Obsidian
Obsidian is natural volcanic glass, black and glossy. Pliny the Elder named it after Obsius, who found it in Ethiopia; the Aztecs polished it into mirrors, and John Dee used an Aztec obsidian mirror to call spirits.
Meaning
Obsidian is volcanic glass. Pliny the Elder (book 36, chapter 67) called it Obsian stone after Obsius, who found it in Ethiopia, and noted that a slab hung on a wall as a mirror gave back a shadow rather than an image. The Aztecs worked it into mirrors: Tezcatlipoca is often shown wearing them, Smithsonian Magazine notes, mirrors that let him see people’s thoughts and deeds. The magazine translates the god’s name as “Smoking Mirror”; George Frederick Kunz, in 1913, gave it as “shining mirror”.
Origin and history
Pliny saw solid statues of Augustus in obsidian, and says the emperor dedicated four obsidian elephants in the Temple of Concord. In Mexico, Smithsonian Magazine reports, the Aztecs used obsidian in medicine and saw its reflecting surface as a shield against bad spirits; the glass was tied to death, the underworld and the capturing of a person’s image and soul. Kunz wrote that obsidian mirrors were said to have been used for divination in ancient Mexico and the lands around it.
John Dee’s black mirror
John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I, used a polished black mirror to call spirits. Kunz in 1913 traced a Mexican obsidian slab from the Mordaunts, Earls of Peterborough, whose catalogue called it the black stone into which Dee called his spirits, through Horace Walpole to Prince Alexis Soltykoff in Russia. Dee’s mirror is now in the British Museum. In 2021 a team led by the archaeologist Stuart Campbell of the University of Manchester tested it with a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner: the obsidian came from Pachuca, north-east of Mexico City, an area under Aztec control in the early sixteenth century, Smithsonian Magazine reported. Dee may have bought it in Bohemia in the 1580s. He also used a crystal ball (Clear quartz).
Read next
- Next in Crystal and gemstone loreAmethystAmethyst is purple quartz whose Greek name, amethystos, was read as “a remedy against drunkenness”. Pliny the Elder recorded that belief in the first century AD, and called it one of the magicians’ lies.
- Tezcatlipoca, the "smoking mirror", wears obsidian mirrorsTezcatlipoca (smoking mirror)The Aztec god whose name means “smoking mirror”: a powerful, unpredictable god of rulers and of fate, shown with a face painted in black and yellow bands and a smoking obsidian mirror in place of one foot.
See also
Clear quartz, Rose quartz, Citrine, Carnelian, Onyx, Bloodstone.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 36, chapter 67, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, book 36, chapter 67 (Obsian glass and Obsian stone)
- The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, by George Frederick Kunz, 1913, J. B. Lippincott (Project Gutenberg edition), ch. 6 (crystal-gazing, Dr. Dee); ch. 6 (Tezcatlipoca)
- Obsidian ‘Spirit Mirror’ Used by Elizabeth I’s Court Astrologer Has Aztec Origins, Livia Gershon, 7 October 2021, Smithsonian Magazine, Report on Campbell et al., Antiquity (2021)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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