THE SCRYING GAME
The Mexican origin of Dr Dee’s magic mirror revealed
The British Museum has long held a number of items relating to the Elizabethan occultist and polymath Dr John Dee (see FT290:74-76, 338:12-13), including a small crystal ball, several wax discs engraved with occult symbols and a hand mirror, or speculum, made of highly polished obsidian, a form of volcanic glass. The mirror was kept in a sharkskin case and used by Dee for “peering into the future”. Notes that came to the museum with the mirror also refer to it as “The Devil’s Lookingglass” and “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits”; these probably date from when it was later owned by the politician and writer Horace Walpole (see FT320:38-39, 340:4). It is highly polished on both sides and is nearly perfectly circular, 7.2in (18.5cm) in diameter and 0.5in (13 mm) thick, with a perforated tab on one side that probably served as a handle. While another object known to have been owned by Dee, a purple crystal on a chain, was supposed to have been given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher’s stone, he never revealed the origin of this scrying mirror.
It has long been known that obsidian mirrors much like Dee’s were made by the Aztecs as they are illustrated in the Codex Tepetlaoztoc, a 16th-century Aztec pictorial manuscript created by inhabitants of Tepetlaoztoc complaining about the excessive tribute demands made by Spanish conquistadors. These mirrors were linked to the god Tezcatlipoca (“smoking mirror” in the Nahuatl language), an Aztec creation deity and a god of sorcerers. “He’s often shown with a severed left foot, and he’s got an obsidian mirror in place of his left foot,” said Stuart Campbell, a professor of Near Eastern archæology at The University of Manchester. “Sometimes they appear on his chest; sometimes they appear on his head.” While it was known that the Spanish had brought some of these mirrors back to Europe, it was not known whether Dee’s mirror was of Aztec origin or was a European copy. They were highly prized because obsidian is extremely hard and it required laborious effort to grind it flat and polish it to mirror consistency, using abrasive sand and similar materials.
Now the question of the mirror’s origin has been solved using X-ray fluorescence, which enables researchers to compare the ratios of elements in the mirror to samples from obsidian sources used by the Aztecs in Mexico. “Because obsidian only occurs in very specific volcanic locations, it’s almost always got a very distinct chemical profile,” said Campbell, who carried out the study. His team’s analysis showed that Dee’s mirror was made of obsidian that was a close match to that found near Pachuca in Mexico, one of the main sources of the Aztecs’ obsidian, so Dee must have acquired it after it had been brought back from Mexico. Interestingly, it was not just the mirror that came from Mexico, its function did too. Campbell says that the mirrors had “a set of very specific cultural meanings in the Aztec Empire,” being used for looking into the future and communicating with spirits, and it seems this meaning was preserved when they were brought to Europe, making the mirrors attractive to European occultists like Dee. Once Dee started using the mirror, “it gained a whole new life and a whole new set of meanings — and it’s continued to acquire those,” Campbell said. “So, it now sits in the British Museum as an occult artefact. It’s got its own biography and its own impact in the world. I think, because of that, it’s a particularly fascinating object.” livescience. com, 10 Oct 2021.