The Occult

Scrying, Runes, and Other Oracles

Divination · 11 min read

Beyond the tarot, the Western divinatory tradition includes a remarkable range of methods: scrying mirrors and crystal balls, the casting of runes, the consulting of the I Ching, the use of pendulums, the practice of bibliomancy, and the reading of bones and stones. Each method has its own history, its own symbolic grammar, and its own working practice. For the broader context of divinatory practice, and for the historical and theoretical background, see the central account. This article treats the Western tradition in depth, with brief comparative reference to practices that have entered the Western repertoire from elsewhere. The best single reference is Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (Routledge, 2018); for the scrying tradition, the documentary collection by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (2012), is invaluable.

Scrying Mirrors and Crystal Balls

Scrying is the practice of gazing into a reflective or luminous surface — a polished black mirror, a crystal ball, a bowl of water, a flame, an ink-darkened surface — to receive visions. The practice is among the oldest in the Western tradition, and it is mentioned by the ancient Greek writer Heliodorus, in his Aethiopica (third or fourth century CE), where the seer Calasiris uses a bowl of water as a scrying surface in Books II and VI. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder describes the use of water, polished stones, and other materials in his Natural History (XXXVII), and the practice continued through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The grimoire tradition includes scrying as a standard part of the conjuration ritual, with the spirit sometimes said to appear in the mirror or the crystal. The late-medieval German hydromancy text Spiegel der Kunst (c. 1450) and the scrying instructions of the Liber Juratus are among the more important fifteenth-century sources.

The most famous of the early modern scryers is the Elizabethan mathematician and court adviser John Dee (1527–1608/9), who worked with the scryer Edward Kelley to produce a series of visionary sessions that were recorded in the Mysteriorum Libri (Five Books of Mysteries, 1582–83) and the Enthusiasticall Aphorismes (1582). The visions included the Enochian system of alphabets and calls, a complex symbolic language that Dee and Kelley believed had been received from angels. The Enochian system has had a continuing influence on Western esotericism, particularly in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and in the Thelemic tradition of Aleister Crowley. The most famous of the early modern scryers in France was Michel de Nostredame, known as Nostradamus (1503–1566), who reportedly used a bowl of water and a tripod of iron for his visions; the quatrains he published are among the most famous and most disputed documents in the Western divinatory canon.

The scrying tradition has continued to the present. The black mirror, often a piece of polished obsidian or a surface of black glass, is the standard scrying tool in many contemporary Wiccan and ceremonial-magical contexts; the ritual and ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn includes elaborate instructions for the construction and use of the scrying mirror in the order’s Z’ documents and in the published rituals. The crystal ball, often associated in the popular imagination with fortune-tellers, has a long and serious history in the British and American scrying traditions; the seventeenth-century astrologer John Lambe, the nineteenth-century French occultists Adolphe Belloguet and Eugène Ledos, and the well-documented practice of the Victorian “bedroom” seers catalogued by the Society for Psychical Research are the most important references. The classical source for crystal-gazing is Theophrastus’ On Stones (c. 300 BCE), which describes the optical properties of rock crystal; the modern divination literature is properly a separate development.

The actual practice of scrying is meditative. The scryer sits in a quiet room, sometimes in a darkened space lit by a single candle, and gazes into the surface. After a time — sometimes minutes, sometimes a half hour — the surface seems to lighten, and images begin to appear. The images may be visual, in the form of figures, scenes, or symbols; they may be auditory, in the form of words, names, or sentences; or they may be felt, in the form of an emotional or somatic quality. The art of scrying is the art of attending to these appearances without forcing them, of recording them accurately, and of interpreting them in the context of the question. The depth-psychological account treats scrying as a meditative practice that surfaces material from the unconscious; the mediation account treats it as communication with non-human intelligence. Most contemporary scryers work with both.

Runes and the Rune Casting

The runic tradition is treated in depth in Understanding Rune Readings, which traces the 24-letter Elder Futhark, the meanings of the individual runes, and the practical methods of reading. The historical runic tradition — the use of the runes as a writing system by the Germanic peoples from the second century to the eleventh — is the basis of the modern occult usage, but the modern usage is a later development. The Norse and Icelandic sources of the thirteenth century, the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the various runic poems, attribute magical properties to the runes, and the medieval Icelandic galdrar (magical incantations) used runes for inscription and for divination; but the use of the 24 Elder Futhark runes as a casting oracle, drawn from a bag and laid out in a spread, is largely a development of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The key figure in the modern revival of the runes is the Austrian occultist Guido von List (1848–1919), who in 1908 published Das Geheimnis der Runen (The Secret of the Runes), a treatment of the Elder Futhark as a system of magical and divinatory significance. The runic revival that List inaugurated was continued by the German völkisch and Ariosophist movements of the early twentieth century, and it influenced the SS of the Nazi period, which adopted a stylized Sowilo (sun) rune — sometimes called Sigrunen — as an emblem in 1933. The post-war revivals, including the work of the German runologist Karl Spiesberger, the English occultist and poet Ralph Blum (whose The Book of Runes of 1982 was a popular best-seller), the Norwegian Åsatru movement, and the Icelandic Ásatrúarfélagið (founded 1972), developed the rune-casting tradition in forms that are more meditative, more inclusive, and more explicitly distanced from the political associations of the early twentieth century.

The casting of the runes, as practiced in the modern Western tradition, is a relatively simple procedure. The 24 runes are drawn from a bag, often made of cloth or leather, and laid out on a casting cloth. The drawing of the runes is not random, in the strict sense, since the practitioner is responsible for the drawing; the divinatory meaning is read in the position of the runes in the spread, in the relation of the runes to one another, in whether the rune is drawn face up or face down (the so-called meridian rune and the reversed rune, treated in detail in the practical guide), and in the overall pattern of the cast.

The I Ching and the Chinese Connection

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is the Chinese divination classic that entered the Western tradition through the German translation of Richard Wilhelm (1924) and the Cary F. Baynes English translation (1950), with its famous foreword by Carl Jung. The I Ching consists of 64 hexagrams, each composed of six lines, each line either solid (yang) or broken (yin). The hexagrams are built up by the casting of three coins (the fast method) or fifty yarrow stalks (the traditional method); the result of the cast is read as the name and the judgment of a particular hexagram. The I Ching is also a philosophical classic, a work of cosmology, and a manual of conduct; Wilhelm and Jung treated it as a divination, a system of philosophy, and a depth-psychological instrument all at once.

The I Ching’s place in the Western divinatory tradition is unique. It is the only East Asian method that has been widely adopted in the West, and it has been a major influence on the depth-psychological theory of divination. Jung’s foreword in particular shaped the modern Western understanding of the I Ching as a method of accessing the unconscious through meaningful coincidence. The I Ching has also been used in conjunction with the tarot and the runes, with readers drawing cards or runes in addition to consulting the hexagrams, and it has been an important influence on the New Age and the human-potential movements of the twentieth century. Edward Shaughnessy’s The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton, 2014) is a reliable recent introduction; the older Hellmut Wilhelm, Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes (1977) is the most readable short treatment by a Sinologist.

Bibliomancy, Osteomancy, and the Casting of Lots

Bibliomancy is the practice of opening a book at random and reading a passage as a divination. The medieval sortes Vergilianae and sortes Biblicae used Virgil and the Bible as the oracular text; the sortes Sanctorum used the Vitae of the saints. The practice has been applied to any book, and the contemporary bibliomancer might open a favorite novel or poem, read the first passage the eye falls on, and interpret the passage in the context of the question. Bibliomancy is a humble method, but it can be remarkably effective, especially in conjunction with a meditative or ritual frame. A famous historical example is the consultation of the Sortes Astrampsychi, a late-antique Greek poem of oracular questions and answers, in the Roman and Byzantine worlds.

Osteomancy is the practice of reading the patterns of animal bones. The Tibetan mo divination, which uses a sheep’s shoulder blade (a form of scapulimancy, sometimes called phyva-mo in Tibetan), has a long and continuing practice; the Mongolian and Buryat scapulimancy traditions are related. The African and African diasporic practice of bone-casting, in which a set of small carved bones and shells is thrown on a mat and read, has a long history in West Africa, in the Caribbean, and in the hoodoo and conjure traditions of the American South. The contemporary Western practitioner who works with bone-casting typically uses a set of about twenty items, each with a fixed meaning, and reads the cast in the context of the question.

Cleromancy, the casting of lots, is the simplest of the divinatory methods. The Roman practice of the sortitio, the medieval practice of the sortes, the modern practice of drawing cards or runes from a bag, and the I Ching’s coin-casting are all forms of cleromancy. The principle is that the answer is produced by chance but read as meaningful. The modern reader of the tarot or the runes is, in a sense, practicing a form of cleromancy, since the cards or runes are drawn at random and read in context.

Pendulums, Pyromancy, and Other Methods

The pendulum is a small weighted object on a string, suspended and allowed to swing. The swing is read as a response to a question: a swing along the vertical axis is read as “yes,” a swing along the horizontal as “no,” and a circular swing as “maybe” or as a request for a clearer question. The pendulum’s responses are calibrated against a chart agreed in advance with the practitioner, and the chart may include labels such as “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “ask again,” or specific items for dowsing (locating water, minerals, or lost objects). The pendulum has been used in the Western tradition at least since the seventeenth century, and it has been particularly popular in twentieth-century dowsing, in the work of French dowsers, and in the modern dowsing tradition of the United States.

Pyromancy is the practice of reading the patterns of fire and flame. The Greek and Roman practice of reading the flame on the altar has been continued in some modern Wiccan and ceremonial-magical contexts, with the practitioner watching the candle flame for movement, color, or spark patterns that may indicate a positive or negative outcome of a question. Aeromancy, the reading of the sky, has a long Western history; the Roman augurs and the Etruscan lightning-readers are the classical examples. Lithomancy, the reading of stones, includes both the casting of stones (in the manner of the casting of the runes) and the use of polished crystals in scrying.

Hydromancy is the practice of reading water — the patterns of a stream, the surface of a bowl of water, the patterns of bubbles in a glass. The Greek and Roman traditions of hydromancy continued through the medieval and the early modern period. Oneiromancy, the interpretation of dreams, has been a Western divinatory method since at least the Babylonian period; the Greek practice of incubation at the temples of Asclepius is a formal version. The modern psychological theory of dreams has not displaced the divinatory reading; many contemporary readers treat the dream as a divinatory message, the symbols to be read in the same way as the symbols of the tarot or the runes.

Comparative Practice

The methods surveyed here are the working repertoire of the Western occult tradition, but they have analogues in many other traditions. The Chinese practice of the I Ching, the African practice of bone-casting, the Tibetan practice of mo divination, the Native American practice of the vision quest, the Hindu practice of the prasna (a horary astrology) — each has a structure that resembles the structure of the Western methods: a question, a method, a casting, a reading. The differences are real, but the family resemblance is striking. The comparative study of divination, exemplified by the work of Marcel Mauss (A General Theory of Magic, 1902/1950), the more recent scholarship of Wouter Hanegraaff and of Michael D. Bailey on divination and magic, and the Russian-material historian W. F. Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight (1999), has been an important resource for the modern Western practitioner. What the comparative work reveals is that the structural features of divination — the question, the ritual frame, the casting, the reading — are remarkably stable across cultures, which is one of the reasons the academic study of religion now treats divination as a coherent field of inquiry.

Sources and further reading

  • Michael D. Bailey, Magic: The Basics (Routledge, 2018).
  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).
  • P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
  • W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Penn State, 1999).
  • Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament (Sheffield Academic, 1997).
  • Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Johns Hopkins, 1985).
  • Edward Shaughnessy, The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton, 2014).
  • Helmut Birkhan, Kelten: Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur (Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997).