gaze softly. let your eyes unfocus.
The Black Mirror
Obsidian, polished to a dark sheen, returns no clear likeness. It gives only what the eye is willing to surrender. This is Tezcatlipoca , the smoking mirror; the same volcanic glass through which John Dee swore he spoke with angels.
dim the room · light a single flame to one side
Open the glass
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The Smoking Mirror
The black mirror is volcanic glass, obsidian , ground and polished until it holds a dark, near-perfect sheen. Because the surface is faintly convex and drinks most of the light, it never returns a sharp likeness. It hands back a dim, low-detail shadow of the gazer and the room.
Physical qualities
Deep absorptive black. A weak, glassy specular sheen drifting across the stone. A slight convex bulge that shrinks the edges of the reflection. Crushed shadow, almost no colour. A soft circular rim where the polished face meets darkness.
The myth
To the Mexica it was Tezcatlipoca , "Smoking Mirror," a god of night, sorcery and prophecy who wore an obsidian disc in place of a foot and saw all deeds through its smoke.
One such Aztec mirror reached the magus John Dee in Elizabethan England, who with the scryer Edward Kelley used it to receive the angelic Enochian language. It now rests in the British Museum, labelled simply "The Devil's Looking-glass."
How scrying works
The darkness starves the eye of detail. Deprived of a clear image, the mind fills the void with its own forms: faces in the grain, movement at the edge, smoke that was never there. The mirror shows nothing. It is a screen for what is already inside the watcher.
This glass
Your own reflection is the raw material, darkened into obsidian and bent by the surface. The runes below let the smoke rise, the surface ripple, faces gather in the grain, and visions burn up out of the dark. Lower the light. Soften your gaze.