John Dee's Obsidian Mirror

John Dee's Obsidian Mirror is a polished circular mirror of volcanic glass, made by an Aztec artisan in central Mexico in the final decades before the Spanish conquest of 1521, that reached Elizabethan England and became the best documented of the scrying instruments, "shew-stones," owned by the mathematician, astrologer and royal advisor John Dee. Dee did not scry into it himself; his associate Edward Kelley performed the seeing while Dee recorded what Kelley reported, the working method behind Dee's angelic conversations and the Enochian material. How the mirror travelled from Aztec ritual use into an Elizabethan magician's cabinet is not fully documented, but by the eighteenth century it belonged to the antiquarian Horace Walpole, who labelled its case with the words "the Black stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits." The British Museum purchased it in 1966. A 2021 geochemical study using portable X-ray fluorescence analysis sourced its obsidian to the Pachuca deposit and confirmed the Aztec attribution directly, closing a question earlier scholarship had only inferred from style.