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FILE 056 · VOL IX · Do Not Touch the Exhibit

Queen Elizabeth's Magician Spoke to Angels Through This Mirror. It's Aztec.

Some doors are made of glass so you can see who is waiting before you open them.

Based on: John Dee's Black Mirror

Intake record

Recovered file

In a glass case in the British Museum in London sits a small, polished disc of black volcanic glass, about the size of a dinner plate, with a little handle on one side. It is called Dr. Dee's Mirror. [1]

John Dee was one of the most brilliant men of the Elizabethan age. Mathematician. Astronomer. Navigator. Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, who consulted him to choose the most favorable date for her coronation. He owned one of the largest libraries in England. He coined the phrase British Empire. [1] [2]

He also spent the last decades of his life trying to talk to angels. [2]

Beginning in the 1580s, Dee worked with a man named Edward Kelley, who claimed to be able to see and hear spirits in polished stones and mirrors. Dee would ask questions. Kelley would stare into the glass and report what the angels said. Dee wrote down every word, in meticulous diaries that still survive. The angels dictated an entire language, with its own alphabet and grammar, which became known as Enochian, after the biblical Enoch, who walked with God. [2]

The angels gave many commands. In 1587, they commanded the two men to share everything they owned, including, the angels insisted, their wives. Dee was horrified. He obeyed. [2] Kelley was later imprisoned in Bohemia. Dee died in poverty in 1608 or 1609, his great library looted, his reputation ruined. [2]

The black mirror passed through several owners and came, in the eighteenth century, into the collection of the writer Horace Walpole, who attached a handwritten label: The Black Stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his Spirits. [1]

For centuries, nobody knew where it had come from. In 2021, scientists analyzed its chemistry and traced the obsidian to a specific source: Pachuca, in central Mexico. It is an Aztec mirror. Aztec priests used polished obsidian mirrors in rituals connected to the god Tezcatlipoca, whose name means Smoking Mirror, a god of night, sorcery, and fate, who was said to see everything in the world through a mirror of his own. [3]

Nobody knows how an Aztec priest's mirror reached an English magician within a few decades of the Spanish conquest. Nobody knows what Dee and Kelley saw in it.

Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.