John Dee's Scrying Mirror

Mortlake is a small London suburb that lies inside the southwestern Borough of Richmond upon Thames square between Kew and Barnes. The district sizes up at less than two square miles with direct access to the river. Mortlake was first mentioned in the Domesday Book, the written records of the “Great Survey” held by William the Conqueror in 1086, in which the estate was said to be owned by the Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury. For the majority of its history, Mortlake was a simple village known for its farming, brewing, and ferrying. Its most famous resident by far was the Renaissance man John Dee, who lived in his Mortlake home from 1565 to 1595, aside from his multiple excursions around broader Europe and the New World where he obtained his acclaimed scrying mirror. His home, which no longer stands today, later became the site of the Mortlake Tapestry Works under King James I, which also failed to stand the test of time.

Today, Mortlake is primarily a residential area. Because of its waterfront placement outside the hustle and bustle of central London, the district maintains high property values. Being a suburb, the streets of Mortlake are calmer to walk through, with a slower pace and sense of ease. Despite its spell with John Dee and the chaos he brought in, Mortlake’s history has and continues to be one of peace and pleasure.

A complex, convoluted figure, John Dee was a Renaissance polymath and magus who lived from 1527 until his unfortunate demise in 1608 or 1609, the precise date of which is contested by historians. In his earlier years, he was a renowned scholar of many subjects, with his primary studies being in mathematics and the logical understanding of the natural world. At the same time, he was also a highly religious man who firmly believed in the presence of a God who created the world through quantifiable means under His and his many lieutenants' divine coordination. 

Because of his two special interests, Dee developed an insatiable fascination with the occult where the divine and mathematics coincided, such as in geocentric astrology. In astrology, occurrences on Earth are understood to be reflections of what is occurring in the broader universe, with the Earth being the focal point of a circular plane, represented by the Unit Circle in geometry. When two astral bodies, represented by points on the graph, enter into a specific ratio with one another (such as opposing one another at opposite ends of the circle), they affect one another in different ways, and subsequently, people and events on Earth. To Dee, mathematical occultism made perfect sense, as the world was constructed in a specific order by God, which could be quantified and understood by mankind through careful mathematics. 

Dee’s personal philosophy of the world was centered around mathematics. In his 1570 “Mathematicall Praeface” to Billingsley’s translation of Elements by Euclid, he presents his construction of the world as supernatural, natural, and mathematical. He states that while natural objects have physical substance and supernatural objects have spiritual substance, mathematics (the most pertinent of the three) is the force that acts upon them. It is the ordering principle of all worlds and all things, and all sciences are at heart merely understanding the mathematical effects on their fields. In a sense, Dee is correct. The ways in which the sun burns, winds blow, trees fall, bodies decay, and axons fire can all be mathematically configured and quantified. Math is the translation of every force in the universe, which he contributes to God. Therefore, by following mathematics, one could follow the river to its source of the esoteric, sacred knowledge of God. 

Unfortunately for Dee, following the route of mathematics was easier said than done. After decades of directionless computing, and following a series of political losses that brought him out of the public eye, he eventually turned to the less tangible approach of scrying and direct communication with heavenly spirits. At some point during his later life, Dee came into the possession of an obsidian scrying mirror, which became his means of contact with angels. 

The mirror itself, which is a thick slab of obsidian carved into a near perfect circle with a tab and hole on top for hanging, is of Aztec origins. Cambridge scientists have used a portable fluorescent x-ray to analyze the obsidian’s exact geological components and tracked its origins to an obsidian quarry in Pachuca, Mexico, which the Aztecs used (2021). Whether the mirror was stolen, purchased or bartered for by Spanish conquistadors is unknown, as well as how exactly the mirror came into Dee’s possession. Dee did attend multiple ventures to the New World as an advisor for the crown, although it is far more likely he acquired the mirror secondhand back in Europe. The mirror presently resides at the British Museum. 

To the Aztecs, obsidian mirrors, known as acultezculs, held strong spiritual connotations. The fine craftsmanship of the mirror alone speaks to the time, effort, and care that went into its production. The mirrors were sacred to the god Tezcatlipoca, whose name means “Smoking Mirror” in Nahuatl, the god of the night, sorcery, and vengeance, patron of kings and warriors. Originally a Toltec deity, the shapeshifting god played a role in the creation of the universe and was said to grant revelations out of the worldly chaos, with obsidian mirrors acting as a medium between him and mankind. Obsidian also held cultural significance to the Aztecs, revered as a protective and healing substance that could keep away evil spirits and reflect one’s true self. It is unclear to what degree Dee knew of this mythology, if at all, although he did maintain the mirror’s intended purpose of divining revelations through scrying.

Scrying refers to the method of divining knowledge or visions out of a reflective surface, such as a crystal ball, reflective pool of water, or, of course, a mirror. While not belonging to any specific cultural practice, the first written documentation of scrying is within the Book of Genesis, where silver cups for the purpose of divination are mentioned as a symbol of Egyptian aristocrats (Genesis 44:4-5), which squarely placed the practice within Dee’s Christian jurisdiction. A unique form of divination, scrying does not require physical manifestations, unlike Roman augury or Chinese tea leaves, or the ingestion of psychoactive substances like the Native American Peyote Ritual. The performance requires an individual to stare into the reflective surface for a prolonged period of time, until their eyes unfocus and the world begins to melt away, when they will eventually begin to see shapes and symbols appear before them, similar to cloud watching. Different symbols can have different meanings depending on the context.

For example, if a person were to see the shape of a horse, it could be equally interpreted as representing hard work and dedication, a need for haste, or personal loyalty. Because of scrying’s individual nature, there is no means for a second party to reinterpret what appeared and only to further question what was reported. One could redefine what the horse could represent, but they can only work within the boundaries of the horse. They cannot reimagine the image of the horse to be a table or a comb. The nature of scrying is obscure, but a more experienced medium can work through the fog to find meaning, although never to the precise nature of mathematics that Dee once acclaimed above all.

Throughout his life, Dee never scried for himself. He preferred to have hired mediums perform the act and relay the revelations back to him. On his first attempt scrying for Dee, the infamous Edward Kelley reported to have communed with the angel Uriel. Together, the two interacted with many angelic spirits and received many pieces of alleged divine wisdom, from the order of the heavens to prophecies on the fate of Europe that would bring together the Church of England and the Catholic Church of the Holy Roman Empire before the Last Judgment. An intellectual failing, it seems in part that Dee never questioned Kelley’s revelations because they aligned with his own personal hopes. In his 1577 General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfecte Art of Navigation, Dee had expressed his own desires for Britain and the Holy Roman Empire to come together and spread Christian peace across the globe. Eventually, the two separated after an incident where the angel Uriel requested that Dee and Kelley share their wives. Dee returned home to find it ransacked, and soon died in poverty in his Mortlake estate.

The tragic story of John Dee is one of misguidance and obfuscation. Though he started as a renowned mathematician and intellectual among his peers, in the end, he was considered a crazed occultist who very few wanted to associate with. Scrying had changed his God from one who spoke in numbers and equations into one who spoke of puzzles and false promises. If only Dee had cut out the mediums and gazed into the acultezcul himself, he could have seen his true self reflected back and left chasing ghosts in smoking mirrors to return to the wise man he once was. 

I have adhered to the Honor Code on this assignment - Jonah Knittel