John Dee’s obsidian mirror in the British Museum

John Dee was born on 13 July 1527 in London, England, and educated at Cambridge University (1542-48). He travelled to Continental Europe on many occasions. There he met a number of important thinkers. Although Dee himself never left Europe’s shores, he read about those who did. He owned and, as his extensive annotations show, read the Italian edition of Ferdinand Columbus’ History […] of the Life & Deeds of the Admiral Christopher Columbus (1571). This book fed Dee’s appetite for information about Spain’s voyages of exploration, which Dee felt England had the capacity to surpass. In practical terms, Columbus’ reports were models of good practice for English mariners. Dee was also, however, more widely and critically aware of the nature of contact. In the margin alongside Ferdinand’s remark that Christopher had prevented the Spanish sailors he commanded from taking anything from the people they encountered lest they be accused of theft, Dee witticised: “well done if you had kept that rule allwayes [sic]”. Dee is sure to have known of the riches captured by Francis Drake from the Spanish during Drake’s 1577-80 circumnavigation.

Pic 2: ‘Vignette from a Spanish map of the world, showing treasure being loaded onto galleons’; ©The British Library Board: C.39.f.14 vol. II

Dee, however, is less well known for his star-gazing, than for his glass-gazing. From at least the late 1570s, and then more intensively throughout the 1580s and onwards, Dee engaged in what he called ‘angelic conversations’. His accomplice Edward Kelley contacted celestial beings by gazing at and into objects made of polished shiny materials in sessions that today sit uneasily between magic and religion. Clear crystal balls were thought especially suitable for calling up visions of angels and spirits. Dark reflective obsidian was especially suitable for visions of the future. Skilled seers like Kelley could enter a trance-like state, transcend barriers between the physical and spirit worlds, and concentrate occult rays. Kelley looked, saw and recounted mysterious images and messages; Dee listened, scribed and interpreted. Dee appears to have seen himself as akin a prophet. God had chosen him to receive such messages, and he recorded them in ‘angelic diaries’.

Pic 4: Cartoon of John Dee by Quentin Blake

The British Museum in London is home to a crystal ball which has been linked to Dee since at least the mid-19th-century (SLCups 232). And since the mid-20th-century, the Museum also has been custodian of an obsidian mirror with a matching case (reg. no. 19611,1001.1) to which Dee’s name is also attached. Measuring 22 cm by 18.4 cm this was purchased from the Reverend Robert William Stannard for the sum of £750 in 1966. A number of previous owners are known. The most prominent is the author, antiquarian and politician Horace Walpole (1717-97). Walpole recorded that this was “the Black stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits” on a small handwritten label and pasted this into its leather case.

Pic 6: 17th century leather case with inscription attributing ownership of the mirror to John Dee, alongside the black obsidian mirror, on display in the British Museum

Certainly made before 1521, the British Museum mirror is one of several surviving. In pre-hispanic Mesoamerica such mirrors were symbols of royal power and tools for divination and destiny revelation. It is very unlikely that Dee, had he owned or seen such an object, would have appreciated its complex function, although he may have recognised it as hailing from the ‘new world’. Nonetheless, it is certainly highly interesting that other early owners such as Walpole still linked the curious gleaming object – which Walpole believed to be polished coal – to divination, despite the then apparently complete erasure of its original cultural significance and context.

Pic 8: Mexica obsidian mirror, Museo de América, Madrid