Scrying is a divinatory or visionary practice in which a person attends to a crystal, reflective surface, or other visual focus and reports images or messages. Different traditions explain these experiences through spirits, imagination, symbolic perception, or several of these at once.
Dee and the scryer#
John Dee's records provide an unusually detailed historical example. Dee commonly wrote questions and reported answers while a scryer, most famously Edward Kelley, described the vision. The manuscripts preserve tables, figures, dialogues, and the circumstances of successive sessions.[1]
The resulting record is more than a list of predictions. It documents how the participants interpreted what was reported, asked further questions, and attempted to organize the material. Later angelic magic drew extensively on these papers, sometimes rearranging them into a different practical system.
Image, report, and interpretation#
A scrying account can separate what the participant saw, what they believed it represented, and what they later concluded. This distinction makes a diary more useful for comparison. A record of a perceived figure establishes that the perception was reported; identifying the figure as a particular spirit is a further interpretation.
Crowley's training instructions include controlled attention and the keeping of records as part of magical work.[2] Modern practice can adopt similar habits without accepting his entire religious system. In Theistic Satanism or Demonolatry, the practitioner may give an encounter devotional significance, while still preserving the actual observations and circumstances in an occult diary.
See also#
References
- John Dee, Mysteriorum Libri Quinque (accessed 2026-10-01) ↩
- Aleister Crowley, Liber E vel Exercitiorum · Primary instructions on training and the magical record. (accessed 2026-10-01) ↩