Critomancy
Divination by means of observing viands and cakes. The paste of cakes which are offered in sacrifice, is closely examined, and from the flour which is spread upon them, omens are drawn.
Crollius, Oswald: A disciple of the school of Paracelsus, and author of the Book of Signatures-the preface to which contains a good sketch of hermetic philosophy. The writer seeks to demonstrate that God and Nature have, so to speak, signed all their works, that every product of a given natural force is as the sum of that force, printed in indelible characters, so that he who is initiated in the occult writings can read as in an open book the sympathies and antipathies of things, the properties of substances, and all other secrets of creation. "The characters of different writings," says Eliphas Levi, were borrowed primitively from these natural signatures existing in stars. and flowers, in mountains and the smallest pebble; the figures of crystals, the marks on minerals, were impressions of the thought which the Creator had in their creation.
But we lack any grammar of this mysterious language of worlds, and a mathematical vocabulary of this primitive and absolute speech. King Solomon alone is credited with having accomplished the dual labour, but the books of Solomon are lost. The enterprise of Crollius was not the reconstitution of these, but an attempt to discover the fundamental principles obtaining in the universal language of the creative world. It was recognised in these principles that the original hieroglyphics, based on the prime elements of geometry, corresponded to the constitutive and essential laws of forms, determined by alternating or combined movements, which, in their turn, were determined by equilibratory attractions. Simples were distinguished from composites by their external figures; and by the correspondence between figures and numbers it became possible to make a mathematical classification of all substances revealed by the lines of their services.
At the root of these endeavours, which are reminiscences of Edenic science, there is a whole world of discoveries awaiting the sciences. Paracelsus had defined them, Crollius indicates them, another, who shall follow, will realise and provide the demonstration concerning them. What seemed the folly of yesterday will be the genius of to-morrow, and progress will hail the sublime seekers who first looked into this lost and recovered world, this Atlantis of human knowledge."
Crosland, Mrs. Newton: An early spiritualistic medium. Under the name of Camilla Toulmin, she published, in 1857, Light in the Valley, a record of her experiences. There is a trend of Swedenborgian mysticism in her writings. (See Spiritualism.)