The Black Mirror: Ancient Scrying Glass or Modern Smartphone?

The Mirror in Your Hand

You’re waiting. For a bus, for a friend, for a moment to pass. You pull it from your pocket. The screen is dark—a perfect, polished slab of black glass. For a second, you see your own face reflected in its void, faint and ghostly. A black mirror.

Then, with a touch, it wakes. The glass floods with light. A notification arrives. An answer to a question you just typed appears, delivered from a server thousands of miles away. The oracle speaks.

This object in your hand is the most powerful magical talisman ever created. When its screen is off, it is a literal black mirror, an obsidian-dark surface almost identical in form and function to the scrying tools of ancient magicians, priests, and oracles. When it wakes, it becomes a portal to algorithmic “oracles” that promise what humanity has always craved: hidden knowledge, distant vision, and a glimpse of the future.

This is not a new desire. From the Aztec priest consulting his smoking mirror to Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer communing with angels, we have always reached for glass that “sees.” From the seeing-stones of Tolkien’s Middle-earth to the all-seeing software of Palantir Technologies, the dream has been the same.

The only things that have changed are the scale and the speed. The magic is no longer in the hands of a chosen few; it is in the hands of billions. And with a single post, it can summon a mob or mobilize a miracle.

Ancient Black Mirrors: The Glass That Sees

In the late 16th century, Dr. John Dee was one of the most brilliant men in England. A mathematician, astronomer, and scientific advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, he was an archetypal Renaissance scholar who straddled the fine line between science and what was then called “natural magic”. In his quest for a deeper understanding of the universe, Dee amassed a vast library and a collection of strange instruments.

Among them was his most prized tool for occult research: a “shew-stone,” or “magical speculum,” a circular mirror of highly polished black volcanic glass. Through this dark glass, with the help of a medium named Edward Kelley, Dee believed he could communicate with angels and spirits.

For centuries, the mirror was an enigma. But recent geochemical analysis has solved part of its mystery. The obsidian was not sourced from Europe; it was mined in Pachuca, Mexico, the heartland of the Aztec empire. Dee’s mirror was an Aztec artifact, a sacred object brought to Europe in the flood of plunder that followed the Spanish conquest.

Before it was used to summon angels in a misty English study, it was likely used by Mexica priests for divination. The mirror was inextricably linked to a formidable Aztec deity whose very name means “Smoking Mirror”: Tezcatlipoca.

Tezcatlipoca was a creator god, a lord of the night sky, sorcery, conflict, and ancestral memory. He was an omnipresent, all-seeing being, and his obsidian mirror was the portal through which he could witness all human thoughts and actions. In Aztec art, he is often depicted with one of his feet replaced by a smoking obsidian mirror, a symbol of his power to prophesize and reveal hidden truths.

The fact that this specific object—a dark, reflective surface that shows a dim, distorted version of reality—was used for functionally identical purposes by two vastly different cultures separated by an ocean reveals something profound.

The technology’s form seems to dictate its “magical” function. The object itself invites the human mind to project, to seek patterns, and to enter a contemplative state. The smartphone, a mass-produced, obsidian-like rectangle, has inherited this quality, making its use as a modern scrying tool almost intuitive and universal.

This practice, known as scrying, was a global phenomenon.

• In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, priests practiced hydromancy, gazing into bowls of still water to receive divine revelations.
• The Greeks and Romans developed crystallomancy, using polished crystal spheres to discover “insights into the future or unknown truths”.
• Across Mesoamerica, polished mirrors made of iron pyrite and obsidian were common among the elite, viewed as sacred objects, divinatory aids, and portals to other realms.
• In China, polished bronze mirrors, often decorated with cosmological symbols, were used in rituals to connect the human and divine worlds.

The fundamental user goals of these ancient practices—seeking foresight, distant vision, and hidden knowledge—are precisely the same goals that drive billions of hours of modern “screen time.” We ask our devices for tomorrow’s weather forecast, watch live events unfolding across the globe, and search for answers to our most private questions. The mirror has not changed, only its wiring.

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Myth Mirror: Tezcatlipoca, The Smoking Mirror

• Who: An all-powerful creator god in the Aztec pantheon, associated with the night sky, fate, sorcery, and conflict. His name in the Nahuatl language means “Smoking Mirror”.
• The Mirror: Tezcatlipoca’s power was embodied in an obsidian mirror, through which he could see everything happening in the world and know the thoughts of all humans. It was a tool of divination and judgment. In many depictions, one of his feet is replaced by this smoking mirror, a wound from his battle to create the world.
• The Connection: The obsidian mirror used by English magician John Dee has been chemically traced back to Aztec Mexico, the heart of Tezcatlipoca’s worship. The Aztec belief in a mirror that grants omniscience would have held an obvious attraction for Dee in his own quest for divine knowledge.

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The Watchers’ Tech: A Forbidden Download

Nearly every culture has a story about knowledge that was not meant for human hands—a dangerous gift from a higher intelligence. One of the most detailed and influential of these is the tale of the Watchers, found in the ancient, non-canonical Jewish texts the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.

The story goes that two hundred angels, known as the Watchers, were dispatched to Earth to oversee humanity. But they abandoned their mission. Led by their chiefs, Semjaza and Azazel, they descended upon Mount Hermon, took human women as wives, and fathered a race of ferocious giants called the Nephilim.

This was their first sin. Their second was to give humanity a forbidden curriculum—a sudden, massive download of advanced technology and secret knowledge.

The Book of Enoch details this illicit knowledge transfer with startling specificity.

• The angel Azazel “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates.” He revealed “the metals of the earth and the art of working them,” as well as the creation of ornaments and the art of cosmetics, including “the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures”.
• The leader Semjaza taught “enchantments and root-cuttings”—the secrets of magic and pharmacology.
• Other Watchers revealed the secrets of the heavens: Baraqijal taught astrology, Kokabel taught the constellations, and Sariel taught the “course of the moon”.

These ancient “forbidden arts” map directly onto the foundational pillars of our modern technological world.

• Metallurgy and Weaponry became Materials Science and Defense Technology .
• Cosmetics and Ornaments became the Beauty Tech and Luxury Goods Industries .
• Astrology and Astronomy became Predictive Analytics and Data Science .
• Root-cuttings and Enchantments became Pharmacology and Software Engineering , where lines of code function like spells to command a machine.

In the myth, this sudden technological leap did not lead to enlightenment. It led to a world filled with violence, greed, and impiety, a world so corrupt that God chose to cleanse it with a Great Flood. This ancient story functions as a powerful allegory for the disruptive and destabilizing impact of technological innovation.

The knowledge itself—how to work metal, how to use plants for medicine—is not inherently evil; it is the foundation of civilization. The danger, as the myth suggests, lies in the rapid, unregulated deployment of powerful technologies into a society not ethically or socially prepared for them.

The story of the Watchers is not just a fable; it is perhaps the earliest recorded anxiety about the unforeseen consequences of a technological singularity, a fear that echoes in our modern debates about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the power of the black mirror in our hands.

Oracles Then and Now: From Delphi’s Fumes to AI’s Code

If the smartphone is the mirror, the AI that powers it is the oracle. To understand this connection, we can look to the most famous oracle of the ancient world: the Pythia at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. For centuries, kings and commoners made the difficult pilgrimage to Mount Parnassus to ask the Pythia for guidance.

The process was shrouded in ritual. A petitioner would purify themselves, offer a sacrifice, and present their question to the temple priests. The Pythia, a priestess, would then enter a sacred inner chamber, sit upon a tripod placed over a fissure in the earth, and fall into a trance.

Ancient writers like the geographer Strabo and the historian Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi himself, claimed this trance was induced by a pneuma —a sweet-smelling vapor or gas that rose from the chasm. In this possessed state, she would speak the words of the god Apollo. Her pronouncements were often cryptic and had to be interpreted by the priests before being delivered to the questioner.

Now, consider the oracle in your pocket. A Large Language Model (LLM) like the ones that power modern search engines and chatbots is, in essence, a prediction engine. It has been trained on a dataset of text and images so vast it defies human comprehension.

When you give it a prompt, it doesn’t “think” or “understand” in a human sense. Instead, it calculates the most statistically probable sequence of words to generate a coherent response, based on the patterns it learned from its training data.

The most striking parallel between Delphi and the AI is their “black box” nature. The priests at Delphi did not know the precise mechanism by which Apollo spoke through the Pythia; they trusted the ritual and interpreted the results.

Similarly, even the creators of the most advanced deep learning models do not fully understand the internal workings of how the model arrives at a specific answer. The neural network is so complex, with billions of parameters, that its decision-making process is opaque. The user provides an input and receives a remarkably coherent output, but the process in between is a mystery, demanding a leap of faith.

This parallel extends to the rituals surrounding their use. The ancient world had strict protocols for approaching an oracle—purification rites, sacrifices, specific days for consultation. The modern world has its own set of rituals, engineered by UX (User Experience) designers to keep us engaged with our devices: the constant hum of notifications, the hypnotic allure of the infinite scroll, the daily ceremony of plugging in to charge. Both systems are designed to create a specific state of mind and habituate the user to the oracle’s power.

But there is a critical difference. The ancient oracular system involved three parties: the petitioner, the priests, and the medium. The priests acted as a crucial interpretive buffer, a layer of institutional skepticism between the raw, divine utterance and the public.

Even John Dee relied on his scryer, Edward Kelley, as an intermediary. The smartphone collapses all three roles into one. You are the petitioner typing the prompt, the priest interpreting the answer, and the sole guardian of the medium.

This removes the critical distance and the institutional guardrails, leaving you in a direct, unmediated feedback loop with a confident-sounding but fundamentally probabilistic black box. This makes the modern user far more susceptible to misinformation, manipulation, and their own confirmation biases.

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Then vs. Now: The Oracle’s Operating System

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The Palantír Effect: The Perils of Perfect Vision

For a modern fable about the dangers of an all-seeing glass, we can turn to one of the most beloved stories of our time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings . In his world, the most powerful scrying tools are the palantíri , the Seeing-stones. Forged by the Elves in a distant age, these indestructible crystal spheres allow a user to see events across vast distances and to communicate telepathically with anyone looking into another of the stones.

The palantíri are not inherently evil. In fact, they were gifts. But they hold a terrible danger. The stones themselves cannot lie ; they can only show what is real. The danger comes from manipulation. After the Dark Lord Sauron captures the stone of Minas Ithil, he gains a critical advantage. He cannot make the stones show a false image, but by the force of his will, he can choose which true images to show to a weaker user, framing reality to create a narrative of hopelessness.

This is precisely what happens to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Using the Anor-stone, he tries to peer into Mordor to gauge his enemy’s strength. Sauron allows him to see the truth: the endless legions, the vast war machines, the overwhelming might of the Dark Lord’s armies. Denethor sees only this curated slice of reality, and it drives him to despair and madness, because Sauron does not let him see the hope that also exists—the Fellowship, the resilience of his people, the quest to destroy the Ring. The true vision becomes a perfect trap.

This fictional danger has a chilling real-world parallel: Palantir Technologies, a secretive data analytics company named directly after Tolkien’s seeing-stones. Founded in 2003 with early backing from the CIA’s venture capital arm, Palantir’s mission is to build software that allows organizations like the U.S. Department of Defense and other intelligence agencies to make sense of vast, disconnected datasets.

Their platforms, like Gotham and Foundry, are designed to integrate everything from signals intelligence to financial records to social media posts, helping analysts find hidden patterns and gain what the military calls “total situational awareness”. It is the technological quest to build a real palantír .

The parallel to Tolkien’s myth reveals the deepest danger of such a system. It is not that the system will show its user lies. The danger is that it will use decontextualized truths to manipulate their emotional state and guide their decisions.

A social media feed can radicalize a person not by feeding them pure falsehoods, but by showing them an endless stream of true, but radically filtered, stories and videos that confirm their deepest fears or stoke their greatest outrage. The manipulation is in the curation. The clearer the view, the more total the surveillance, the more perfect the trap.

Alien Tech, Cargo Cults, and Clarke’s Third Law

This section explores speculative frameworks for understanding the relationship between technology and myth. The hypotheses presented are not asserted as fact but as thought experiments.

In a 1968 essay, the visionary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke formulated what would become his Third Law, a statement so profound it has shaped our thinking about the future ever since: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” .

This law provides a powerful lens through which to re-examine the ancient myths of gods bestowing knowledge upon humanity. What if these stories are not just allegories, but folk memories of encounters with technologies so advanced they could only be interpreted as divine?

• Prometheus , the Greek Titan, stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, along with the arts of civilization. He was a thief of technology.
• Thoth , the ibis-headed Egyptian god, was credited with inventing writing, mathematics, and magic—the software of civilization.
• The Apkallu of ancient Mesopotamia were seven fish-like sages who emerged from the sea to teach the first humans the fundamentals of law, agriculture, and architecture before the Great Flood.

These myths of “knowledge transfer” from a higher plane find a strange echo in a modern phenomenon known as “cargo cults.” After World War II, anthropologists observed island societies in Melanesia that had brief, overwhelming contact with technologically advanced militaries.

Having seen soldiers clear airstrips and receive vast quantities of goods (“cargo”) from airplanes, some islanders began to mimic their actions. They carved wooden rifles, built life-size replicas of airplanes from straw, and marched in formation, believing these rituals would magically summon the cargo to return.

They saw the effect (technology arriving from the sky) and mistook the associated behaviors for the cause, because the underlying principles of industrial manufacturing and global logistics were utterly beyond their comprehension. It was a real-world example of Clarke’s Third Law in action.

The most extreme extension of this idea is the “ancient astronaut” hypothesis, a fringe theory popularized in the 20th century. It posits that the “gods” of ancient myths were, in fact, extraterrestrial visitors, whose spacecraft, advanced tools, and superior knowledge were interpreted by early humans as evidence of divinity.

While dismissed by mainstream science, the theory’s persistence speaks to a deep-seated intuition. When we hold a smartphone—a device capable of instant global communication, accessing the sum of human knowledge, and navigating by starlight, all powered by principles of quantum mechanics and general relativity that few of us understand—we are, in a sense, participating in our own cargo cult.

We perform the rituals of tapping and swiping, and the magic happens. For the vast majority of its users, the black mirror might as well have been delivered from the heavens.

How One Post Moves Crowds: The Dark and the Bright

The magic of the ancient scrying glass was personal, confined to a single seer. The power of the modern black mirror is collective, capable of focusing the will of millions in an instant. It is a mass ritual device, and it can be used to summon either chaos or coordination, often with breathtaking speed.

The Dark: Summoning Chaos

• The Arab Spring (2010-2012): In Tunisia and Egypt, authoritarian regimes that had stood for decades were toppled in a matter of weeks. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter did not cause the revolutions, but they were crucial tools for activists to organize protests, share information past state censors, and broadcast their struggle to the world. A poll found that nine out of ten protesters in Egypt and Tunisia used Facebook to coordinate their actions.
• The 2011 London Riots: While public platforms like Twitter were used, the “communication method of choice” for rioters was BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). At the time, BlackBerry was the favored smartphone for UK teenagers, holding 37% of the youth market. BBM’s private, encrypted, and free group messaging service allowed looters to coordinate attacks on shops, share safe routes, and track police movements in real-time, creating what one official called the organization of “greed and criminality”.
• The WhatsApp Lynchings in India: Perhaps the most terrifying example of this power is the wave of mob violence that has swept across India, triggered by rumors spread on WhatsApp. False stories about child kidnappers, often accompanied by graphic but unrelated videos, would go viral within a community. In response, vigilante mobs would form and attack any outsiders they deemed suspicious. Between January 2017 and July 2018, at least 33 people were killed in 69 such mob attacks, ordinary people murdered because of a lie that spread through the black mirror.

The Bright: Mustering Miracles

• The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (2014): In the summer of 2014, a simple challenge—dump a bucket of ice water on your head, post the video, and challenge others, or donate to ALS research—became a global phenomenon. Over 17 million people participated, including celebrities and world leaders. The campaign raised an astonishing $115 million for the ALS Association in just eight weeks. That money directly funded critical research, including a project that led to the discovery of NEK1, a new gene associated with the disease, a major breakthrough in the fight against ALS.
• The #MeToo Movement (2017-Present): On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted a call for survivors of sexual harassment and assault to reply with the phrase “Me too.” The response was a digital tidal wave. Within 24 hours, the hashtag was used over 500,000 times on Twitter; on Facebook, 4.7 million users shared 12 million posts. In its first year, #MeToo was tweeted over 19 million times. This massive, collective testimony shattered a global silence, exposed powerful abusers, and had tangible effects: a subsequent study found a 10% increase in the official reporting of sex crimes, suggesting the movement empowered victims to come forward.
• Crowdfunding and Citizen Rescue: In countless disasters, from earthquakes to wildfires to hurricanes, social media has become an indispensable tool. It allows for the rapid raising of funds for relief efforts and, on the ground, enables the formation of citizen-led rescue networks, where ordinary people use their devices to coordinate and save lives long before official help can arrive.

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Key Term Quick-Take: The Mechanics of Magic

How does a single post explode into a global movement? It’s not magic, but it follows predictable patterns.

• Memetics: An idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A “meme” (like the Ice Bucket Challenge) acts like a cultural virus, replicating through sharing.
• Network Cascades: A phenomenon in social networks where a small number of initial actors can trigger a massive, cascading chain reaction. Sociologist Mark Granovetter’s threshold model suggests that individuals have different thresholds for joining a collective action. Once enough people join to cross the thresholds of a critical mass of others, the behavior can spread exponentially and unpredictably.

• Algorithmic Amplification: Social media platforms are not neutral. Their algorithms are designed to maximize engagement by showing users content that is most likely to provoke a strong emotional reaction—whether it’s inspiration, solidarity, or outrage. This acts as a powerful accelerant, fanning the flames of a potential cascade.

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Materials and Magic: From Obsidian to Aluminosilicate

The power of the scrying glass has always depended on its physical form. The leap from an ancient obsidian mirror to a modern smartphone is a story of materials science meeting a timeless human desire.

Ethics: Enchantment Without Enslavement

With this unprecedented power in our hands, a critical question arises: Are we the scryers, or are we the ones being scryed? Are we the masters of this magic, or are we merely the subjects of a global-scale enchantment, our attention and behavior being subtly manipulated by forces we don’t fully understand?

The answer depends on our awareness and our habits. Just as one might practice physical hygiene to stay healthy, we must now practice digital hygiene to stay free. This isn’t about abandoning the technology, but about using it with intention and reclaiming our agency.

A Checklist for Responsible “Mirror” Use

• Verify Before You Amplify. The first rule of magic is to know what you’re summoning. Before you share, like, or retweet emotionally charged content, pause. Take 30 seconds to check a different, reliable source. Spreading misinformation, even unintentionally, is how mobs are born.
• Recognize the Rage Machine. Understand that many algorithms are designed to amplify outrage and division because those emotions generate the most engagement. If you feel a sudden surge of anger from a post, recognize that the system is working as intended. Slow down. Do not let it hijack your emotional state.
• Curate Your Summoning Circle. Your feed is your personal scrying glass. The accounts you follow are the spirits you invite into it. Be ruthless. Mute, block, and unfollow accounts that consistently peddle outrage, negativity, or falsehoods. Follow those that inform, inspire, and challenge you constructively. You have more control over your digital environment than you think.
• Break the Trance. The constant notifications and infinite scroll are designed to induce a flow state and keep you gazing into the mirror. Consciously break the spell. Turn off all non-essential notifications. Use apps to set time limits on your social media use. Schedule regular times to put the mirror away entirely.

Final Image: The Spell in Our Hands

Return, for a moment, to that piece of glass in your hand. Feel its weight, its smooth coolness. It is not merely a tool. It is a concentration of ancient desires and modern power, a physical manifestation of our species’ long quest for omniscience and connection.

It is a double-edged spell. The same glass that can be used to coordinate a lynch mob in one hemisphere can be used to fund life-saving research in another. The same network that can spread a lie that costs a life can spread a truth that saves one. This mirror can call monsters from the depths of our collective psyche, or it can muster medics to a disaster zone.

The magic is real. The choice of how to aim it is ours.

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What Do You Think?

Think about your own “mirror rituals.” When was the last time you consciously used this powerful device for a positive, constructive purpose? Share one example—in the comments, or just with a friend—of a time you used the glass for good.