An occult mirror is a tool used in various occult and spiritual practices. It is believed to possess certain mystical properties and can be used for scrying, divination, and spiritual communication. The occult mirror is typically a mirror that has been specially consecrated or charged with spiritual energy. The mirror itself may be made of various materials, such as black obsidian, black glass, or polished metal. The choice of material is often based on personal preference or the specific requirements of the spiritual practice. In scrying, the occult mirror is used as a window into different dimensions or realms of consciousness.

Objects of Despair: Mirrors

No common object has inspired as much dread, confusion, and morbid anxiety as the mirror. Superstitions exist in practically every culture: sickroom mirrors are covered in many countries, lest they lure the soul from the ailing body, and are cloaked after a death in others to prevent the spirit from lingering. A Chinese myth once held that images in the mirror were actually demonic beings who were pretending to be our reflections, while silently plotting our deaths. When I was a child, the popular folklore held that if you stood before a darkened mirror and chanted “Bloody Mary” three times, it would conjure a witch who would, if you failed to pass her tests, murder you. I never took the dare, but the story spooked me enough that I spent years avoiding my image in darkened mirrors, afraid that merely thinking the incantation could invoke her. Narcissus was the first to die from looking at his reflection—though the gnostics perfected the myth by reattributing it to Adam, who lost his divine nature, they said, by gazing at himself in a pool of water. I have always preferred this version of the Fall. The mirror, after all, is an apt metaphor—far more so than the apple—for what the Genesis story is meant to dramatize: the moment when humans evolved to self-awareness and understood, for the first time, that they would die. This primal epiphany persists in the dual meanings of “vanity,” which lock self-love and futility in an etymological death-brace. (That hevel, the Hebrew word for vanity preferred by Solomon, can also be translated as “mere breath,” only underscores the morbid undertones.)

Anthropologists have long suspected that reflections inspired the first conception of the soul: early man saw his face in a pond and believed it was an alternate self who would persist after his death. But if having a double gave you immortality, it also presented a new anxiety: your likeness could detach itself and take on a life of its own, or fall into the hands of your enemy. Many primitive taboos about reflections, shadows, and effigies stem from the conviction that you could harm a person by damaging their likeness. Witchcraft and voodoo introduced into our collective memory a nagging fear that we might one day become the slave to our shadows. I think of the scene in the 1944 musical Cover Girl, where Gene Kelly’s reflection in a store window comes to life and entrances Kelly into aping his erratic dance, as if puppeteering his marionette. The same choreography can be found in the countless Romantic-era fables where the hero trades his image to the devil for the love of a woman or the promise of eternal youth. The bargain never ends well. The reflection, once brought to life, acts out all of the hero’s repressed desires—an id made flesh—and ruins his reputation, inevitably driving him to suicide. As the psychoanalyst Otto Rank pointed out in his study of doubles, all these stories contain a moral: no matter how miraculous a reflection may seem, it is always a harbinger of death.

Another problem with mirrors is their similarity to windows. Both are crafted in simple shapes—circles, rectangles—contained by a frame. Both give the impression of depth, inviting us to conflate their uses. The Aztec divinity Tezcatlipoca was said to possess an obsidian mirror that allowed him to “see into the hearts of men.” It was possibly one such Aztec mirror, brought back to Europe during the Renaissance, that fell into the hands of John Dee, an English occult philosopher who popularized the art of scrying—the use of mirrors or other reflective surfaces to see distant events and predict the future. (Modern witches still do their divining in black mirrors, which are sold on Etsy and in the booths of new age expos.) Today, we still fear that people are watching us through mirrors, thanks to their popularity as surveillance devices. The one-way mirror of interrogation rooms—a window disguised as a mirror—makes it impossible for the suspect to know whether or not he’s being observed. The convex mirror looming above drugstore aisles allows our every movement to be covertly monitored by the cashier. The child’s belief in parental omniscience is seemingly confirmed by the car’s rearview mirror, which makes real the mythical “eyes in the back of the head.”

What we see in a mirror is always an illusion. Lacan demonstrated that our identification with our reflection relies on méconnaissance, or misrecognition. When we look in the mirror, we see a pleasing image of wholeness and project onto it a mental fantasy—the ego ideal. If you watch someone gaze at themselves in a mirror, you can glimpse this fantasy in action. Some people suck in their lips. Others elongate their neck, or tilt their head into a more flattering light. I am as curious as anyone about the nature of people’s souls, but I can hardly bear to see the naked longing concealed in these gestures. Dickens captures it memorably in Nicholas Nickleby when a servant observes Miss Squeers gazing at herself in a mirror. “Like most of us,” the servant notes, “she saw not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.”

Until recently, one did not find this look in photographs. Unlike the mirror, which flips our image horizontally (an illusion we’ve come to prefer), photos show us how we appear to others. Perhaps for this reason, the expressions we assumed for cameras have traditionally been closer to the affable, unselfconscious face we showed to the world. This has changed, owing to the invention of the smartphone and the new form it has spawned—the selfie—which allows us to watch ourselves as our image is captured. To scroll through the feeds of Instagram and Facebook is to see a gallery of Lacanian méconnaissance; the private longing once reserved for the bathroom mirror has become our most public face. And yet these photos are never as pleasing as we’d like them to be. The forward-facing camera mimics the reverse image we recognize from mirrors, but once the photo is taken, the technology flips the image as it would in a traditional photo. As a result, the still images always strike us as slightly askew: our eyes uneven, our parts reversed, our faces bulging on one side. The popularity of the mirror selfie — the selfie taken in a mirror — speaks of our desperate need to preserve the delusional image, the ideal I that exists in our heads.

Cultural critics of every generation have decried the narcissism of their age, but never before has a single object—the phone—been made to bear the entire weight of our descent into solipsism. Perhaps this stems from the irony that these devices were originally intended for connection and communication. The turn inward suggests the closing of some imaginative possibility: a window becoming a mirror. But these think pieces themselves exhibit a lack of imagination, reiterating the same points about skin-smoothing apps and body dysmorphia, rapturously quoting Chrissy Teigen, who once offhandedly called Snapchat “a narcissism dream machine.” Such commentary rarely breaches the true ontological disruption and psychic doubling that makes these devices so unsettling. One can only imagine the critical field day Freud or Jung would have with the face-swap filter, which allows you to, quite literally, project your ego onto another person. Few have pointed out that such apps depend upon “computer vision,” affirming the ancient fear that we are being seen by something sentient that lives on the other side of the screen, like the Slave of the Mirror who is trapped in the evil queen’s looking glass in Snow White. Can we ignore the fact that the screens of these devices, when idle, blink to the reflective obsidian of a black mirror? I once stumbled into an occultist subreddit where people were earnestly discussing whether iPhones and tablets could be used as scrying mirrors (the consensus: yes, but it’s easy to get distracted). One of the users then shared a stoner revelation that these technologies were already divination machines: they give us access to an esoteric font of knowledge and allow us to remotely view other people and places.

But revelations of this sort only expose our ongoing credulity, the extent to which we still believe ourselves to be the scryers and not the scryed. We are rarely on the transparent side of the one-way mirror: it is our images that appear on the devices at Langley and Fort Meade and the trailers of Russian troll farms. The temporal schema of Snapchat, where images erase themselves after viewing, was inspired by our anxiety about doubles. The disappearance was supposed to forestall the proliferation of shadow selves that could slip out of our control and be used for malignant purposes. Deepfake videos and apps like Mug Life are black magic performed as blackmail, allowing hackers and jilted exes to make our reflections say and do things we have neither said nor done. Most of these stolen images are eventually found in sexual postures—or what Google now calls “involuntary synthetic pornographic images”—and its victims are not unlike the Romantic hero who finds that his double has sabotaged his good name. (“All I could think of was my character,” one deepfake victim told the Washington Post. “Is this what people will think of me?”)

The internet is one endless hall of mirrors where the line between our selves and our shadow souls is blurred. We guard against it with the flimsiest of talismans—Twitter’s blue checkmark, handles that insist upon “The_Real.” The most horrific moment in mirror fables comes when the hero realizes that his reflection is indestructible: to kill his double would amount to suicide. Now we have created a place where death is virtually impossible, where we are denied even the simple dignity of what the EU calls “the right to be forgotten.” (How many bloggers have deleted their archive only to find that it has been replicated in its entirety on a mirror site?) This is not to say that we are not complicit. All of us have entered willingly into this bargain with the devil, who knows better than anyone that our weak spot is vanity. Our online reflections—the idealized images that appear in Google image results—are largely the objects of our own creation, more real to us than our fragmented bodies. We have become the pale custodians of these digital eidolons, the marionettes of our shadows.

Freud believed that doubles were a sign of psychic disintegration—a theory that has since been mythologized by midcentury auteurs, who dramatized a character’s free fall into madness through the appearance of a doppelgänger (Bergman’s Persona, Altman’s 3 Women, Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Unlike the primary narcissism that occurs in children, which is a source of power and delight, the adult narcissist finds her double uncanny and comes to believe she is being persecuted by it. This is the problem with megalomaniacs: they see themselves everywhere and believe all events are related to them. We have no shortage of scapegoats for our own paranoia: Twitter mobs, the NSA, malware. But the unease we experience in the digital maze recalls the deeper, more primal logic of horror stories and our most unsettling nightmares. There is a moment when you’re forced to acknowledge that the voice on the other end of the line is eerily familiar. You flee down a corridor, only to turn the corner and come face to face with yourself.

What we are outrunning, of course, is our final end—our knowledge that Death owns a doll bearing each of our faces. That we now have a modern version of the Narcissus myth—“death by selfie,” people who have died in the midst of posing with sharks and on the edge of cliffs—speaks of some half-remembered truth that has already begun its descent into the collective unconscious. A more telling object is perhaps the funeral selfie. The collective outrage inspired by the news, several years ago, that many people take and post self-portraits during funerals is evidence itself that we’ve forgotten such myths. The phenomenon could not have surprised anyone fluent in psychoanalysis, which has long known that narcissism springs from that primal sublimation—our inability to countenance our own mortality.

There are those who promise eternal life to those who post prolifically; our reflections, they say, are a form of digital DNA that will be used to resurrect us in some distant future. But I have never been able to buy into this vision. It’s more likely that these images are all that will be left of our souls. I sometimes imagine the Great Internet Archive as the afterlife painted by Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes: a dusky underworld where our shades will persist in the preening poses we assumed during our waking lives, making duck face, among the echoes of our likes and shares, our witticisms and cheap jokes—all our wasted breath.

Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of the essay collection Interior States. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, Tin House, and The Best American Essays 2017.

'Magic' mirror in Elizabethan court has mystical Aztec origin

A black mirror used by Queen Elizabeth I advisor John Dee to 'speak' with angels was originally a prophetic Mesoamerican artifact, new research reveals.

A “spirit mirror” believed to have been used by Queen Elizabeth I’s famed political advisor John Dee was crafted in Aztec Mexico around 500 years ago, reinforcing the idea that the mirror was used by the Elizabethan occultist in his attempts to communicate with angels.

Dee was an advisor in the court of the 16th-century queen, as well as an accomplished alchemist, astrologer, cartographer and mathematician. It’s thought he may have been the model for Prospero, the magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

A portrait of John Dee (1527-1608). “Dee initially straddled the fine line between natural ‘magic’, which was considered a science, and demonic magic, which was considered a perversion of religion – but the one into which he eventually crossed,” the researchers write.

Tales abound of Dee’s occult exploits, including his practice of skrying, or conjuring angels and spirits through clairvoyant tools such as crystals and mirrors. This particular “spirit mirror,” attested in the 1650s as part of John Dee’s skyring collection, was eventually purchased in the 1700s by the writer Horace Walpole, who believed it belonged to the English Renaissance polymath and was used by him in magical rituals.

The British Museum purchased the mirror in the late 1800s; it is currently on display in museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.

Researchers used a portable x-ray fluorescence scanner to examine John Dee’s mirror, as well as three other obsidian objects—two almost-identical circular mirrors and a polished rectangular slab—acquired by the British Museum from collectors in Mexico in the 1800s. The research was first published in published in the journal Antiquity in 2021.

Because chemical elements glow differently under x-rays, the scanner was able to determine a geochemical “fingerprint” for each obsidian object based on the proportions of titanium, iron, strontium, and other substances each contained. The results show the obsidian in John Dee’s mirror and one of the other mirrors could only have come from the Pachuca region of central Mexico. The other mirror and the obsidian slab, likely a portable altar, came from the Ucareo region, about 150 miles farther west.

Aztec codices, like the 16th-century Codex Tepetlaoztoc shown here, depict obsidian mirrors. Ancient Mesoamericans believed such mirrors could serve as portals to spiritual worlds.

Both regions were ruled by the Aztecs, who had a tradition of making obsidian mirrors for magical purposes, says archaeologist Stuart Campbell of the University of Manchester, the lead author of the Antiquity study. Circular obsidian mirrors are depicted in Aztec codices written soon after the time of the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century, and in depictions of the deity Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”) who had powers of divination. The Aztecs believed the mirrors could show smoke, which would then clear to reveal a distant time or place.

Ancient Mesoamericans believed mirrors were spirit doorways to alternate worlds, “much like Alice in Through the Looking Glass,” anthropologist Karl Taube of the University of California Riverside writes in an email. “Once you deeply gaze in, you have opened up that connection.” Taube has studied Aztec mirrors but was not involved in the new research.

The finding that the British Museum “spirit mirror” is of Aztec origin reinforces the theory that Dee used it as a skryer to conjure angels and spirits, Campbell says. It’s likely that Dee, who was very interested in the exploration of the New World, knew about the mirror’s reputed magical properties when he acquired it, probably during his travels around Europe in the late 1500s. Records show that several Aztec mirrors were shipped from Mexico to Europe soon after Hernán Cortés and his troops took the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521. And like the Aztec, Europeans of the period also believed in the magical powers of mirrors, a belief that may have led Dee to try to communicate with angels through the spirit mirror.

Dee’s reputation as an Elizabethan proto-scientist remains strong in the United Kingdom (he’s the subject of an opera composed by Blur frontman Damon Albarn, for example). And his presence persists in a variety of historical accounts from the time.

“You can be reading something where you don’t expect to see him, and John Dee’s name suddenly pops up,” Campbell says. “He was involved in so many areas, and in the early stages of so many different approaches to the natural world.”

'Spirit mirror' used by 16th-century occultist John Dee came from the Aztec Empire

Dee, whom Elizabeth I called "my philosopher," used the mirror in attempts to talk to ghosts.

John Dee was a mathematician, astrologer and occultist. (Image credit: Copyright Antiquity Publications Ltd./Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

The 16th-century courtier John Dee, a scientific adviser to England's Queen Elizabeth I, was also deeply involved in magic and the occult, and he tried to commune with ghosts, using a so-called spirit mirror made of polished obsidian.

Now, a new analysis of Dee's infamous mirror has finally traced its origins — not to the spirit world, but to the Aztec Empire.

Obsidian mirrors such as Dee's were known from Aztec culture, but there were no records on his mirror's origins. However, geochemical analysis enabled researchers to link the mirror's obsidian — a type of volcanic glass — to Pachuca, Mexico, a popular source of obsidian for Aztec people. This finding indicated that the artifact was Aztec and not a copy made from European obsidian, and Dee likely acquired the mirror after it was brought to Europe from Mexico, according to a new study.

Though Dee was a scientist and mathematician, his interests also swung toward the magical and mystical, and in addition to the spirit mirror, he owned other objects related to astrology, divination, alchemy and the exploration of "demonic magic," scientists reported Oct. 7 in the journal Antiquity.

Dee claimed that one of these objects, a purple crystal on a chain, was given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher's stone — the mythical alchemical marvel that promised the gift of eternal life and the ability to turn base metals into gold, according to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. Dee also possessed a Claude glass, a black glass mirror kept in a sharkskin case, which he used for "peering into the future," according to the RCP.

Dee's obsidian mirror, now in the collection of the British Museum in London, is polished on both sides and is nearly perfectly circular, measuring about 7.2 inches (18.5 centimeters) in diameter and 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick, and weighing about 31 ounces (882 grams). A perforated square tab at the top of the mirror measures about 1.3 inches (33 mm) long and may have served as a handle, according to the study.

Inscriptions on notes that are stored with the mirror refer to it as "The Devil's Looking-glass" and "The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits," according to the British Museum.

Drawings of mirrors that resemble Dee's appear in the Codex Tepetlaoztoc; this 16th-century Aztec pictorial manuscript was created by inhabitants of Tepetlaoztoc and depicts excessive tribute demands and other abuses of Indigenous people by Spanish conquistadors, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Aztecs used obsidian mirrors for scrying — peering into the future — and for religious rituals. These mirrors were strongly associated with one god in particular: Tezcatlipoca ("smoking mirror" in the Nahuatl language), a creation deity in the Aztec pantheon and a god of sorcerers, according to the British Museum.

"In the period iconography, he's often shown with a severed left foot, and he's got an obsidian mirror in place of his left foot," said lead study author Stuart Campbell, a professor of Near Eastern archaeology at The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. "Sometimes they appear on his chest; sometimes they appear on his head," Campbell told Live Science. "So there's quite a specific association with these types of mirrors and that particular deity."

The scientists analyzed Dee's mirror and related objects in the British Museum collections, including one rectangular obsidian mirror and two circular ones, using a portable X-ray fluorescence instrument. They then compared its chemical "fingerprints" — ratios of elements such as iron, titanium and rubidium — with ratios in samples of obsidian mined from different parts of Mexico.

"Because obsidian only occurs in very specific volcanic locations, it's almost always got a very distinct chemical profile," Campbell explained. "If you do a detailed chemical analysis, very often you can use that to assign it to a unique original source."

Their analysis showed that Dee's mirror — and a circular mirror that was similar to Dee's — were close matches to samples from Pachuca, a region in Mexico that was under Aztec control and "was the most heavily exploited" of the known obsidian resources for the Aztec Empire, according to the study.

At the dawn of the 16th century, obsidian mirrors that were crafted by Aztec people had a specific cultural context "with a set of very specific cultural meanings in the Aztec Empire," Campbell said. When colonizers brought those mirrors to Europe, they also transplanted the idea that mirrors could be used to peer into the future or contact other worlds, he explained.

After Dee acquired his mirror and began using it for magical rituals, "it gained a whole new life and a whole new set of meanings — and it's continued to acquire those," Campbell said. "So, it now sits in the British Museum as an occult artifact. It's got its own biography and its own impact in the world. I think, because of that, it's a particularly fascinating object."

Originally published on Live Science.

In scrying, the occult mirror is used as a window into different dimensions or realms of consciousness. The practitioner gazes into the mirror and allows their mind to enter a state of deep relaxation and receptivity. Through this process, they can receive visions, insights, and messages from the spiritual realm.

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Divination is another common use for the occult mirror. The practitioner may use the mirror to focus their intention and open themselves to receive guidance or answers to specific questions. They may observe patterns, symbols, or images that manifest in the mirror, which can be interpreted as signs or messages from higher realms. Spiritual communication is also facilitated through the use of an occult mirror. The practitioner may invoke spirits, guides, or ancestors and use the mirror as a tool to enhance their connection and receive direct communication. This can be done through scrying or by simply focusing on the mirror while engaging in meditation or ritual practices. The occult mirror is often considered a sacred object and is treated with respect and reverence. It may be consecrated or blessed before use to ensure its spiritual potency. Some practitioners choose to dedicate a specific area or altar for the mirror, creating a sacred space for their rituals and practices. It is important to note that the occult mirror is not inherently good or evil. Its use and effectiveness depend on the intentions and spiritual practices of the individual. Like any spiritual tool, it should be used with caution, ethical considerations, and a responsible approach to personal and spiritual development. Overall, the occult mirror is a fascinating tool with historical and cultural significance. Whether used for scrying, divination, or spiritual communication, it offers a unique and powerful means of connecting with the unseen realms and gaining insights into one's spiritual journey..

Reviews for "The Occult Mirror and its Connection to Scrying Bowls and Crystal Balls"

1. Name: Emily

Rating: 2/5

Review: I was really disappointed with "Occult Mirror". The storyline started off promising, but it quickly became convoluted and confusing. The characters were also poorly developed, making it difficult to connect with them. Additionally, the pacing was inconsistent, with some parts dragging on while others were rushed. Overall, I found the book to be unfocused and lacking in depth.

2. Name: Mark

Rating: 1/5

Review: "Occult Mirror" was a complete disappointment. The plot was predictable and lacked any originality. It felt like the author was ticking off all the cliched elements of a supernatural thriller without adding anything new or interesting. The writing itself was also lackluster, with choppy dialogue and lazy descriptions. I couldn't find anything enjoyable or engaging about this book.

3. Name: Sarah

Rating: 2/5

Review: As a fan of the occult genre, I was excited to read "Occult Mirror". However, it fell short of my expectations. The pacing was sluggish, and the story seemed to drag on without much happening. The characters were one-dimensional, lacking any real depth. I also found the dialogue to be unrealistic and forced. Overall, I was left unimpressed and unsatisfied with this book.

4. Name: James

Rating: 1/5

Review: "Occult Mirror" was a complete waste of my time. The premise held promise, but the execution was extremely poor. The writing was filled with grammatical errors and awkward phrasing, making it a chore to read. The plot was predictable, and the twists were ineffective and unoriginal. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a well-crafted occult thriller. Save yourself the disappointment.

5. Name: Amanda

Rating: 2/5

Review: I really wanted to enjoy "Occult Mirror", but unfortunately, I found it to be quite frustrating. The story had potential, but it lacked cohesion and clarity. The author seemed to jump around without providing enough context, which made it difficult to follow. The dialogue was also stiff and unnatural, making it hard to become invested in the characters' struggles. Overall, I was left feeling disappointed and underwhelmed by this book.

The Hidden Powers of the Occult Mirror: What You Need to Know