bound.

Magical crystals in the world of Twisted Wonderland are tools to make the use of magic easier.

People don’t need them to perform magic.

The magic crystals main purpose is to prevent blot from directly accumulating inside a spell casters body. (Blot manifests as smudges inside the crystal.)

Crowley meantioned that crystals also make performing spells easier, but as far as I know he never really clarified in what regard. My best guess is that using a wand with an embedded crystal makes it easier to direct and focus on the spell. But again I don’t know for sure if that’s the case.

As for how may people use magical crystals, I’d say most of the population would use them, since the crystals can also be seen as an early warning system. If a person’s crystals starts to darken the person itself, even if they didn’t feel like they used to much magic, would see that the amount of blot they accumulated is dangerously high. Also other people around just need to take one glance at a person’s crystals to see if they are about to overblot or not. In this regard I see it more as a safety tool.

But I could see some people who have a very high blot tolerance(which is extremely rare btw) to just completely ditch magical crystals, and not use them at all.

I think when it comes to magic schools all students have to use magic crystals as a safety precaution.

Also for the NRC staff, it would make sense for them to use the crystals. Divus Crewel, Mozus Trein, Ashton Vargas and Dire Crowley actually all have some kind of jewel on them, which could be magic crystals since it’s never stated that the crystals can’t come in different shapes/cuts.

However we don’t know for sure if those are magical crystals or not.

I explained how the whole magic and blot thing works in this post.

I agree with you. The accessories on Crowley definitely look more like some kind of mirrors. Which would make sense since he has some kind of weird infatuation with the mirror of darkness. Kinda seems to worship it :/