Tezcatlipoca and John Dee

A few days ago, on December 27, I posted "Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca," noting a synchronicity in which I encountered those two ancient Mexican deities -- the Feathered Serpent and the Smoking Mirror -- in a Whitley Strieber novel and then, shortly thereafter, on 4chan.

Yesterday, December 30, I was tutoring a young girl in English. Her textbook had a unit about chocolate and its history, which of course goes back to the xocolatl drunk by the kings and warriors of ancient Mexico. The text mentioned how Moctezuma II used to drink 50 cups of the stuff a day, and how the Spanish first encountered it after they invaded the Aztec capital. My student had lots of questions about this, wanting to know the name of the capital (Tenochtitlan) and the conqueror (Hernán Cortés) and how he had managed to conquer such a famously bloodthirsty people. I said historians generally attributed the Spanish victory to their use of guns, steel armor, and horses; but that it was probably not so much this technology in itself as the Aztec's awed reaction to it. They quickly lost hope and the will to fight, just as we might do faced with invading extraterrestrials wielding incomprehensibly powerful technology. I also mentioned that Moctezuma suspected Cortés might be one of the Mexican gods, and of course she wanted to know the god's name as well: Quetzalcoatl.

Later that evening, I read a bit of The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna, the chapter on the Voynich manuscript. (The name has some resonance with me personally. Back when I was working for UPS, my coworkers called me "the Senator" because they thought my surname sounded similar to that of George Voinovich, who was one of the senators from Ohio at the time.) I was surprised to run into our old friend John Dee and his shew-stone.

The next important event in [Dee's] life with regard to the Voynich Manuscript, and one of the most puzzling events in the whole history of science, took place on an afternoon in July 1582. While in his study at Mortlake, John Dee was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the Angel Gabriel a polished lens of New World obsidian, which he described in his diary thenceforward as "the Shew Stone." He was able, by meditating on this stone, to induce visions and dialogues with spirits, but this ability seemed to fade in the months after he received the stone . . . . (The Shew Stone is in the British Museum, where one can see it today.)

I had read an account of this event before, in Dwellers on the Threshold by Henry Davenport Adams, and had commented on it in my post "John Dee vs. Joseph Smith." Some of the details are different -- Adams says the angel was Uriel and that he appeared in November 1582 -- but it is obviously the same event they are describing. Adams describes the shew-stone as "a convex piece of crystal"; McKenna's more specific characterization of it as "New World obsidian" is highly relevant, since the obsidian mirror is the primary symbol of the New World deity Tezcatlipoca.

That Dee's shew-stone was in the British Museum was also news to me. I looked it up on the British Museum website (here), expecting something roughly similar to the seer-stones of Joseph Smith, but found that it is literally an Aztec obsidian mirror! McKenna is apparently confused in identifying it with the angelic shew-stone, since the mirror is flat and neither "a polished lens" nor "a convex piece of crystal."

The notes on the British Museum website say that the mirror is obsidian and of Aztec origin. It says that the mirror's leather case has the following inscription on it, taken from Samuel Butler's Hudibras and believed to have been written on the case by Horace Walpole:

Kelly did all his feats upon

The Devil's Looking Glass, a stone;

Where playing with him at Bo-peep,

He solv'd all problems ne'er so deep."

(Debbie will be interested in "Bo-peep," with its Heaven's Gate resonance.)

The BM website also notes:

Michael E. Smith who specialises in Aztec archaeology (The Aztecs - Blackwell Publishing) has an essay in progress on obsidian mirrors in museum collections for an edited volume of essays on Tezcatlipoca to be published by Univ of Colorado Press.

and:

This obsidian mirror featured in the British Museum exhibition 'Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler' (24 September 2009 - 24 January 2010).

So the connection with Tezcatlipoca and Moctezuma is undeniable.

In the image I have reproduced above, also from the BM website, Dee's obsidian mirror is shown together with three "magical discs"; the BM page for these objects notes that they "bear a striking similarity to the 'seals' for which the angel Uriel was said to give instructions to John Dee on Saturday 10 March 1582 as recorded by Dee in Ms Sloane 1388, fol.1or, British Library."

One also notes its general similarity to the famous Aztec Calendar Stone.

Speaking of calendars, I had an extremely complex and information-dense dream last night about three different calendars that were successively used by the ancient peoples of the Near East. These were shown to me visually, and explained verbally, in exhaustive detail -- but, maddeningly, I can remember only the vaguest outlines. The first calendar was called the Calendar of Life and was based on the planets rather than on the Sun and Moon. This was succeeded by a Calendar of Death, also called the Old Hebrew calendar, which I think was primarily solar and somehow emphasized by its nature and structure "the inevitability of entropy." These two were later integrated into the third calendar in the series, which is the Hebrew calendar as we know it today.