A sphere is a gazing object. In low light, with something dark behind it and the stone below your eye line, hold a soft unfocused stare for about ten minutes. That is the practice the shape carries, and it is a good deal more precise than it sounds.
A bound volume in the British Museum’s central archives holds Sir Hans Sloane’s own catalogue of miscellanea, and entry 232 reads, in full, “A large chrystall ball.” The object is still in the collection. Rock crystal, or probably rock crystal, 5.2 centimetres across, acquired with the rest of Sloane’s bequest in 1753.
The museum lists it as associated with Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer, and is careful about how it says so. The record dates the ball to the seventeenth century with a question mark, and notes that the Dee association was attached later, inside the museum. About the other famous object in that collection it is more definite. The acquisition note for the Aztec obsidian mirror, the piece carrying Horace Walpole’s handwritten label on its case, says it was acquired by Dee for use in his magical pursuits.
That is roughly the sum of what is settled about the ball: a size, and a material with a question mark after it. The owner was proposed later. The instructions that go with spheres are a great deal more definite than that, and they are what gives you something to do this evening.
How to gaze into one
The instructions in circulation are unusually precise, and each step holds up for an ordinary reason. Work in low light. Not darkness, which strains the eyes and makes you squint, but one lamp behind you or a candle off to the side, so the stone is lit indirectly and no bright reflection sits on its surface. Overhead light is the arrangement to avoid, because it puts a hard highlight on the top of the sphere and your eye locks onto it.
Put something dark behind the sphere and something dark under it. Black cloth is what the instructions ask for and it does an obvious job: it stops your kitchen competing for the inside of the stone. This is the easiest step to leave out, and leaving it out is the difference between looking into a sphere and looking at a small curved photograph of your worktop.
Set the sphere below your eye line, on a table and not a shelf, at roughly arm’s length. You want to be looking slightly down into it rather than straight across at it.
Then let your eyes go soft. Not crossed, not squinting, just unfocused in the way they go when you are staring past a page. Rest your attention on the middle of the stone and not on its surface. Hold that for about ten minutes and do not chase anything that happens.
That is the whole procedure. Whatever it was once meant for, it sits much closer to a meditation than to a divination, and the related sitting practices are worked through in how to meditate with crystals.
What happens when you do
Something, and it will be your own visual system at work, not a message from anywhere.
Held in soft focus, a translucent sphere clouds and clears. Internal veils and colour zones drift in and out of legibility as your eyes give up trying to fix on any one plane, and the stone seems to go milky and then open again. That is what an unfocused eye does with a curved translucent object, and knowing it spoils nothing. The clouding is your cue that the attention has let go, and that is the part you came for.
That is also why a flawless sphere is a poor thing to buy. The one here is white agate, five centimetres across, kept on a stand, and it is not evenly polished at all. Open crevices and small holes break the surface, and those are the reason the piece is liked rather than a defect to look past. A perfectly closed, perfectly bright ball of the same material would be a duller object to sit with, because there is nothing in it to go into.
You are not going to see the future in one, and none of this needs you to. What ten minutes of soft attention on a fixed object does is well enough understood without any of the old machinery, and a sphere is a very good object to spend it on.
Picking a sphere worth sitting with
Size follows what you mean to do with it, not what looks impressive on a shelf. Something around five to eight centimetres sits comfortably in cupped hands, and that is where to start. Larger spheres are display pieces and they want a stand you trust, because a sphere left on a flat surface will eventually find the edge of it.
Material matters less than the lighting does. Clear quartz gives you the most to look into. Amethyst and smoky quartz hold up well under a low lamp, and a banded agate swaps depth for structure, which some people find easier to rest on. Obsidian goes the other way entirely. It has no interior at all, only a dark reflective face, so gazing into one is a different practice with a different feel. That is the material Dee’s mirror is made of, and the museum records it as an Aztec object made in Mexico long before he ever acquired it.
For placement, put the sphere where you will sit with it. That is rarely the shelf where it looks best. A sphere in a bright window becomes an ornament and goes unused, and a sphere on the table you already sit at gets its ten minutes on a Tuesday evening.
If the gazing does not appeal, a sphere is still a fine thing to own and turn over in your hands, and the aiming logic that governs the other common shape is set out in how do you use crystal points.
White agate, as it happens, is a seller’s colour word rather than a species, and agate’s own entry in the Crystalance Mineral Library settles the rest of it.
