In some texts and examples from history, a specific kind of mirror was used for ‘scrying’. What this may refer to is not a single activity, and though special mirrors with unique ‘properties’ were often employed, the actual capacity was in the one using the mirror, much more than the object.

However, many such mirrors were black.

And our screens are like these mirrors when unlit.

Our televisions and smartphones. Our computer monitors. They are black mirrors.

But we do not use them for scrying. Rather, the opposite. Images, mostly of events that are »appearances of events. Fictions. Advertisements. Representations of experience ‘enacted’ by unknown others.

It’s a very strange situation. One in which our innate faculties for dreaming and farsight were captured, represented, and counterfeited… by the machines we built once we forget the faculties they would come to replace…