The Crystal Ball by John William Waterhouse (1902, oil on canvas)
Immersed in a good story, we’re often hooked by the simple question: what’s going to happen next? The link between divination and storytelling is apparent. Scrying involves looking into a mirror, a vessel or body of water, a mirror, a flame, or reflective surface, and being receptive to messages or images we see there. Traditionally it has been used to predict the future; it can also be employed to better understand our own thoughts. It is a way of speaking directly to the unconscious, that realm of symbols to which we go in dreams. John Dee, the court astrologer to Elizabeth I, looked into his black obsidian mirror to summon visions of angels. In the 16th century, his spirit mirror was brought to England from Mexico, where Aztec priests employed such tools for prophecy making. Cunning folk in early modern England scried, too, for clients who wanted to find lost or stolen goods and break alleged bewitchments, among other things. Many different cultures around the world have their own version of scrying.
The most modern reference to scrying, perhaps, is in the popular Netflix series Black Mirror. When our phones and laptop screens turn off, what do we see? First, maybe, ourselves reflected back at us. And then, if we let our thoughts settle, perhaps we’ll catch a glimpse of some technological future, dystopian or utopian or both.
We too can scry to find the story, the setting, to understand more about a character, or to find out what happens next. Or, for creative non-fiction, to find out more about ourselves and how we handle things, what moves us, what troubles us. We might use scrying to connect with our intuition, to understand a gut feeling. It might help us conjure up those elusive words or images needed to generate a story. Remember: not every story or poem comes fully formed. Often it first appears as an image or a string of words you can’t shake off. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series grew out of the image of the dire wolf giving birth, and its litter being distributed among siblings. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road also began with an image:
"Four or five years ago, my son (John, then aged three or four) and I went to El Paso, (in Texas) and we checked into the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, it was probably about two in the morning, and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years… fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote two pages. And then about four years later I realised that it wasn't two pages of a book, it was a book, and it was about that man, and that boy.”
As McCarthy and other writers like him demonstrate, the unconscious can take a while to process an image and an abstract idea, to create order and narrative and cohesion, so don’t worry if there is no immediate shape. Whatever medium we use, through scrying, and other forms of divination, we may be able to find that image or string of words necessary to create something we care about.
How to submit
You may respond to this theme with short fiction, creative non-fiction, or poetry (maximum three poems).
We accept submissions via email. Please send your work to cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. We ask that you include Spiritus Mundi in the subject line, followed by your name and the genre of the work you are submitting. Your work should be provided as an attachment, not pasted into the body of your email. It needn’t be occult-themed, though we do love work that draws on the occult, mythology, folklore and magic; more importantly, its creation must in some way respond to the theme. All submissions should be accompanied by an artist bio of no more than 100 words. Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer a fee for Spiritus Mundi submissions. We are fully volunteer-run. The deadline for the current theme is 15 March 2021.
*Note: though we accept submissions to Spiritus Mundi, one of our prime goals here is to offer generative prompts for helping you get in touch with the unconscious, conjure up images and words which you can use later on. We will be publishing selected submissions sometime between March and May.