Crystal Balls & Crystal Bowls: Tools for Ancient Scrying & Modern Seership (Crystals and New Age)

Rating:
Summary: Written by a great teacher
Review: I enjoyed this book as much as possible. Ted Andrews can explain anything in lamens terms so that you can understand it. Aside from crystal balls and bowls it contains several good meditation and pendulum exercises.

Rating:
Summary: Useful
Review: If Llewellen had better editors, this would be a better book. There's a lot of useful information, techniques, and ideas for using crystal balls and bowls. This may also be the first occult book ever to include a maze with a rabbit chasing after a carrot. (There's a reason for it. The mazes are intended to train your psychic perceptions.) However, the book is poorly organized and edited. There are multiple redundancies of phrase such as "free choice". Sections which appear to depend on certain techniques being mastered are included before the techniques are explained. For instance, it seems common sense to put sections on attuning with the energy of a crystal ball before trance techniques intended to contact an anthropormorphized version of the ball's "angel". If you reverse the process, you'll just be projecting your ideas of what the "angel" is like. The second section is just plain garbled. I found myself having to read paragraphs two or three times just to figure out what Andrews was trying to say. It looks like he was trying to pack information into the section, and couldn't quite figure out where it fit. This is, of course, part of an editor's job. If something doesn't fit where it is, suggest a way to move it or create another subsection where it might find a home. It's a shame that such useful information has to be put together so poorly. But it IS useful, and I recommend the book to anyone interested in crytsal gazing, so long as they're patient and willing to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

Rating:
Summary: Useful
Review: If Llewellen had better editors, this would be a better book. There's a lot of useful information, techniques, and ideas for using crystal balls and bowls. This may also be the first occult book ever to include a maze with a rabbit chasing after a carrot. (There's a reason for it. The mazes are intended to train your psychic perceptions.) However, the book is poorly organized and edited. There are multiple redundancies of phrase such as "free choice". Sections which appear to depend on certain techniques being mastered are included before the techniques are explained. For instance, it seems common sense to put sections on attuning with the energy of a crystal ball before trance techniques intended to contact an anthropormorphized version of the ball's "angel". If you reverse the process, you'll just be projecting your ideas of what the "angel" is like. The second section is just plain garbled. I found myself having to read paragraphs two or three times just to figure out what Andrews was trying to say. It looks like he was trying to pack information into the section, and couldn't quite figure out where it fit. This is, of course, part of an editor's job. If something doesn't fit where it is, suggest a way to move it or create another subsection where it might find a home. It's a shame that such useful information has to be put together so poorly. But it IS useful, and I recommend the book to anyone interested in crytsal gazing, so long as they're patient and willing to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

Rating:
Summary: I'm so lucky to have found this book.
Review: Now I feel more prepared to use a crystal sphere. Excellent source of information. But have to admit that I skipped the entire section on crystal bowls as that doesn't "call" to me.

Rating:
Summary: Very interesting and informative-Perfect for the beginner
Review: This book has wonderful exercises for the beginner and gives helpful hints to the experienced scryer also. The book not only discusses crystal balls and crystal bowls, but also touches on water divination and mirror gazing as well. I'd recommend it to anyone.