Legendary scryers: Frederick Hockley

Frederick Hockley (1809-1885) was a British occultist who was particularly fascinated with the practice of summoning spirits into crystals and mirrors.  His other interest included alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and later in life, Freemasonry.  An accountant by trade, he spent much of his free time visiting the British library and transcribing magical texts for his vast personal library.  Hockley's meticulously recorded scrying sessions spanned several decades.  In a lecture given in 1854, he claims to have thirty years of experience with crystallomancy.  Assuming he began in 1824, his practice predates both the Spiritualist movement and the Victorian occult revival spearheaded by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

 Despite his lifelong interest in the practice, Hockley apparently was not himself a gifted scryer.  Instead, he relied on the talent of a clairvoyant assistant (usually a young woman acting under hypnosis), who he termed his "speculatrix."  His most fruitful such partnership was with Emma Louisa Leigh, who began scrying for Hockley around the age of thirteen, and who died at the age of twenty.  Through her, Hockly received the answers to over 1,000 questions posed by him to a purportedly ascended spirit being, who he called C.A. (for Crowned Angel).  The result is a lengthy philosophical and cosmological document, which certainly exceeds what a Victorian girl of Leigh's age and education could be expected to generate.

Hockley published no books during his lifetime.  His output was in the form of lectures, letters and essays on magic and mysticism.  He was reputedly a generous lender of his personal library, and kept up an active correspondence with students and colleagues on the topics that interested him.  Virtually the only component of his practice that he did not share was the collection of spiritual diaries that detailed his scrying sessions.  These were dispersed after his death, and the contents mostly lost.  Of the thirty or more notebooks he is said to have compiled, only a few excerpts transcribed by one of his associates have survived.

However, we can gather some of his methods from the book "Invocating by Magic Crystals and Mirrors."  This short treatise originated as a hand-scribed and illustrated manuscript which Hockley presented for the medium Barbara Honywood (herself an accomplished watercolorist), probably to try and inspire her to scry for him.  Hockley was a devout Christian, and grew more and more devoted as a result of his lifelong work with spiritual entities.  Thus his tracts contain effusive prayers, invocation of angelic spirits, and precise formulae for the proper consecration of ritual objects.  For would-be scryers, Hockley prescribes a life of abstinence and piety in order to avoid the physical and mental problems that seemed to have befallen many clairvoyants and mediums of Hockley's day.

Maybe this speaks more to my ignorance that his obscurity, but I hadn't heard of Frederick Hockley until fairly recently.  His works are not much in print, and for that reason I think he's often overlooked.  It is almost certain that Hockley's manuscripts were circulated widely among members of the Golden Dawn, and strongly influenced the development of that organization.  Hockley also stands as a transitional figure between the venerable tradition of Renaissance magic whose grimoires he studied, and the eclectic occult revival which was soon to follow him.  For those who are interested in learning more about this fascinating figure (and who have moderately deep pockets), occult publisher Teitan Press is currently in the process of putting out some truly covetable fine editions of his major works.  Or, you can check out the book The Rosicrucian Seer (out of print, but available as used paperback and also online if you poke around), which compiles some of Hockley's papers into a single volume.

Further reading:

Teitan Press's Frederick Hockley Series.
Hamill, J.  The Rosicrucian Seer: The Magical Writings of Frederick Hockley (1986).
Samuel Scarborough. "Frederick Hockley: A Hidden Force behind the 19th Century Occult Revival" Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition 14:2. (2008).