The Mirror, the Magus and More: Reflections on John Dee's Obsidian Mirror

The Mirror, the Magus and More, Reflections on John Dee's Obsidian Mirror, by Stuart Campbell, Elizabeth Healey, Yaroslav Kuzmin and Michael D. Glascock, published in Antiquity in 2021, is a peer reviewed archaeometric study applying portable X-ray fluorescence analysis to four obsidian objects in the British Museum, including the mirror associated with Elizabethan magus John Dee, sourcing the obsidian to the Pachuca deposit in central Mexico and dating the manufacture to the final decades of Aztec rule before the 1521 Spanish conquest. Its strength is that direct physical geochemical testing settles the mirror's material origin and approximate manufacture date as a matter of measurable fact rather than inference from historical circumstance alone. Its limit is that the analysis establishes where and roughly when the obsidian was worked, not how or when the object actually reached Dee or what role it played in his own practice, a separate historical question needing the documentary record of Dee's own life.