THE SCRYING GAME
he British Museum has long held a number of items relating to the Elizabethan occultist and polymath Dr John Dee (see ), including a small crystal ball, several wax discs engraved with occult symbols and a hand mirror, or speculum, made of highly polished obsidian, a form of volcanic glass. The mirror was kept in a sharkskin case and used by). It is highly polished on both sides and is nearly perfectly circular, 7.2in (18.5cm) in diameter and 0.5in (13 mm) thick, with a perforated tab on one side that probably served as a handle. While another object known to have been owned by Dee, a purple crystal on a chain, was supposed to have been given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher’s stone, he never revealed the origin of this scrying mirror.
