Hydromancy and Scrying
So I tried scrying for the first time a few nights ago. My experience was compelling (????) so I am going to share it.
The first time I was introduced to scrying (outside of fiction) was last year when I read The Witch of the Forest's Guide to Natural Magick by Lindsay Squire. She introduces scrying as an exercise that, like other methods of divination, assists in revealing or seeing hidden information. I don't believe in supernatural scrying, like seeing the future or talking to spirits, but I firmly believe that divination can bring things to the surface of your mind from your subconscious. Many methods of scrying involve meditation upon a reflective surface, but Squire also discusses things like pyromancy and bibliomancy.
Instructions for scrying, as stated in her book, promote passive observance of the subject of divination (fire, water, deck of cards, flock of birds, etc). With scrying, as the images come and go in our mind we should attempt to interpret them.
Hydromancy, where the reflective surface for scrying is water, seemed the most appealing to me--but it took me a long time to find a scrying bowl that worked. It ended up being a shallow, circular, matte black ceramic bowl. At night, I lit a candle, turned all the lights off, bent my head over the bowl, and observed the water. Afterward, I wrote down my experience:
"I am in a dark room--spherical and all black with traces of white and blue creating hints of shadow and depth, solid but blurry in the water.
There seems to be a rodent to my right (or something like a rodent) looking over a wooden desk at me, talking. He's got a man's voice and he speaks English. He's very wise, but he's small. He's very blunt, too--not rude, but he doesn't waste time on sentimentality or getting too emotional about things. He's generally not very emotional, but he's smart and kind. He knows what he's talking about, and he's generally right about things.
To my left, light is shining through two separate doorways, one big and one small. They are doorways to other places but I don't know where they go. I'm having a hard time deciding whether I should focus on the wise rodent, or the other doorways. I decide that the doorways and the rodent are equally important.
Then my cat distracts me, and I decide that this was more than enough for a first scrying session. I blow the candle out."
I think I'll be chewing on this one for a while, honestly. What an interesting first-time experience. I'll say it's possible the animal that was speaking to me is some aspect of my higher self, or an aspect of myself that I am looking to for guidance right now. I felt extremely comforted by him, like I knew him very well. Y'all, I literally just imagined a rodent in a scrying bowl lit by a candle in the dark, but he feels like a very real aspect of myself that I want to get to know better.
TLDR; Based on my first impressions, scrying is really fun, is a great writing exercise and also returns those feelings of enchantment that I felt when I was a kid.
