, and the exhale as the gradual descent down the hill. This visualization can help you to think of your breath in terms of depth and pacing, instead of thinking of each portion of your breath as rigidly separate from each other.
It is valuable to bear in mind that as your progress in threefold breathing, you will be able to feel the three portions of your breath without having to think about each action, or visualize each portion in the way described above. As it becomes more natural to you, it will become more of an unconscious action, and will more easily fade into the background that a lot of breath counting techniques and other similar methods. I find that this is one of the most effective ways to get into a deeper state of relaxation, and it has an immediate slowing effect on your pulse and blood pressure. It is also valuable to use outside of meditative practice for this reason.
Over the years, I have managed to develop my own meditative techniques – both from personal study, spiritual practice, and deep contemplation. For me, my meditative practice is ultimately three-fold, focusing on both spiritual, mental, and physical aspects. The way I classify and explain these techniques is largely through the lens of Greco-Roman tradition, but it can most certainly be interpreted from a variety of other perspectives. The following meditative practices are regular exercises that can help prepare you for scrying and spiritual practice in general.
In the Ancient Greek and Roman worldview, a complete person had a properly harmonized psyche, often represented as a pyramid, with the logos in control of the two lower impulses of thymos and epithymia. Balancing those aspects of self-formed the basis of many philosophical and meditative traditions. The following active meditation techniques are what I use, in tandem with each other, to refine and balance these aspects of self—often on their own, but quite often as adjunct practices within my polytheistic rituals.
Each of my three forms of meditation I associate with Plato’s Tripartite Soul:
Devotional: The Logos
Contemplative: The Thymos
Explorative: The Epithymia
Devotional Meditation
Devotional meditation focuses on the domain of a particular deity or divine aspect, which enlightens the mind, and increases our sacred connections to the gods.
Sit up straight, with your body relaxed and eyes open. Take in a few short and even breaths, allowing yourself to direct your attention to the state of your thoughts, and what philosophical matters are in your awareness. Once you have formed these ideas concretely, channel those thoughts in the direction of a deity significant to them.
Begin reflecting on the ideas associated with them, as they come, keeping your vision pointed a short distance ahead of you (a blank wall or simple space is ideal here). With each inhale and each exhale, allow both recognition of these symbols and release of “mental static”, being mindful of them without becoming distracted by external forces.
Begin to explore the symbols associated with the deity in question, allowing your internal and external observations to gradually fall away. While maintaining natural posture and breath, allow these symbols to form into more complex symbols, until you form a connection to the domain of this particular divinity.
As the intensity of this experience increases, do not force your connection to the deity to go in any particular direction, and be receptive to any impressions, feelings, and sensations that may emanate from their domain—making sure that you are focused and comfortable, without being rigid or too intense.
Once twenty minutes have elapsed (a timer is good here), or you feel that you are ready to stop, gradually release your focus until you become fully aware of your external environment. Once you have become aware of it, repeat step one.
At this point, you analyze your mental state before and after meditating, and the various experiences, symbols, and messages you may have received. From those observations (a journal is recommended), you can work to apply them to your daily life—most especially regular ritual practice and devotion. This is a highly-focused active meditation technique that is devotional or “adorative” in scope, and its purpose is to not only clarify the mind, but heighten one’s awareness of both self and deity. In combination with more physical and emotional meditations, as well as regular ritual practice, can deepen your understanding of the wisdom the gods and goddesses have to teach you, and make ritual experience more holistic in nature.
Contemplative Meditation
Contemplative meditation focuses on the relationship between our thoughts and feelings and the world—clarifying and uncluttering mental debris.
Sit up straight, with your body relaxed and eyes open. Take in a few short and even breaths, allowing yourself to direct your attention to your feelings, and what they are telling you.
Begin reflecting on those emotions, as they come, keeping your vision pointed a short distance ahead of your (a blank wall or simple space is ideal here). With each inhale and each exhale, allow both recognition and release of those emotions, being mindful of them without becoming distracted by external forces.
Continue reflecting while paying attention to flow of your breathing, and maintaining a comfortable but stable seated posture. Gradually allow deeper emotions and concerns to surface, addressing and accepting them with the flow of your breathing.
As the intensity of these emotions increase, allow the reflections to be natural mental processes, and allow your breathing to emanate from that central awareness—making sure that you are focused and comfortable, without being rigid or too intense.
Once twenty minutes have elapsed (a timer is good here), or you feel that you are ready to stop, gradually release your focus until you become fully aware of your external environment. Once you have become aware of it, repeat step one.
At this point, you reflect on your emotional state before and after meditating, and what processes effectively resolved emotional turmoil. From those observations (a journal is recommended), you can work to apply them to your daily life. This form of meditation, while in a seated position, is a more active form than the kinds of passive-awareness meditation you might find in Eastern religions. The objective is not the cessation of ego, or the quieting of the mind, but the calming of the heart to make room for a clarity of the rational mind.
Explorative Meditation
Explorative meditation is a walking meditation that focuses on what the body is telling the mind and heart, putting the breath and step in sync, and increasing external awareness.
Stand up straight, with knees relaxed and eyes open. Take in a few short and even breaths, allowing yourself to direct your attention to your body, and what it’s telling you.
Begin walking at a slow pace, keeping your vision pointed a short distance ahead of your steps. With each inhale and each exhale talking a fairly regular amount of steps, at first.
Continue walking, while paying attention to flow of your breathing, and maintaining a flexible yet steady pace of walking. Allow yourself to gradually increase the pace.
As the intensity of the walking increases, allow it to be a natural one, and keep your mind centered on your body, your walking, your breathing, and the feelings emanating from that central awareness – making sure that you are focused and comfortable, without being rigid or too intense.
Once twenty minutes have elapsed (a timer is good here), or you feel that you are ready to stop, gradually slow down your pace of walking until you are at a light stroll, and stop. Once you have come to a gentle stop, repeat step one.
I highly recommend this form of meditation, particularly in combination with a more contemplative form, as the two modes are complementary, and like standard meditation, this method can effectively utilize an otherwise mundane activity to the effect of all-around wellness. That being said, I recommend that you don’t do it for more than twenty or thirty minutes, because the after effects of this process can be a lot to take in. Certainly one could do it longer, with time, but personally I think that consistency is more valuable than a few extra minutes.
Once you’ve had time to practice some of the previous meditative techniques I’ve provided, adapt or modify them to your own purposes, or even add some of your own spiritual techniques, you can begin to practice them with your speculum or specula of choice. Scrying is ultimately a meditative technique, and of course any meditative technique can easily be done with your eyes open, with a relaxed gaze. A part of the reason why I emphasized meditation as the first step, outside of simply because it helps to put you in a more relaxed and receptive state, is because it helps to activate the creative mechanisms of psychic ability that underlie scrying practice.
A lot of books out there on scrying will have you focus on a lot of complex and largely unnecessary ritualistic or preparatory aspects in order to begin scrying, when ultimately your foundation will always be your ability to get into this state of consciousness. I cannot emphasize enough that if you are struggling with scrying initially, even as an intermediate or advanced oracle, it is likely because you are not able to get into the right kind of meditative state.
What I have provided above is hardly exhaustive when it comes to meditative practice, and I highly recommend that you learn as much as you can. There are also plenty of classical and contemporary techniques out there which focus on meditative states, or the spirit body, and they are definitely worth exploring for those inclined. I have emphasized techniques that focus on perception because of the inherently contemplative nature of scrying as a technique, but anything that can help open up your psychic senses would be valuable to you here.
The following chapters are going to focus on mental and spiritual techniques that help you develop general creativity, visualization techniques, and memory, as well as getting you to think about spiritual and mythological concepts in a broader context.
In every chapter that follows, each technique will be practiced in the context of a scrying session, and are meant to be repeated where appropriate. I advise you to read about each of the techniques carefully, and be mindful of any suggestions I make about how to deal with difficulties that may arise. I will not be able to cover every possible positive or negative experience you will have as a scryer, but I will do my best to cover as many general areas as I can, and I think you’ll find that the general principles are fairly universal.
As scrying is ultimately a very abstract spiritual technique, as I have previously suggested, it can be intimidating at first. It is for this reason, at this beginning stage, and those that follow, that I ask you to take your time, and be patient with yourself as you progress. There are a lot of amazing things that can follow for you, and that scrying is capable of.
Creative Visualization
In the previous chapter, I provided examples of meditative techniques to help develop and refine your ability to get into a relaxed physical and mental state, and although there are certainly other techniques you can utilize, as I previously suggested, the broader purpose of those meditative techniques were to help you to focus on your creative, spiritual, and psychic senses and impressions. This chapter is meant to be your first introduction to developing and refining your ability to not only have impressions, but be able to see and experience them clearly.
The following visualization technique is to be done with your preferred scrying speculum, while in a deep meditative state. It is important to remember that when you attempt this exercise that you should keep a relaxed gaze on your speculum, and do not stare. As I’ve said before, the visions and impressions you receive are internal, and the speculum helps you to focus and project your psychic senses. If you feel yourself focusing on trivial details of your speculum setup, take some time to relax and let go of those anxieties. Those ancillary details are only going to be a distraction for you later on, and will make you more easily discouraged.
Creative Visualization Exercise
Before you begin controlled breathing and entering a meditative state, I want you to take some time to think of a place. It doesn’t have to be anywhere in particular, and should instead be an ordinary place from your own imagination. Natural spaces such as forests or fields are excellent choices, but it can also be things as diverse as the grounds of a castle, a medieval village, or even the grounds of a sacred temple. Take some time to think about it for a while, and once you’ve decided on something that feels right, keep it in the back of your mind.
With your chosen location in mind, get into a relaxed state and begin controlled breathing. As you continue to focus on your breathing, you will likely start to get a lot of random mental chatter. It is important to be passively aware of these mental elements. When they come to you, acknowledge them, and let them pass. Eventually, the steady river of random thoughts will trickle down to a quiet stream, and you can begin to focus on visualization
Once you are in an appropriately relaxed and quieted state, you can begin to lightly gaze at your speculum of choice, which should be in a comfortable position that is lightly illuminated with dim light. As you gaze at the speculum, bring the place you created in your mind previously back into your mind. At first, like your random thoughts from earlier, the initial visions and impressions you’ll receive will be scattered and unclear. This is completely normal. Just be patient with yourself, and remember where you are supposed to go.
After some time passes, your mind will eventually find an object or small portion of the place you created in your mind, and it will be a clear vision within your mind’s eye. Once this vision occurs, try not to become too excited, and remain dispassionate, especially as you are first starting out. You are a passive observer at this point, so it’s important to be patient and focus on what you are being shown. Once you feel that a clear image has appeared to you, I want you to look at the object or person. Observe all of its features. Think about how big it is, what color or colors it has, what kind of texture it has, or any other sensory information you can become aware of. Take some time to absorb this experience, and remain patient.
From this point, depending on how deeply you are in the scrying state, you may experience other objects, movement, and eventually even the whole environment. If you feel comfortable, you can most definitely observe other parts of the space you have created, such as the ground beneath you, the sky above you, or any natural or man-made features that the place you created in your mind might have to show you. Take your time, and try not to go too deeply at first. Once you have had enough time to observe, I want you to gently move your focus back to your breathing, and allow the visions to slowly fade from your perception. Allow your consciousness to gradually exit this deeper state, and once you feel yourself beginning to awake from your scrying session, you can begin to pull your gaze from the speculum, and come back to ordinary consciousness. Once you are fully awake, continue controlled breathing, and gradually start to move your body, until you are completely active again. It is important not to rush the returning state. I plan to go into this in more detail in the following chapters.
Once you have fully exited the scrying session, take some time to reflect on the experiences you had. This is an absolutely crucial part of scrying because it is when you have time to absorb those raw psychic experiences that you will be able to put those details into proper context. It is very valuable for you to note each aspect of the experience, and even write it down if you are so inclined. You will find, even at these early stages, that you will remember more about the experience you had then when you were actually experiencing it. It can be tempting to disregard these after effects, and though some degree of skepticism is normal and healthy, these additional impressions are essential to forming deep and accurate interpretations of your whole scrying session, especially if you are doing this for clients. As you continue to practice visualization techniques, you will begin to develop and refine your own symbolic language. It is definitely worthwhile to consult your own knowledge base as well as dream dictionaries at this point.
This creative visualization exercise was meant to give you a taste of all the features of a scrying session through the vessel of deliberate, conscious creativity. Creating these sorts of conscious spaces and working on visualizing individual objects and people can help you to refine your vision and other psychic senses as you progress. As well, focusing on certain concepts is something that is essential to doing scrying practice, both for yourself and clients, because you will always be starting from a certain question or core spiritual concern when you scry. The initial concept or question involved in beginning a scrying session is what I’ve taking to calling a scrying tether. Much like a creative visualization exercise, a scrying tether helps bring you to the appropriate place, both mentally and spiritually, to discern applicable divinatory meanings.
If you are experiencing difficulties with this first visualization exercise, there are a few things that I’d like you to consider before continuing:
Firstly, it is important for you to realize that the kinds of visions you will receive, in most instances, will not be crystal clear, and definitely not the kind of high definition you would get from a television screen. Visions in the mind’s eye are formed in haze, and are of a similar quality as ordinary daydreaming. As you get better, these visions will become clearer, but it’s important not to expect something like psychic visions or magic from a fantasy setting.
Secondly, it’s important to realize that the kinds of visions and sensory impressions you will receive will be unique to you. You might see and experience things that seem strange, surreal, comical, or even a bit unsettling at first. This is why it is important to remain dispassionate, and to remember that you are safe while you’re engaging in your scrying practices. This is why it is so important to understand and trust yourself.
Lastly, I want to remind you that if you rush your first experiences, like trying to see the entire environment, or trying to explore, and you’re not ready, the visions and impressions you will receive will likely be confusing and disorienting, even if they are positive visions. I’m providing these exercises one at a time not only to help you build a strong foundation, but to give you the tools to re-strengthen your ability as you progress. These are exercises I do on a regular basis, and even as a natural I struggle with my visions all the time. If you ever feel uncomfortable or disoriented during a session, it is perfectly acceptable to stop, as long as you allow yourself to gradually exit the scrying session. This is not like a video game or chat room where you can just force quit whenever you’re upset. You need to take your time, or you can make things worse.
The next chapter will focus on free association, which despite its unassuming title, is quite a bit more difficult than creative or guided visualization techniques. I strongly advise you to continue practicing conscious imagining like what I have listed here, as well as any other visualization techniques you feel comfortable with as you progress. Feel free to experiment with different concepts and themes, and remember to have fun as much as possible, despite some cautionary language I have used to describe this process. It is important that you are as comfortable as possible with the process as you proceed because the more you delve into the more abstract aspects of scrying divination, the more you will be dealing with uncertainty.
As I have expressed before, it is really important to be able to accept failure. You will be learning a great deal from your failures, as they will help you learn where your boundaries lie with your own gifts and psychic senses. There will be times when you will really struggle to receive scrying visions, which can be particularly frustrating when you are scrying for clients, but it is important to recognize at this early stage that it is a part of the territory. The trade of scrying divination is that you trade uncertainty for extreme spiritual potential. This is of course the case with all divination, but is especially the case with scrying divination practice.
Free Association
As I explained in the previous chapter, the core basis of developing the psychic abilities which underpin effective scrying practice are rooted in the creative process, which is why I put so much emphasis in starting to use your scrying speculum through a deliberate form of conscious imagining. But with free association, you are dealing with unconscious imagining. Though it can be rather easy to imagine clear objects and indeed whole environments on a more conscious level, being able to visualize and sense even single objects in your mind’s eye when such things are unfolding from your unconscious mind can prove to be more difficult, if not unsuccessful at first.
It is at this stage where many people who jump into scrying find their first fundamental failures. They assume that they can just gaze into the speculum and get crystal clear images and environments without any real development. Now, I completely recognize that everyone is different, and as someone who comes by both scrying practice and imagination very naturally, I definitely understand that you can most definitely have immediate results with minimal effort and development. But it is my belief that those who come by scrying naturally should actually be the most careful, lest they find themselves lost in a sea of symbols and impressions that they lack the experience to properly understand. The very fact that you are reading this scrying manual makes this is a strong possibility for you, and you are also the most likely to ignore my warning. Like I have suggested before, do not rush yourself in these early stages. With all this said, I’m sure that you are eager to continue, so I will provide you your next visualization exercise.
Free Association Exercise
Before you begin free association, it is very valuable to remove physical and mental distractions from your environment. If you are particularly stressed out, or dealing with a lot of responsibilities at the moment, it might be a good idea to wait until a later time or date to engage in free association. You want to provide the best space for your internal world to come about. Whereas with the last exercise you were supposed to imagine a specific place to go within your conscious awareness, when you are freely associating it is a better idea to have a mostly blank slate before you engage in unconscious imagining. This is very important as you progress.
Get into a relaxed state and start controlled breathing. As you begin to deepen your state of relaxation, you will likely receive a lot of random mental chatter. Like I have emphasized before in the last exercise, you should remain dispassionate and passively aware of these initial thoughts and feelings – briefly acknowledging their existence, and letting them pass through your awareness.
Once you have had sufficient time to relax your body and quiet your mind, you can now begin to lightly gaze upon your preferred speculum, dimly lit in the appropriate configuration that works best for you. Similarly, to the mindfulness component of your initial meditation, and the creative visualization exercise from the previous chapter, the initial visions and impressions you will receive will be disjointed and random. It is at this point that you can allow the most immediate thoughts and impressions of your unconscious to emerge and project themselves into your mind’s eye. It is important to remain dispassionate, and not pass judgment on what you see in this initial stage of free association.
As you are allowing your initial unconscious thoughts to pour into your mind’s eye, remain calm and keep a gentle focus on your inner vision and psychic impressions. I may be tempting to stare at your speculum. Keep a relaxed gaze, and remember that the speculum is merely the focus and not the source. Eventually your unconscious impressions will aggregate, and you will begin to see a single object or section of a place or region. Once you feel confident that you have something more concrete in your vision, like before, take time to absorb every aspect of this person, place, or thing. Observe its size, shape, color, texture, and any other sensations that come to your mind. Remember to trust yourself, be patient, and keep a healthy passivity to what you receive at first.
Unlike creative visualization, it will likely be a bit harder to extend your awareness to the broader environment outside of a singular person or object, but if you are getting clearer impressions of what is around you, feel free to take them in, and analyze them. With free association, the environment you’ll see might be a little strange or confusing, at least at first. The more you practice free association, the clearer these spaces will become, and the more you will start to understand your own personal symbolic language within the scrying state. Once you have had enough time to explore free association, just like before, you should gradually exit the scrying state by gently moving your focus onto your breathing, and slowly pulling your awareness from your speculum. Give yourself time to return to ordinary conscious, and slowly move your body when you feel sufficiently aware.
Once you have had time to practice free association within the scrying state, it is also valuable to practice it in more mundane environments. Though it will not be as focused or intense, in most situations, there is definitely a lot to learn from it. It is also worth mentioning that continued practice of free association and creative visualization will increase the likelihood that you will receive psychic impressions and visions outside of the scrying state, and as I have suggested in previous chapters you will also have increased dream recall as well.
If you are experiencing difficulties with the free association exercise I have provided above, there are a few things that I would like you to consider – especially since it is so tempting in this first abstract stage to be discouraged:
Firstly, I want to remind you of the importance of the body, mind, and spirit relationship I mentioned in the preparation chapter. If you are feeling sick, emotionally distressed, or are going through a major spiritual change, it will likely be difficult for you to progress. I know a lot of people use divination to solve problems, but there are always things you should do to prepare before you engage in a major spiritual endeavor like regular divination practice. It is very easy to make divination into a crutch or abuse the technique in the future.
Secondly, I must again remind you that you will fail – both as a beginner, and as a veteran of scrying practice. The more you engage in abstract psychic impressions, the more likely this is the case. You may sit in front of your scrying speculum and not experience any visions or impressions. This is completely normal. Most of the time it takes at least a minute or so to even receive anything concrete, before you can visualize something resembling a full scrying environment. Like I have stressed before, though scrying has amazing potential, the major trade off is uncertainty.
Lastly, it is very important to remember that free association is a form of unconscious imagining, so what you may receive, especially when you first start, may surprise you a great deal. If there are things in your life that you are not properly addressing, they will likely be quite pronounced in your impressions. The free association state, even more so than the creative visualization state, can be experienced on a visceral level. It is at this stage that you may experience not only intense sensations, but psychic senses you didn’t know you had. This is why it is so important to take your time as you progress.
The following chapter will focus on complete conceptualization within the scrying state, which is essentially an integration of both creative visualization and free association. I will focus on making the transition from simple conscious and unconscious imagining into full psychic impressions and visions, and learning to trust what you receive as genuine and accurate, as much as possible. The chapters following conceptualization will focus on more advanced aspects of scrying.
Conceptualization
In the previous chapters, I presented exercises for you to walk through conscious imagining with creative visualization, and unconscious imagining with free association. Transitioning from your first engagement with the creative core of the scrying technique to building the essence of the practice through developing deep awareness of your own psychic impressions and symbolic language is ultimately a long process that will exceed the content of this manual. The content of your extra-sensory perceptions can be very diverse, and there are elements that will be unique to your own personal experiences and life path, so it is not possible for me to explain every aspect of what your experience in detail.
With that being said, there are some universal, essential elements of the process that follows creative engagement and transitions into full psychic awareness. Scrying practice is an integration of both creative visualization and free association that is focused on the personal questions and desires of both the clients you read for and you as a scryer. Though there are most certainly biases, for both the psychic and the clients you read for, the most important part of scrying practice is being able to suspend disbelief and trust the process.
The Scrying Tether
Before you start a reading with scrying divination, it is important to select the essence of the query you will be focusing on while you are in the scrying state. This core element is what I have taken to calling the scrying tether. In most cases, especially at first, this will be an archetypal or symbolic aspect that will emerge during the preparation stages of a reading. Both for your sake as a reader, and to instill trust in your client, whether or not it is you or someone else who is asking the question, it is valuable to keep your scrying tether something simple and easy to focus on. In most cases, this will be something that emerges in your mind’s eye before you even start meditating and gazing upon your speculum. Your scrying tether might be an object, a personification, or even a scene within your mind. Don’t spend too much time thinking about your tether, and don’t ask your client too many preliminary questions. Conversely, ask your client to refrain from describing the content of their question. Both of these measures will help you to better focus on the symbolic content of the scrying session that follows.
The scrying tether, in essence, is a refined manifestation of what you learned during the creative visualization exercise, to be built upon with free association as you are gazing at your speculum. The difference between the former two aspects and fully integrated scrying is that you are allowing yourself to project your psychic senses more fully, with a more trusting attitude. A healthy amount of skepticism is of course warranted, but resist the temptation to invalidate your experiences.
Scrying Conceptualization Exercise
Before you begin your complete scrying session, take some time to remove physical and mental distractions from your immediate environment, wherever possible. Once you are in an appropriate space, either by yourself or with your client, determine the essential question that is the focus of your scrying session. At this point, take some time to think about the question, until you have a clear picture in your mind about the essential quality of the query. It is at this point that you will be able to discern a simple scrying tether – a basic impression of the reading at hand, that could be a person, place, or thing. Do not dwell in this creative place for too long. Proceed to the next step once you are ready to do so.
Once your scrying speculum is appropriately setup, and any relevant client or clients are seated a comfortable distance away from you, begin controlled breathing, and get into a relaxed meditative state. Allow yourself to get into a state of dispassionate, passive awareness of your external environment, including any client or clients you are reading for. Allow any random mental chatter to pass through your awareness, acknowledging any thoughts and impressions that may initially come up, and letting them pass.
Once you are in an appropriately passive and relaxed state of mindfulness, you can begin to focus on your scrying tether while lightly gazing at your scrying speculum. Allow your scrying tether to enter into your conscious awareness. Take time to absorb and analyze its characteristics, until you get a clear picture of this initial source of symbolism. Once you feel comfortable with this image, allow your consciousness to deepen, and let your unconscious impressions begin to flow forth. It is important to allow yourself to let go to strongly held conscious attachments, and let this flow naturally.
As your conscious mind goes deeper into the unconscious, your initial conscious impression of the scrying tether will begin to unfold into deeper unconscious symbolism and characteristics, if not changing into something else entirely. It is important to remember at this stage that the tether is simply a starting point to help you enter this state, and it is not something that you should rely on too strongly as you progress. It is at this stage that, with time and practice, your deeper psychic abilities will begin to manifest, and you will see and experience images and environments that will become progressively more vivid and unusual as you cultivate them further. Once you have a clear image in your mind’s eye, just as before, you should analyze its characteristics. Look at the shape, size, color, and texture of the object or objects in your vision. Determine if anything is living or dead, and whether or not they are moving. Remember to be patient at this stage.
As you see things more clearly, you’ll eventually see more of the surrounding environment. As before, take your time in absorbing your initial environment and any objects or living things that inhabit it. With time and practice, these environments will become more and more complex and dynamic, and you’ll not only see a single environment, but many other environments, from a variety of different perspectives within the scrying state. Eventually you will also have the opportunity, in certain situations, to explore your scrying environment. If you feel reasonably confident at this stage, you can definitely start to look at more of your environment and explore. As you progress more deeply into these environments, you will eventually see various activities in different places, that when taken together will form a narrative or narratives for you to answer the query presented to you by your client. These narratives may be difficult to interpret at first, which is why it is essential to be well-studied and analytical during the interpretation phase that follows after a scrying session. Once you are sufficiently satisfied with what you have received during your scrying session, you can gradually move your focus towards your breathing, and start to pull your gaze away from your scrying speculum – allowing yourself to gradually awaken from your trance state. As always, take your time exiting the trance state, as this will help you recall and expand upon the information gained during your sessions. Some scryers will also talk to their client during their sessions, and I have frequently done it myself, but I recommend that you only do that when you are more confident in your technique, as it can be difficult to focus on what you receive with too many distractions.
It goes without saying that the difficulties that can be experienced during full scrying sessions are numerous. It would be impossible for me to go through every potential difficulty, but I would like to address a few things before continuing.
The solution to most issues with forming psychic impressions have to do with practice, and being in a sufficiently deep trance state when engaging in active scrying divination. If you are struggling to receive visions and impressions at any stage, remember to continue focusing on your breathing, and allow any mental clutter to leave your awareness before you continue. Like I stated in the previous chapter, make sure you are in the right physical, mental, and spiritual state.
Despite all I’ve said thus far about encouraging practice and considerable effort, it should be noted that it is very tempting to sabotage yourself when you are first starting out. As I’ve stated in previous chapters, learning to trust yourself is an ongoing and an ultimately lifelong process – both for divination and spiritual practice as a whole. You’re not going to get it all right away, and that’s perfectly acceptable, even for people who’ve been doing this for years.
The following chapters are going to focus on further refining your ability to see, experience, and explore the psychic environment of your scrying sessions with greater confidence and accuracy, where appropriate. There will also be an advanced chapter on something I’ve taken to calling the Spirit Sanctuary, which is a space within the scrying environment that you can use for personal spiritual development, using the tools of this book. In the last two chapters I will walk you through effective strategies for leaving the trance state, as well as learning how to properly interpret what you receive during your sessions.
If you have gotten this far in the book and have had success with your scrying practice, you have engaged in full scrying as a complete technique. The last few chapters are really to help you further develop this ability, but ultimately the journey will be very personal and subjective from here on out. I can only provide you with the tools that have helped me on my journey as an oracle, and you can most certainly adapt and modify anything I’ve written here. I hope you’ve enjoyed this book thus far, and I look forward to helping you further as you progress.
Integration
In the previous three chapters, I walked you through three distinct yet related spiritual exercises. The first spiritual exercise, creative visualization, was designed to help you develop the ability to consciously imagine. Creative visualization is most closely tied to ordinary daydreaming, and is relatively easy to develop. The second spiritual exercise, free association, was designed to help you develop the ability to unconsciously imagine. Free association, though often engaged in during ordinary daydreaming, is more difficult to engage in, and often is the place when you are first confronted with the inner layers of your unconscious mind. The third spiritual exercise, conceptualization, was designed to help you develop not only the ability to imagine on a conscious and unconscious level, but to tap into and develop your own innate and unique psychic abilities. This is the most difficult step for beginners, and is where the complete scrying process takes shape for the first time.
Once you have had time to enter into fully conceptualized scrying, and perhaps combine the practice with some of your own spiritual techniques, where appropriate, you will begin to notice certain characteristics of the kinds of visions and psychic impressions you will receive. Outside of just your visualization, you may also begin to experience other senses, such as hearing or touch, and it is also possible that these senses may have been as pronounced for you as your vision when you first started practicing scrying. For the purposes of providing instruction in scrying, I have of course focused on vision, as it is the most common and practical way most of us engage with the scrying medium. That being said, it is worth taking time to experience the scrying state more often, and taking an inventory of the sensory content you receive.
In addition to the nature of the sensory information you receive, you will also begin to notice certain kinds of details that your mind is more likely to notice, and specific kinds of scenery that you are taken to during your sessions. For some scrying practitioners, the environments that they experience are very realistic, while for some it may be more surreal or fantastical. You may be more drawn to natural symbolism, or you may find yourself in urban spaces – whether modern or very historical in character. In all of these circumstances, it is essential for you to gain as much knowledge as you can about these kinds of environmental features and both natural and architectural characteristics. Definitely study these in an academic manner, where appropriate, but don’t hesitate to put yourself in situations where you can analyze similar features in the real world. As I’ve suggested in previous chapters, life experience is ultimately what will make you a better oracle, and allow you to reach more advanced levels of accuracy.
As I have explained in previous chapters, you should always remain mindful of the details of the individual people, creatures, places, and things that you see and sense within the scrying environment. It is worth reminding you that your focus should always be dispassionate, and you should resist the temptation to fixate too long on any one thing. As you become more advanced in your ability, the scrying environment will become a more dynamic experience – taking you to different locations and perspectives, either consciously or unconsciously, so it is important to be as light on your feet as possible while you’re traveling.
With that being said, the most important part of scrying as you advance in your ability will be the interpretation you do afterwards. Though I intend to go into more detail about that in the following chapters, the most essential element of interpretation is not about spiritual or mythological symbolism, or the psychological aspects discussed in many dream dictionaries, but is instead rooted in your ability to recall the details and experiences you have during your scrying sessions. Before you can have any meaningful spiritual interpretation of what you have experienced during a scrying session, you need to develop and reinforce your ability to reliably retain and remember essential sensory information.
The most effective way of reinforcing your memory of what you receive during a scrying session is, as I’m sure you might have already guessed, being patient and mindful during your scrying sessions. A major reason why I have continually advised against rushing your progress as an oracle is because it is something that can so easily ruin an effective session. This is especially the case with natural scryers who become arrogant about their own talents, and then struggle to achieve even nominal accuracy when they are under the pressure of an actual reading for a client or close friend.
When you learn to be patient during your scrying sessions, it will also help you better understand the pace with which you will transition between areas within your inner scrying world. Once you have begun to understand your own personal pacing, the qualities and content of the scrying environments you see, and the context of those environments with certain questions, it will be far easier for you to truly trust and understand the efficacy, accuracy, and spiritual intensity of those experiences as you progress. As your own spiritual clarity increases, you will be better prepared to effectively explore your scrying environments with confidence, and be able to gain much deeper awareness of the spiritual meanings of what you are being shown during your scrying sessions.
It is during the deepest of scrying sessions where our ability to discern perspective in the spiritual environments we witness becomes the most difficult. Though it can certainly be the case that even comprehending a complex environment is difficult, and in many sessions we are unconsciously guided to new locations and perspectives, with patience and considerable effort it is possible for more advanced scrying practitioners to guide their experiences to different places and perspectives within the larger spiritual environment of their sessions. It is my intention with this chapter to explain some general guidelines for deeper exploration, and provide you with an exercise to more effective explore environments and perspectives, as well as adjust to natural shifts in perspective that occur during advanced scrying.
Before we continue, it is important for me to stress that in addition to learning about the content and qualities of the kinds of scrying environments you receive in different divination contexts, it is absolutely vital for you to have a solid sense of self as you progress. Like I have stated before, if you feel like a certain time is not best for you to engage in scrying, or you feel the question is specious, it is best for you to trust that instinct, and reassess. You will ultimately be a better oracle that is more prepared to deal with the often taxing experiences presented by the scrying medium if you are honest with yourself and your client.
With all that out of the way, I would like to explain something that might be a bit difficult to understand regarding advanced scrying. Though it is likely that if you’ve got to this point you are having more effective scrying sessions, what I’m about to tell you could be difficult to understand fully. When you are fully immersed in scrying, you will often find yourself guided – both unconsciously and through the aid of spiritual or divine forces, and there are more and more situations that will be presented to you as an advanced user to move around in your environment, and change your perspective within a scrying session, often multiple times. These kinds of changes, like fully conceptualized scrying technique, exist beyond the conscious and the unconscious mind, and are ultimately motivated by psychic senses. As you begin to engage in this practice more effectively, it will become second nature.
Integrative Scrying Exercise
Prepare for your scrying session by removing and physical, mental, or spiritual distractions from your immediate environment. Make sure that you and any clients are in a reasonably comfortable space. At this point, you should determine any relevant query that you would like to scry about, and take time to get a clear impression of your scrying tether – be it an archetype, place or object.
After your scrying speculum is set up, begin controlled breathing and get into a progressively relaxed meditative state. Remain mindful and dispassionate about irrelevant mental or emotional clutter, – acknowledging these thoughts and emotions as they arise, and letting them gently pass out of your awareness until you are in a state of calmness, clarity, and spiritual focus.
Once you have sufficiently calmed yourself, you can begin to focus on your scrying tether, while lightly gazing at your scrying speculum, taking inventory of all of its innate characteristics, until it is clearly present within your awareness. Once you are confident with this initial vision, you can allow your unconscious, psychic impressions to flow forth as before., remembering not to retain too much conscious attachment.
From this point on, your psychic senses will begin to activate again, and you will start to see your first impressions, until they will eventually aggregate into a clear picture of a person, creature, place, or thing. As before, allow your awareness to expand outward until you have a clear picture of your immediate environment
Once you have a clear picture of the whole environment you are placed in, allow your mind to choose an object or place of interest within the space. Be patient with yourself, and do not force it, but trust that your senses will extend to a new place within the scrying environment. When you find yourself in a new place, take an inventory of any new objects or movement within that space. Remember that everything in each new place you travel to is deliberate, and that you will learn what you need to before you move to a new place. Whenever you find something new, such a new person, an animal, or a unique physical feature, you can start to move your perspective to that place – often taking the perspective as a person or animal within your environment. This is something that will take practice and deliberate effort to achieve, and may not always work at first. Once you feel satisfied with your scrying session, allow your attention to gently shift back to your breathing, and allow yourself to pull your gaze away from your speculum. As you continue to breathe, you can begin to slowly move your body, and fully awaken.
Like I’ve said before, the deeper you progress with scrying the more personal your difficulties will become. It is at this stage that you need to be confident and persistent with your practice, and remember all the factors that have produced results for you thus far. It is important for you to rely on previous experiences to guide you, and be discerning when it comes to what concerns you focus on for yourself and clients. The following chapter will focus on a way to explore the integrated scrying state for completely personal spiritual development.
Spirit Sanctuary
In the majority of this book, the spiritual exercises have been designed, through practicing scrying divination, with the implied intent to make you effective as an oracle for friends and clients. But as you are probably already aware at this point, scrying divination can also be used to gain personal spiritual wisdom. If you have been practicing the aforementioned scrying exercises, you have likely already started to engage in personal divination—asking all sorts of different questions about your life and your spiritual path. Though that can certainly be very effective, there is also a spiritual technique that you can use to not only ask questions, but explore a personal spiritual landscape, projected through your psychic senses.
For those of you that have more broadly studied contemporary, alternative, or otherwise esoteric spiritual traditions, you may already be familiar with a concept called the Astral Temple. For many people that adhere to this concept, this a place that exists in a higher spiritual plane for each individual to explore. For me personally, it has always been my belief that where we go during our scrying sessions is ultimately connected to the underworld. It was a common belief in many ancient cultures that our dreams ultimately come from the realm of the dead, and since scrying divination is essentially a form of lucid daydreaming, it makes complete sense to me that our scrying gifts also arise from this place. That being said, the concept of an Astral Plane carries with it a lot of specific contemporary connotations, so I have opted for Spirit Sanctuary as a more neutral term.
As you may have already guessed, I have reserved the Spirit Sanctuary for one of the final chapters of the book because it is something that requires much more advanced spiritual ability in order to achieve. It is a place that not only requires the conscious imagining of creative visualization, the unconscious imagining of free association, the psychic awareness of conceptualized scrying, and the full exploratory faculties of integrated scrying, but it requires a level of personal trust and spiritual toughness that intimidates a lot of fledgling scryers. When you are able to clearly visualize and explore the personal landscape of the innermost essence of scrying technique, you may be confronted with visions and impressions that are difficult to comprehend, if not outright disorienting or unsettling.
That being said, the Spirit Sanctuary is a place that will quite often change with you over time, and though that itself may be challenging, it can present great potential for personal spiritual change in the future. This realm can provide you with a place to not only assess yourself, but can be a place for you to develop your spiritual abilities and discern deeper meanings for clients and other important people in your life. For those that are more inclined towards other mystical practices, your Spirit Sanctuary can also be used as a place to have gnostic spiritual experiences, and even to develop magical operations, where appropriate.
As I have suggested numerous times before, it is essential for you to maintain active wellness in your everyday life as an oracle – cultivating both body, mind, and spirit, in whichever ways are most meaningful to you. Regular meditative practice, and any other personally relevant purifying or stabilizing spiritual practices are also strongly advised. It is important for you to realize before we proceed that working with the Spirit Sanctuary, more than anything else I’ve provided in this book, is a challenging and ultimately lifelong process. As someone who is a natural scryer, who has acted as an oracle and spiritual guide for quite a long time, personally focused scrying, and most especially the Spirit Sanctuary, is something that I still struggle with. Though interacting with the Spirit Sanctuary can often present an affirming and beatific experience, it is connected to an ultimately vast spiritual realm, so you should prepare to confront the unknown, more than any other version of scrying I’ve presented thus far.
Spirit Sanctuary Exercise
As always, prepare for your scrying session by removing any physical, mental, and spiritual distractions from your immediate environment. Since this is a personal exercise, you have more flexibility about your location, but you should probably do this in the quietest, most private area of your home. Take some time to think about your current situation, your identity, and your spiritual path. Once you’ve had time to contemplate various mundane and spiritual factors, you should distill them down to a scrying tether like before. Be certain that your scrying tether feels natural, and do not force yourself.
Once you’ve had time to set up your scrying speculum properly, you can begin controlled breathing and mindfulness meditation. Allow the extraneous mental clutter present in your mind gently clear itself from your awareness – acknowledging its presence, and letting it pass, until you are in a state of mental clarity and spiritual quiescence.
After you are sufficiently calm, you can begin to focus on your scrying tether while lightly gazing at your scrying speculum, allowing all of its qualities and characteristics to fill your awareness until you get a clear image. Once it is clear in your mind, you can allow your unconscious and psychic impressions to flow forth.
As your own psychic senses activate, a clear image of a person, creature, place, or thing will eventually form in your awareness. Gently focus on this psychic impression, and allow the surrounding environment to fill your awareness until you feel fully immersed in this spiritual realm.
It is at this point where all the skills you have learned thus far will come into play. You may be guided to different places and to see different elements in your vision, but do not be afraid to explore your scrying environment. What you see in your first trip to your Spirit Sanctuary is often only a small piece of the process to find your own spiritual space within the scrying environment. Take your time exploring, and be prepared for anything that might be unusual to you. There are often very amazing experiences that happen here, but you should definitely take your time. In this space, you will find that you will have more control of the surrounding environment – even being able to interact with objects in the space on a more conscious level. Experiences of the Spirit Sanctuary will vary widely though, so try not to place too much expectation upon yourself. Once you feel that you’ve had enough time to explore, you can gradually start to shift your focus back to your breathing, and gently pull your gaze away from the speculum – moving your body bit by bit until you are fully awake again.
Like I suggested previously, this place can be difficult to experience in a fully conceptualized, integrated manner. It may be fuzzy and disjointed at first, so be patient with yourself. Work on creative visualization, even outside of scrying practice. Reading books can also help with your imaginative muscles. Practice free association, and don’t be afraid to daydream in your daily life. Feel things out with your psychic senses, and be aware of the surrounding environment. Make sure to meditate regularly, and engage in the spiritual practices and rituals that are more significant to you in your tradition. These activities will make your Spirit Sanctuary clearer as you progress. It is also worth mentioning that this realm not only grows with you, but may only appear at certain times. It is of course worth exploring, but try not to overdo it. Things will happen for you when they’re supposed to.
The next chapter will focus the process of returning from a deep trance state after a scrying session, and some important considerations that will better prepare you for being able to retain and interpret spiritual information from them.
Returning
As I’ve discussed in previous chapters, returning from the trance state after a scrying session is very important for effective results. It is not only to help you more safely transition back into ordinary consciousness, but is crucial for retaining clear and meaningful experiences after a session is completed. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, the most important part of a scrying session is not the experiences you have during your sessions, but what happens in the moments following your session. In these brief moments, the psychic impressions and complex spiritual symbols not only come into sharper focus, but additional impressions you were not initially aware of start to become apparent. Before you even begin to interpret the meanings of these visions and sensations, it is important to take note of these developments.
Understood another way, your initial psychic impressions germinate in your awareness during a scrying session, but allowing yourself to gradually transition out of your initial scrying state back into ordinary conscious allows your psychic impressions to grow and blossom into complete readings from this important stage of mental and spiritual transition. And as you practice scrying more regularly, your ability to receive psychic information will not only increase, but your ability to more easily and naturally transition out of the trance state will improve – allowing you to efficiently and accurately form complete readings for clients and friends.
Another important aspect of transitioning out of a scrying session is understanding the best time to do so. As you engage more in scrying, you will find that the information you receive will be more of a clear, albeit interactive narrative. With effort and patience, you will be able to tell when is the best time to begin exiting the scrying state. From my experience, the exit point will often feel like a point of resolution of the story you are being shown, though it may sometimes feel more like a climax – especially if your client is being given a strong warning, or being shown a beatific representation of good fortune in their future.
On a more technical level, I’d like to emphasize the manner with which you should best engage in conscious returning at the end of a scrying session. When you have reached a point in your session when you feel it is best to return, you can begin to shift your focus back onto your breathing, and the physical sensations of your body. It is at this point that you will begin to feel yourself draw away from the experiences projected through the speculum. Resist the temptation to physically jerk away from the speculum, and instead begin to relax your gaze even further, allowing yourself to mentally pull away from the visions and impressions within your scrying speculum. Continue deep, controlled breathing, and begin to physically move your eyes from the speculum. An effective method is to gently drop your gaze from the center of the speculum to just below the speculum. At this point, continue to breathe, and allow the psychic impressions to fill your conscious awareness. As you begin to start to mentally awake from the experience, you can slowly start to move your body – starting with your head, and moving down to your torso, eventually moving your hands and feet. Once you have total awareness of your physical body, you can take a nice deep breath, and start to move your eyes normally – breaking the connection to the speculum.
Before you do anything with your speculum, such as putting it away in a box, setting it aside on your table, or emptying out water from your scrying bowl, it is important to keep the psychic impressions you received fresh in your mind. Take some time to reflect on what you experienced – writing it down if necessary. If you are with your client, you can start speaking to them about what you received, and you will begin to notice that additional meanings will start to come to you as you talk to them. It is important that your client is receptive to listening at this stage, because what scryers often receive can be confusing at first. This of course will improve as you get better. You can also share visions and impressions during the scrying session itself, but the greatest part of the interpretation will come after the session is completed and you’ve had time to come back from the trance state.
Practice using care and patience when you leave scrying sessions. Though you won’t seriously hurt yourself, you’ll notice significant improvements if you continue good habits with your returning technique after scrying. It will be difficult to give effective and accurate interpretations otherwise.
The last chapter of this book will focus on the various aspects of scrying divination interpretation, and the myriad of different approaches that are possible for active scryers. I will go through each element and share some of my own opinions on what are most effective. It was important for me to discuss returning technique first because it is necessary for you to be properly prepared and have the best chance of making clear and accurate assessments of your scrying sessions.
Interpretation
As I’m sure you’re already aware, interpretation is the most important aspect of scrying divination. It is the culmination of all the time and effort you’ve put in thus far to developing effective conscious and unconscious imagining, and cultivating both conceptual and integrated psychic awareness. Not being able to effectively discern the meaning of what you see and experience during scrying sessions is an ongoing process, and inability to do so accurately is another major reason why people learning how to scry become discouraged.
Like I have mentioned previously, scrying is a technique with a great deal of potential, but it is also something which deals very heavily with the unknown, in a manner that is often extremely abstract and nuanced. Struggling to reconcile these complexities is not only normal, but a valuable part of the process. The strong desire to make sense of your experiences is a powerful motivator to learn and grow as an oracle.
In much the same way as the scrying exercises I have outlined in this book, learning to interpret scrying divination is a process which unfolds from the most basic, conscious, deliberate, and known elements of symbolism, to the most complex, psychic, instinctual, and unknown elements of your own personal symbolism as a scrying oracle.
As you are first starting out with scrying, and in the months and years that follow, using a dream dictionary or encyclopedia can be an invaluable resource, especially when the symbolism you are interpreting doesn’t directly relate to something as iconic and notable as mythology and religion. Studying the often associated psychological explanations to certain dream symbolism is also something that can help to contextualize your own unconscious framework, and help you make clearer distinctions between your own bias and your client’s query.
When you are reflecting on the symbols and narratives shown to you during your scrying sessions, some of the most notable symbolic aspects that you will receive can be connected to spiritual figures, objects, and motifs associated with traditional mythologies. Being able to understand which objects, symbols, and creatures are associated with certain gods and goddesses can be very valuable to discerning the deeper meaning of your scrying sessions – especially if what you receive ends up being related to the spiritual path of a client.
The real difficulty in interpreting scrying divination sessions lies in being able to synthesize unified meanings from a wide array of different events, symbols, places, experiences, and perspectives. This is of course something that will take a lot of practice and effort, but there are some general guidelines to follow.
Interpretation Guidelines
Elements
The prominence of the classical elements of water, air, fire, and earth in a scrying session can help to describe the general mood of the reading. A heavy presence of water in a reading can represent the unconscious, whereas fire and especially bright light can represent conscious awareness. Scrying sessions with a lot of earth based imagery, such as mountains and cliffs, or even man-made stone or brick buildings can represent a strong focus on material or financial concerns, whereas a lot of air and sky imagery can represent a stronger focus on intellectual, academic, or philosophical concerns. Looking at the complex nature of the elements, both in the Western and Eastern systems, can be very valuable to understanding this better.
Flora and Fauna
The appearance of certain plants and animals within your scrying session can signify more complex mythological and psychological meanings. It is when these appear that it is more valuable to be studied in these areas. In my experience, flora and fauna in a scrying session connects directly to the domain and power of certain gods and goddesses. Animal messengers are seen frequently in a wide variety of ancient polytheistic traditions, so be mindful of them when they appear to you. The nature of plants and animals, such as the difference between flowers in bloom versus those that are wilting, or the difference between tame or wild animals, provide importance context when interpreting their meaning.
Perspective
Generally speaking, a character that you see most frequently, the main character as it were, is most often your client. Most often, you will see your client as representative within a broader narrative, from an outside perspective. If you take the perspective of your client’s character, this generally means that you are meant to experience something on a more personal level. If your perspective changes into another character or creature within the scrying session, pay attention to who or what they are, as that will help you put that perspective into context.
Time and Place
The locations that you find yourself in can tell you a great deal about the concerns of your client. Natural or abstract spaces are most indicative of a more primal or emotional concern, whereas man-made spaces tend to suggest orderliness and complexity of thought or experience. The time period of a certain location can suggest a wide variety of things, depending on both you as an oracle and the temperament of your client. That being said, a good rule of thumb is that more modern spaces tend to suggest a concern rooted in the present, whereas spaces drawn from older time periods tend to suggest the past, memory, nostalgia, and romanticism of some kind or another. It may also suggest someone who is stuck in their past, depending on the tone of the reading. Spaces that seem very futuristic or fantastical suggest a concern that is focused on future events, but may also suggest a person who wants to move away from their past and present situation. A good rule of thumb is that the more surreal or fantastical the space, the more the concern is temporal, whereas very realistic locations suggest a concern that is most focused and grounded in material considerations. Be mindful of any transitions between different locations and time periods within your scrying session, as this can suggest a change of circumstance or life transition.
Ages
It is worth noting that the age of characters within your scrying sessions, such as young children or infants, adolescents and young adults, middle-aged people, and the elderly, reflect a lot of the tone of your scrying sessions. Young children and infants suggest new beginnings, whereas adolescents and young adults suggest coming of age, enthusiasm or zeal, and difficult transitions. Middle aged people, especially those in positions of power or success suggests consolidation, responsibility, and maturation, whereas the presence of the elderly can suggest everything from great wisdom or to horrible bitterness, and can also represent conclusions to events or experiences as well as stagnation or degradation, depending on the situation, or specific query from your client. Things can of course become more complex when there is a mixture of different ages within a given scrying session, so remember to take your time to find the most salient features. If the character representing your client or people significant to them transition between different ages, the aforementioned characteristics are at play in a manner that likely suggests either evolution or regression, but it may also be giving an indication of a past or future situation or concern.
Class or Status
The social status of figures within your scrying sessions can suggest a great deal about the concerns of your client, such as a desire for wealth or fertility in the case of nobility, or represent modesty or austerity in the case of peasants or workers. Specific vocations can of course be directly related to the real life job or potential career of the person you are scrying for, but it can also represent how your client feels about their position in life. Transitions between social roles within a scrying session can forecast past and future progressions of a client’s personality or station in life. The status of figures within a scrying session can also represent how a client views themselves, or how they are viewed by others.
Final Thoughts
There are many other aspects that you can experience and analyze as you progress with scrying divination, but this is ultimately a very personal journey. There are going to be experiences you will have that will likely contradict much of what I have suggested in this chapter, and even the rest of the book. I highly encourage you to explore your psychic ability through scrying divination, and develop your own spiritual innovations as you progress.
I’m grateful to be able to share what I have learned in my own spiritual path as an oracle, and I hope that what you have read in this book will benefit you. Even if you don’t end up practicing scrying to the degree that I do, or end up gravitating towards some other form or mixture of divination techniques, it is my hope that you can benefit from the essential exercises I have merged into scrying practice, as I sincerely believe they apply to all forms of effective divination in some form or another.
Wherever you find yourself, I wish you good fortune and happiness.
Thank you for taking the time to read my practical scrying manual.