This is a digression from the topic of hallucinations caused by gazing into a clear depth. Forms of crystal-gazing, it is well known, are found among savages. The New Zealanders, according to Taylor, gaze in a drop of blood, as the Egyptians do in a drop of ink. In North America, the Père le Jeune found that a kind of thought reading was practised thus: it was believed that a sick person had certain desires, if these could be gratified, he would recover. The sorcerers, therefore, gazed into water in a bowl expecting to see there visions of the desired objects. The Egyptian process with the boy and the ink, is too familiar to need description. In Scott’s Journal (ii. 419) we read of the excitement which the reports of Lord Prudhoe [{215}] and Colonel Felix, caused among the curious. A boy, selected by these English gentlemen, saw and described Shakspeare, and Colonel Felix’s brother, who had lost an arm. The ceremonies of fumigation, and the preliminary visions of flags, and a sultan, are not necessary in modern crystal-gazing. Scott made inquiries at Malta, and wished to visit Alexandria. He was attracted, doubtless, by the resemblance to Dr. Dee’s tales of his magic ball, and to the legends of his own Aunt Margaret’s Mirror. The Quarterly Review (No. 117, pp. 196-208) offers an explanation which explains nothing. The experiments of Mr. Lane were tolerably successful, those of Mr. Kinglake, in Eothen, were amusingly the reverse. Dr. Keate, the flogging headmaster of Eton, was described by the seer as a beautiful girl, with golden hair and blue eyes. The modern explanation of successes would apparently be that the boy does, occasionally, see the reflection of his interrogator’s thoughts.
In a paper in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (part xiv.), an anonymous writer gives the results of some historical investigation into the antiquities of crystal-gazing. The stories of cups, ‘wherein my lord divines,’ like Joseph, need not necessarily indicate gazing into the deeps of the cup. There were other modes of using cups and drops of wine, not connected with visions. At Patrae, in Greece, Pausanias describes the dropping of a mirror on to the surface of a well, the burning of incense, and the vision of the patient who consults the oracle in the deeps of the mirror. [{216a}] A Christian Father asserts that, in some cases, a basin with a glass bottom was used, through which the gazer saw persons concealed in a room below, and took them for real visions. [{216b}] In mirror-magic (catoptromancy), the child seer’s eyes were bandaged, and he saw with the top of his head! The Specularii continued the tradition through the Middle Ages, and, in the sixteenth century Dr. Dee ruined himself by his infatuation for ‘show-stones,’ in which Kelly saw, or pretended to see, visions which Dr. Dee interpreted. Dee kept voluminous diaries of his experiments, part of which is published in a folio by Meric Casaubon. The work is flighty, indeed crazy; Dee thought that the hallucinations were spirits, and believed that his ‘show-stones’ were occasionally spirited away by the demons. Kelly pretended to hear noises in the stones, and to receive messages.
In our own time, while many can see pictures, few know what the pictures represent. Some explain them by interpreting the accompanying ‘raps,’ or by ‘automatic writing’. The intelligence thus conveyed is then found to exist in county histories, newspapers, and elsewhere, a circumstance which lends itself to interpretation of more sorts than one. Without these very dubious modes of getting at the meaning of the crystal pictures, they remain, of course, mere picturesque hallucinations. The author of the paper referred to, is herself a crystal-seer, and (in Borderland No. 2) mentions one very interesting vision. She and a friend stared into one of Dr. Dee’s ‘show-stones,’ at the Stuart exhibition, and both beheld the same scene, not a scene they could have guessed at, which was going on at the seer’s own house. As this writer, though versed in hallucinations, entirely rejects any ‘spiritual’ theory, and conceives that, she is dealing with purely psychological curiosities, her evidence is the better worth notice, and may be compared with that of a crystal-seer for whose evidence the present writer can vouch, as far as one mortal may vouch for that of another.
Miss X., the writer in the Psychical Proceedings, has been able to see pictures in crystals and other polished surfaces, or, indeed, independently of these, since childhood. She thinks that the visions are:—
1. After-images, or recrudescent memories (often memories of things not consciously noted).
2. Objectivations of ideas or images, consciously or unconsciously present to the mind.
3. Visions, possibly telepathic or clairvoyant, implying acquirement of knowledge by supernormal means. The first class is much the most frequent in this lady’s experience. She can occasionally refresh her memory by looking into the crystal.
The other seer, known to the writer, cannot do this, and her pictures, as far as she knows, are purely fanciful. Perhaps an ‘automatic writer’ might interpret them, in the rather dubious manner of that art. As far as the ‘scryer’ knows, however, her pictures of places and people are not revivals of memory. For example, she sees an ancient ship, with a bird’s beak for prow, come into harbour, and behind it a man carrying a crown. This is a mere fancy picture. On one occasion she saw a man, like an Oriental priest, with a white caftan, contemplating the rise and fall of a fountain of fire: suddenly, at the summit of the fire, appeared a human hand, pointing downwards, to which the old priest looked up. This was in August, 1893. Later in the month the author happened to take up, at Loch Sheil, Lady Burton’s Life of Sir Richard Burton. On the back of the cover is a singular design in gold. A woman in widow’s weeds is bowing beneath rays of light, over which appears a human hand, marked R. F. B. on the wrist. The author at once wrote asking his friend the crystal-gazer if she had seen this work of art, which might have unconsciously suggested the picture. The lady, however, was certain that she had not seen the Life of Sir Richard Burton, though her eye, of course, may have fallen on it in a bookseller’s shop, while her mind did not consciously take it in. If this was a revival of a sub-conscious memory in the crystal, it was the only case of that process in her experience.
On the other hand Miss X. can trace many of her visions to memories, as Maury could in his illusions hypnagogiques. Thus, Miss X. saw in the crystal, the printed announcement of a friend’s death. She had not consciously read the Times, but remembered that she had held it up before her face as a firescreen. This kind of revival, as she says, corresponds to the writing, with planchette, of scraps from the Chanson de Roland, by a person who had never consciously read a line of it, and who did not even know what stratum of Old French was represented by the fragments. Miss X. seems not to know either; for she calls it ‘Provençal’. Similar instances of memory revived are not very uncommon in dreams. Miss X. can consciously put a group of fanciful characters into the crystal, while this is beyond the power of the seer known to the writer, who has attempted to perceive what a friend is doing at a distance, but with no success. Thus she tried to discover what the writer might be about, and secured a view of two large sunny rooms, with a shadowy figure therein. Now it is very probable that the writer was in just such a room, at --- Castle, but the seer saw, on the library table, a singular mirror, which did not exist there, and a model of a castle, also non-existent. The knowledge that the person sought for was staying at a ‘castle,’ may have unconsciously suggested this model in the picture.
A pretty case of revived memory is given by Miss X. She wanted the date of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Later, in the crystal, she saw a conventional old Jew, writing in a book with massive clasps. Using a magnifying glass, she found that he was writing Greek, but the lines faded, and she only saw the Roman numerals LXX. These suggested the seventy Hebrews who wrote the Septuagint, with the date, 277 B.C., which served for Ptolemy Philadelphus. Miss X. later remembered a memoria technica which she had once learned, with the clue, ‘Now Jewish elders indite a Greek copy’. It is obvious that these queer symbolical reawakenings of memory explain much of the (apparently) ‘unknown’ information given by ‘ghosts,’ and in dreams. A lady, who had long been in very bad health, was one evening seized by a violent recrudescence of memory, and for hours poured out the minutest details of the most trivial occurrences; the attack was followed by a cerebral malady from which she fortunately recovered. The same phenomenon of awakened memory has occasionally been reported by people who were with difficulty restored after being seven-eighths drowned.