Mercury-Glass Scrying Orb

A hand-blown glass sphere roughly ten centimeters across, double-walled and silvered on the inside with the true old mercury-glass technique rather than a modern spray coating, so it mirrors the whole room back in a warped, dreamlike convex — a witch ball in the older sense, made in a Bohemian workshop that has practiced the craft for generations. Reflective spheres of this kind were hung in cottage windows across Europe to catch and confuse ill fortune before it could settle indoors, and were also gazed into for scrying, the dark, curved surface offered as a place for the eye to lose its usual focus. Folklore holds that the room it shows back is always slightly wrong, and that the seeing begins exactly there. Rest it in a small stand on a shelf or windowsill, or hang it by its loop in a window where daylight can move across the silvering. Handle it by the neck rather than the widest curve, and keep it away from the edge of any surface. Sold as a curiosity — no medical or scientific claims are made. The glass is genuinely double- walled and silvered by hand rather than mirrored on the surface, which makes it fragile; it is worth the extra care that entails.