Glittering Stones >> Crystal Ball

Crystal ball

A crystal ball is a crystal or glass ball said to aid clairvoyance. It is sometimes known as a shew stone.

History

Celtic tribes, known to live in Britain as early as 2,000 B.C., were united by a priesthood known as Druids. Druids are one of the initial known peoples to have used crystals in divination. It's attractive to note that Druid religion and science have similarities to megalithic priests of a "previous" Britain, thus it is possible the first use of crystal prediction might have come from them.

Later, during central Europe's Medieval Period (500 – 1500 AD), seers, wizards, sorcerers, psychics, gypsies, fortune tellers, and even all other types of diviners also used crystals to "see" into the past, present, or may be in future.

Due to its translucent nature, a natural gemstone called Beryllium Aluminum Silicate (Beryl) was frequently used in the divination process. Scottish Highlanders expression these objects "stones of power." Though early crystal balls were made from Beryl, they were later replacing by rock crystal, an even more transparent rock.

Crystal ball as software

Crystal Ball is the name of a software pack up distributed by Decisioneering. This program is an add-in to Microsoft Excel that enables a user friendly Monte Carlo technique to be performed. In this function, any number of cells in a spread sheet could be made random variables, and any number of other cells could be "followed" to determine their statistical distribution. This could be used in finance, Probabilistic Risk Assessment in engineering, or also Risk assessment in analyzing human or environmental risks of exposure to adverse stimulus.