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Updated: June 16, 2025
"Do you prefer a palm-reading, the crystal-gazing or both?" she asked, and although the words were the usual commonplace phrases that she probably repeated a dozen times a day, uttered monotonously enough, yet through some vibrant, ringing quality her most ordinary utterances were endued with life. "I hardly know," he said in answer to her question, and falling in with her mood.
In the second place, crystal-gazing shows how a substratum of fact may be so overlaid with mystic mummeries, incantations, fumigations, pentacles: and so overwhelmed in superstitious interpretations, introducing fairies and spirits, that the facts run the risk of being swept away in the litter and dust of nonsense.
Luci in the sensational philosophy of Locke, 'nothing in the intellect which does not come through the senses' a queer theme for a man of the sword to study. But, thirty years earlier, the Regent d'Orléans had made crystal-gazing fashionable, and stories of ghosts and second-sight in the highest circles were popular.
Here, then, we find the belief that hallucinations can be induced by one or other form of crystal-gazing, in ancient Peru, on the other side of the continent among the Huille-che, in Fez, in Madagascar, in Siberia, among Apaches, Hurons, Iroquois, Australian black fellows, Maoris, and in Polynesia. This is assuredly a wide range of geographical distribution.
It is to be wished that competent observers would pay more attention to such savage practices as crystal-gazing and automatism as illustrated by the sticks of the Melanesians, Zulus, and Yaos.
Numerous experiments might be tried, such as crystal-gazing, automatic writing, séances, induced dreams, etc. Experiments should be tried in photographing the apparitions, and in getting them to register their presence upon delicate and sensitive instruments of all sorts.
We can no longer do so, it is agreed, in the case of hypnotic phenomena. I hope to make it seem possible that we should not do so in the matter of the hallucinations provoked by gazing in a smooth deep, usually styled 'crystal-gazing. Ethnologically, this practice is at least as old as classical times, and is of practically world-wide distribution.
This is quite a typical case of crystal-gazing the picture correct in every detail, you see, and yet absolutely unimportant and bearing no apparent signification of any sort to either party, except that it served to prove to Mr. Baillie that there was something in crystal-gazing.
In the case of crystal-gazing, however, we can scarcely push scepticism so far as to deny that the facts exist, that hallucinations are actually provoked. The inference is that a presumption is raised in favour of the actuality of the other phenomena universally reported.
At last, in despair, I gave it up, and turned to the book on crystallomancy. Here, at least, was something comprehensible, if not altogether believable, and I read with interest of the antiquity of crystal-gazing as a means of inducing hallucination for the purpose of seeking information not to be gained by any normal means.
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