Scrying Mirrors

For years I've had this strange affiliation with mirrors.
As early as I can remember I would glance into a passing mirror and see a room other than the one that ought to be reflected, or a person not actually in the vicinity.
The scenarios never play out like a movie, it's always just a fleeting image or something othewise lacking in details.

Recently, the muse struck and I began to make scrying mirrors. This is basically a thick glass painted black surrounded by an intricate frame. The theory is that the user should be able to have various visions and so forth using the mirror as a focus.

I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has ever used a scrying mirror. What method did you use in creating it? How did you go about using it? What, if any, positive or negative experiences did you have as a result of your use?

Also, if anyone is interested I can post pictures of the mirriors I have made.

It would probably help if you explained what path you practice, if you just have a strong innate talent let it guide you. If you have an ideology which helps you focus your ability then your working needs to be an extension of that, something to act as a guide.

I will say this bless your tools, and every portion of your working as you go along, the more attuned you can make everything the more likely it will be to boost whatever effect you are trying to create.

Also to keep them uncontaminated, I would put them away somewhere safe when your not using them, so that they cannot be infected with the disbelief of others.

The purer you can keep them the stronger they will be, the same is true for any sort of talisman / artifact.

pictures and links to info would be very interesting.

I have used items as focus points to 'have visions' or 'hallucinate' whichever term your prefer - complex but undefined things are the best, the classic summer day clouds being very popular but also thick mist, the sea at night, embers of a fire, smoke in sunbeams have all served me well.

I would be very interested to hear your experience with your mirror, it sounds like it could be really good.

I would be very interested to hear your method of entering the 'trance' state and how you react / call / control or manifest your visions.

I find that the nature of the item i am unfocused on determines the nature of the vision, mist and dark seas bring me into a yarn spinning mood and often revolve around being on an old wooden boat amid high seas while the embers of a fire, sunlight playing on a rockpool or leaves rustling in the trees tend to give a more abstract almost scatty edge to my thought process. hehe as you can tell i go for nature type things most the time --after all i am a nature boy However more urban areas i find provide a more industrial, mathmatical or strictly logical vision type experience.

I wonder if the semi reflection will create a more reflective mood, a vision of the soul unclouded by ego, pride, shame, etc? Maybe the vision will be centered around a different version of yourself, you see yourself acting through an alien situation -i often do this, it's helped me become much more empathetic. Also the frame must affect it too, a wooden fraime formed from streatching oak might help tune into a world of elves and feyfolken while cool steel bolted with thick brass rivets might slip you into a steampunk thriller.

All these examples of course only true to me and how i think, everyone thinks and dreams differently, that's the beauty of the human mind.

Thank you for your response.
My religious preference doesn't really factor into my being drawn to mirrors. However, if it helps, I am a practicing Buddhist. I was raised Catholic. I live with two Pagans as room mates. I also have a deep love for religion and have extensive knowledge of most major faiths.

Thank you for your suggestions on keeping my tools in a spiritually clean enviornment. One of my Pagan room mates had brought that up as a concern when I began my work, considering how much one makes themselves vulnerable when using any sort of a focus.

Do you have any experiences with scrying that you'd care to share?

Thank you,
Lenina

Hi Lenina,

I've never scryed in a mirror, but I watched a very interesting television show about a man who does that kind of stuff, and it was very interesting.

In his set up, he had a smoked pain of glass mirrored on one side, and he put it in a dark room with dark walls and had a couple of candles lit somewhere in the room. There was just enough light to see into the mirror as one sat in front of it.

According to the story he and others saw stuff when they sat in front of the mirror and looked into it for some time. Sometimes they saw other people.

One time a woman came and saw one of her female relatives that had passed away in the miror if I remember right, and then she left the room and then another woman went into the room and she came out describing seeing the same woman as the other woman had seen; even though she had not heard anything from the other woman or the other people in the building that the former woman had seen a woman in the mirror.

My medium is not scrying I must admit I don't have strong gifts in that area. The information I provided for you is just basics regarding how to shape any form of talisman / artifact.

I asked what path you follow because as Nature pointed out different people have different triggers, some people use fire to scry in, some people use clouds. You will have triggers which activate / act as catalyst for your abilities, they key is to find out what they are, and then incorporate them into your designs.

If your a practicing Buddhist maybe there are particular mantras which would help you achieve a more potent trance state, perhaps it would be helpful to incorporate those mantras around the frame of your mirror.

reply to post by gYvMessanger


haha indeed people use #all# sorts of things, just been reading up and found this on wiki,

Onychomancy or variously onuchomancy, onychomantia, onycomancy, onymancy (from Greek onychos, 'fingernail', and manteia, 'fortune-telling') is an ancient form of divination using fingernails. It consists of watching the reflection of sunlight on the oiled fingernails of an unpolluted boy, then interpreting the symbols that appear.

Wow that's creepy! Trust the greek to have the weirdest divination tools, the Romans had the bloodiest (which carried on to europen occultism) they used to rip the eyes out of an animal and examine the entrails!


What strikes me is that certain groups have split off the main body of practice who have visions and experiences looking at weird things and instead look for fixed systems and measurements - Star gazing could well be the best example of this, maybe some people looked into the stars and let their mind wonder, in this dream state they 'saw' what was going to happen, they knew the battle would be lost, etc -then when they told people and they asked how they knew 'oh i was looking at the stars' then some of the less daydreamy more ridged minded folk heard this and thought 'hmmm, i'm going to crack that code...' before long everything we could see in the sky was part of our astrology, which devloped into a mathmatical means of predicting the future.

However soon it became so vauge and all encompassing that the actual work of calculating the stars positions, decoding the signs and images itself became a form of scrying -the person was put into an alpha daydream state (hehe math will do that to you) and so they were connected with the true potential of their analytic ability, as their mind was full of the situation they wanted the answer too the daydream was focused on the issue at hand, thus the 'vision' actually answered the question, when they knew the answer they could then choose the right bits of astrology to wrap it up in and deliver it to whoever needed it. Brilliant.

I've often thought that psychics had an advantage in predicting the future as the had access to ALL the information, hehe also how the catholic church rose to such high levels of power. People tell them the truth about whats going on, with all this info being worked out by the subliminal brain and thus ignoring the limitations of conscious thought i can see how a good medium could have been very valuable to society in times of old.

I don't mean to offend anyone involved in astrology, etc in fact i think that the ability to think about complex issues and to understand the balance of things is an massively impressive skill, it was what set Shakespear apart as a writer. Back when our mind was still fuddled with undeveloped half-ideas and we had et to grasp the complexity of life these people able to override the limitations that language puts on our mind (as the essay at the back of 1984 describes so well) and think freeform were amazing -and still are, only i think now everyone is able to do it, if only they are willing to try.


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Those mirrors in the pic are lovely, the leaf framed one is so cool that i tripped out (had a vivid vision) of it as i was sitting letting my mind unwind before going to bed, i saw myself looking out of it like i belonged in another time, some sylvanian land back when everyone was born free -i felt like i was looking at my current self in the mirror dreaming of the future.

Never heard of this before to be honest. But it reminded me of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, where the evil witch see's things in the mirror. Just thought i'd mention it. Is this where Disney got the idea?

Scrying is an ancient art which exists in many forms across the world to varying degrees of success and varying types of vision seeking.

Its not like seeing someone through a webcam or anything, though well perhaps it is for some people, I would say they would be exceptionally gifted though not the norm.

I've never tried scrying in a mirror. Your mirrors are very nice Lenina.

I do have what I call an evil mirror. I've had it for 20 years, only hung it one time and it brought me almost two years of misery until I removed it out of curiosity to see if the instability in my life would even out. Stability returned, although we all go through things in life and the mirror may have had nothing to do with it, it seemed odd the way the timing worked.

It was given to me by the owner of a home that I lived previously in which had an entity sharing space with us. I have always been drawn to it for some reason. I don't even like mirrors in general and it's not even particularly pretty or attractive as a wall piece, but it's the objects "oldness" which keeps me hanging on to it.

It is a large, heavy, round antique wall mirror with scrolled edgework. The mirror silvering is damaged. I took it with me when I found this home 20 years ago because I couldn't bear to leave it behind. I've kept it in the back of a closet ever since the hanging period that did not work out. Not sure what to do with the darn thing. I've thought about trying to scry with it, but am afraid to bring something into my home where I have never had any "entity" issues, so it just sits in storage.

[edit on 2/24/2009 by shockedonlooker]

As an update on my mirrors.

I have 14 scrying mirrors made at this point and no clue what to do with them. Some of them also dub as fairly nice artwork.
So silly me decided a few days ago that I'd go ahead and hang them all in my bedroom and throughout my house.

I know what you're thinking. "Why would you hang ritual magick tools that are used as a focus for scrying in the place whaere you sleep? Sounds like something that could potentially have poor results."

At this point I was looking at them from an artistic standpoint, so that's my excuse.

Moving on.
I have four housemates. My boyfriend, another couple whe are very spiritual Pagans, and one extra who mostly stays in the basement on his XBOX.
On the night that I hung the mirrors up in the house, all five of us had (essentially) the same dream involving a woman who was being held captive in a basement.
In all our various dreams the dreamer was the hero who either saved the woman or tried to and got captured themselves.

These dreams repeated themselves over the next two nights until between the five of us I'm fairly confident we explored all possible scenarios of the dream subject.
We all were sharing our dreams with one another and pinpointed that the mirrors were probably not helping our subconcious collective situations.

So now, Sigh, I have fourteen scrying mirrors in boxes in my closet.
The dreams have ceased.

I use scrying mirrors, but I don't paint mine black. They work just fine with the regular glass.

I particularly like hand mirrors, or mirrors under water.

But, of course, I just prefer using water by itself.

Mirrors and smoke have a great effect, too.

Edit to add- My boyfriend (who is a more structured Pagan than my own mystical/agnostic self, although I used to be more into the structure thing, became a high priestess, realized it was too much of a hierarchy, and quit) prefers to scry with fire and air elements.

I also scry with minerals and gemstones, but you have to use the right ones depending on the outcome that you're looking for, you know?

[edit on 3/1/2009 by ravenshadow13]