I’ve posted before about how spirit communication works for me, but had some additional thoughts I wanted to share about the method of scrying in particular, prompted by some stimulating conversation over on the Hermetic House of Life Discord server.

In a conversation about Rufus Opus’ Seven Spheres and the DSIC method of conjuration, discussion came up about the particulars of the scrying medium and whether scrying media other than the prescribed small crystal sphere would be equally effective. My own experience is that the best scrying medium is whatever works for the individual magician, and this varies from person to person. I have great difficulty scrying into a crystal ball, but a black mirror works wonderfully for me.

I didn’t write this post, however, to talk about suitable 7S/DSIC substitutions. Rather, I wanted to share how scrying into the medium actually works for me on a mechanical level, since it seems there’s a great deal of confusion out there about what scrying actually entails and how it can operate for different people.

A common perception seems to be that when scrying into a crystal (for example), the vision will appear and take shape within the crystal, and the magician will observe the vision with their eyes as it unfolds. This may be the way it works for some, but it is not the way it works for me. I find I don’t really see much of anything in the scrying medium itself. The medium is really more of a tool to let my eyes unfocus, or focus beyond the medium–kind of like one of those old Magic Eye posters you had to look at cross-eyed to see the 3D image in. When I see a sort of black vortex in the middle of my vision, I lean into that and make it my (non-)focus, and that leads me into a hypnagogic state. From there I’ll generally close my eyes and the visions will come.

It helps to think of scrying less as a mode of seeing with one’s vision, and more as a hypnotic self-induction into a receptive trance state. The object isn’t to see within the scrying medium itself, so much as it is to create the necessary receptive state in the mind of the scryer. On that note, I think it would be incredibly fascinating to experiment with scrying simply using hypnotic induction directly, rather than a visual scrying medium. I suspect the results would prove very fruitful.