Obsidian spirit mirror used by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, has Aztec origins
Now housed in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Galleries, the mystical object used for occult investigations matches samples found in Mexico, researchers find.
A spirit mirror, used by John Dee, the 16th-century polymath and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, had its origin in Mexico, a team of researchers report in the journal Antiquity.
Using scientific methods, they proved that the obsidian from
The Art Newspaper
October 7, 2021
© S. Campbell
which the circular mirror is made came from near Pachuca, 85km north-east of Mexico City—but how it entered Dee’s possession remains a mystery.
Historians suspected that Dee’s mirror was brought to Europe from Mexico, but lacked evidence. So, the research team—from the University of Manchester, the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Missouri—used a form of x-ray analysis to measure the mirror’s composition and compared it to samples taken from various Mexican obsidian sources. Their results showed that it best matched the samples from Pachuca.
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