When we peer into a crystal ball or gaze into the depths of a black mirror, what exactly are we doing? According to Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, we’re engaging in something far more profound than simply staring at a reflective surface—we’re accessing a system of inner senses that bridge the material world and the realm of spirit.
In Agrippa’s Renaissance worldview, light doesn’t work the way modern science tells us. Instead, divine light descends from beyond the fixed stars, trickling through each of the seven planets where celestial intelligences determine how this radiance is received and emitted. By the time this celestial light reaches us, it’s not visible light at all, but a divine radiance that enters the human soul through the imagination and projects outward from our eyes—like spiritual flashlights—before being received again, allowing us to see. 1
A Metaphor for Spiritual Perception
The key lies in what Agrippa calls the inner senses—those faculties of mind and soul that process the images collected by our physical senses. Agrippa lists four of them. First, common sense collects impressions from our outer senses in the form of images. Then imaginative power retains these images and passes them along. The third inner sense—fantasy and the power of thought—accepts these images, then perceives and judges their nature and meaning. Finally, memory protects and stores these images while distinguishing, connecting, and judging them.
Here’s where it gets interesting for the practicing scryer: these inner senses aren’t passive receivers—they’re active powers. Fantasy, in particular, includes our ability to create and comprehend images, broken into categories like wandering, arranging, pursuits, flights, and passions to action. This active nature supposedly gives us special abilities, including the ability to see the future in dreams or transmit impressions to others.
Active Scrying
This understanding transforms scrying from a hit-or-miss waiting game into an active magical practice. The black mirror or crystal ball isn’t showing us anything—we’re using it as a tool to activate our inner senses, to engage that part of fantasy that can perceive “those things abstracted by the mind or intellect, which are not bodies and not like them”.2
A Culture of the Phantasmic
Renaissance culture was, as scholar Ioan Couliano noted, “a culture of the phantasmic” that had “developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms” .3 When we scry using Agrippa’s framework, we’re not passive observers hoping for visions—we’re Renaissance magicians actively wielding the power of spiritual sight through the disciplined use of imagination.
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Ready to develop your own scrying abilities? Join my upcoming class on spirit scrying, where we’ll explore traditional techniques for crystal gazing, mirror work, and other forms of spiritual vision, combining Renaissance wisdom with practical modern methods for reliable spirit communication.
1 Much of this material is inspired by book 1, chapter 61 of Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
2 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three books of occult philosophy, trans. Eric Purdue (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2021), 212–13.
3 Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 193.
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