Scrying

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

  1. The art of divination involves gazing into reflective surfaces or mediums to gain knowledge about the future or unseen realities
  2. This practice entails looking into objects like mirrors or water to seek insights and predict future outcomes
  3. A method of foretelling events by gazing into reflective objects such as crystals, mirrors, or water

Etymology: Before it meant gazing in silence, it meant shouting. Every crystal-gazer hunched over a dark mirror is practising a word whose ancestors were all about raising your voice. The trail begins with Latin "quiritare", "to cry out, wail", which became Old French "crier", "to cry". With a prefix it became "escrier", "to cry out", and in the French of England's Norman rulers the noun "ascri", "an outcry". Middle English took both. "Ascry" meant a shout or alarm, and the verb "ascrien" meant to cry out. Like many words, it lost its unstressed first syllable in speech and became "scrien" or "scryen". The shift from noise to sight came through a near-twin. "Descrien", our "descry", also came from Old French and also meant to proclaim or cry out, yet in English it came to mean "to catch sight of". How that happened is not certain. It may have passed through a sense of "reveal, make known", and it was probably influenced by Middle English "descriven", "to describe". "Scry" was pulled along in the same direction and came to mean to see, perceive, or make out something distant or hidden. From there it was a short step to seeing what ordinary eyes cannot. Its most famous practitioners worked for John Dee, Elizabeth I's mathematician and astrologer, who in the 1580s sat beside mediums, above all Edward Kelley, as they stared into a crystal "shew-stone" and reported angels speaking within it. Dee also owned a polished obsidian mirror made in Aztec Mexico, now in the British Museum. History remembers Kelley as Dee's scryer: Dee recorded the visions, and Kelley did the seeing. In time the plain sense of "see" faded and was left to "descry". "Scry" survived almost only in its magical meaning, and the Victorian occult revival, with its crystal balls and ritual societies, gave scrying a second life. A word that began as a shout ended as the quietest of arts.

Synonyms: divination, foretelling, prophecy, crystal gazing, fortune telling