Kything

Kything is derived from the Old English kythe, cýðe; a word known from both The Vespasian Psalter (c.825) and the West Saxon Gospels (c.1025). Meaning "to announce, proclaim, declare, tell, to make known in words, to manifest, to make visible", it survived as the Scottish dialect word kythe.

The author Madeleine L'Engle used the word kythe to describe a fictional type of communication, in a sense like telepathy, found in several of the books in her Time Quartet. L'Engle reportedly discovered the term in "an old Scottish dictionary" belonging to her grandfather.

In the Time Quartet books Kything is a sort of wordless, mind-to-mind communication in which one person, in essence, almost becomes another, seeing through their eyes and feeling through their senses.

In such a frame of mind, the two people intuitively know the meaning of what the other is telling them, disregarding such things as words or pictures. The idea may be based on the concept of Oneness, which states that all that exists, is one in its source and end. Apparently, recollection and assertion of that concept puts a person "in Kythe" with that which they are concentrating on.