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quartz - the granddaddy of crystals
Scrying is the name given to the ancient technique of gazing into an object such as a crystal ball for the purposes of divination.
Water-filled crystal bowls were once used to dowse the physical body for imbalances.
In Ife (West Africa) there are still ceremonial stools carved from a solid piece of quartz. And among the Hottentots (Khoi), for whom iron is tabu to a priest, a sharp quartz implement is used for sacrificing animals and circumcising young boys.
As the 16th century, scientists believed that quartz crystal was fossilized ice.
In Persian tradition, quartz crystals are sometimes put on babies to ensure they get enough mother's milk.
In the Shetlands, quartz pebbles were once said to cure sterility; they were collected by women and thrown into a pool wherein they washed their feet.
Sought for their curative properties, many centuries ago in Britain clear quartz pebbles were called 'star-stones.' Nine star-stones, collected from a running brook and boiled in a quart of water from the same brook were thought to impart their curative power to the water. The water was then given to a patient for nine successive mornings.
At holy wells in Wales, offerings of quartz stones were made, and in both Wales and Scotland charms of quartz and rock crystal were used to give the water of healing wells a magical potency.
 the conjuring crystal
Quartz crystals, often referred to as "the ice of the gods" have been used for magic and/or healing purposes since the beginning of time. Magicians and occultists have used crystal balls for scrying and other forms of divination for centuries.
quartz, kwardy, quarzum
The word "quartz," derived from the Slavic kwardy -- meaning "hard" -- was Latinized to quarzum, a term whose first known use was by the sixteenth-century scholar, Agricola, who made the first scientific classification of minerals.

According to Agricola, "kwardy" is what the Bohemian miners of Joachimstal (now Jackimov, Czech Republic) called quarzum.

translucent quartz cockatoos with greenish inclusions on clear transparent quartz
photo: the sunnywood collection

Native Americans of North America used quartz long before the 'discovery' of the continent. Archeologists have found arrowheads, knives, and ornaments of quartz in various mounds (tumuli).
Native American shamans are said to have used quartz crystals as divining and hunting charms, believing they were inhabited by spirits who had to be fed periodically by rubbing the quartz crystals with deer's blood. Quartz crystals mounted on ceremonial wands have been unearthed in Southern California.
The Cherokee were known to use quartz crystals for divining stones. And, New England tribes considered quartz boulders and rocks with visible quartz veins and/or veinlets to be manitou-aseniah, or spirit stones.
the rain-stone
Certain Queensland, Australia, tribes regard quartz crystals as 'rain stones' and attached them to rain-sticks in the rain-making ceremonies. They search for the crystals in the mountains, pulverize them, and use the powder to simulate rain in their rain-making rites.

Men 'shower' the powder over the women while the women hold wooden troughs over their head to keep off the 'rain.'

Aboriginal tribes in New South Wales also regard quartz crystal as a rain-stone. The rain-maker, who normally secures his 'rain-maker' in his 'dilly bag,' holds a fragment of it in his mouth and spits it toward the sky during the ceremony.