How to Use a Black Obsidian Scrying Mirror
You sit in a dim room, set the polished disc in front of you, and let your gaze soften for about ten minutes. That's the whole practice, and it's already a lot. Here's the real history of the black obsidian scrying mirror, a step-by-step walkthrough of a session, what you actually see in one (the answer is documented, and more fascinating than the legend), and the precautions almost nobody bothers to mention.
What a black obsidian scrying mirror actually is
It's a disc, sometimes an oval or a rectangle, of black obsidian polished to a mirror finish, with no silvering and no particular frame. Unlike a bathroom mirror, it reflects only a dark, partial image that seems to swallow light rather than bounce it back. It's also called a black mirror, a witch's mirror, or a scrying mirror.
The material itself isn't incidental. Obsidian is natural volcanic glass, silica-rich lava that cooled without crystallizing, which gives it a perfectly smooth surface once polished. It's the only stone that naturally offers a reflective surface of this quality, I tell that origin story in how obsidian is formed.
Two things set it apart from an ordinary mirror, and they're what the rest of this article hinges on: it reflects poorly (the image is dark, without sharp edges) and it has no readable depth of field. An eye that tries to lock onto something in it finds nothing to grab. Keep that detail in mind, it comes back later.
From the Aztecs to John Dee: the mirror's real history
The obsidian mirror is Mesoamerican before it's esoteric. In the Aztec pantheon, Tezcatlipoca, literally "Smoking Mirror," carries an obsidian mirror, sometimes at his chest, sometimes in place of a foot. As god of night, fate and sorcery, he's said to see everything in it. Priests and diviners used mirrors of this material in their practices.
After the Spanish conquest, these objects reached Europe and became sought-after curiosities. One ended up in the hands of John Dee (1527-1609), mathematician, astrologer and advisor to Elizabeth I, who used it for his well-known "conversations with angels." That mirror is now held at the British Museum.
And here's the detail I love: in 2021, a University of Manchester-led research team, working with the Sobolev Institute of Geology and Mineralogy and the University of Missouri, examined this mirror and several other British Museum pieces with a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The geochemical profile matched obsidian from Pachuca, Mexico. Published in the journal Antiquity, the analysis confirmed that the most famous object in Elizabethan occultism is an Aztec artifact, cut by a Mexican craftsman more than a century before Dee ever looked into it for angels.
This story says everything worth knowing about the black mirror: every era saw in it what it was looking for. The Aztecs saw their god, Dee saw angels, we see our own unconscious. The disc itself has never done anything but reflect a dark image.
What you actually see in an obsidian mirror
This is the section I wrote the article for, so let's be direct: a black mirror doesn't show the future. It doesn't open a portal and it doesn't connect you to anyone. What it does do is more interesting, and it's well documented.
In 2010, psychologist Giovanni Caputo, at the University of Urbino, published a now-classic experiment in the journal Perception. Forty-two healthy adults stared at their own reflection in a mirror, under very low lighting, for ten minutes. After about a minute, most began perceiving "apparitions": their own face distorted, then gave way to other faces, strangers, relatives, deceased parents, animal or monstrous features. The phenomenon has a name, the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion, and three conditions are enough to trigger it: low light, prolonged fixed gaze, and a face to look at.
In other words: deprived of stable edges and reliable light information, the visual system fills in the gaps. It builds shapes out of very little, drawing on a stored memory of faces. An obsidian mirror meets these conditions better than almost anything else: dark, smooth, with no readable depth.
| What people report | Traditional reading | Perceptual reading |
|---|---|---|
| The reflection blurs | The veil lifts | Prolonged fixation, peripheral vision fades |
| Shapes appear | Presences manifest | The brain fills in a weak signal |
| Unfamiliar faces | Guides, spirits, ancestors | Strange-face illusion (Caputo, 2010) |
| A sense of unreality | Crossing into another plane | Transient dissociative effect, well described |
| An intuition surfaces | A message received | Ten minutes of silence, no distractions |
In short, saying these images come from you doesn't make them meaningless. Anything that gives you ten minutes of silence, facing yourself, no phone, produces something real. It's introspection, not clairvoyance, and obsidian, a stone often described as a mirror turned toward the self, stays consistent right to the end.
How to use an obsidian mirror: the session, step by step
What follows is the version most practices agree on. Keep it to ten minutes at most the first time.
Set up the room
Dim the lights without going fully dark, a low lamp behind you, never facing you, to avoid stray reflections. Turn off your phone. A quiet, slightly cool room beats an overloaded atmosphere.
Place the mirror
On dark fabric, tilted at roughly 45 degrees toward you, at arm's length. The goal is not to see your whole face clearly, you want a partial reflection, not a selfie.
Settle in
Sit for two or three minutes, back straight, breathing slowly. This is when to set an intention, one open question rather than several, closer to "what am I avoiding looking at right now?" than "will he call me back?"
Look without staring
The central move: rest your gaze on the surface and let it soften, the way you look at nothing in particular. Blink normally. Don't search for anything, don't expect anything, expectation is what blocks the effect.
Let it come
After one to three minutes, the surface often starts to "move": haze, spots, shapes. Let it happen without narrating it. If an image feels unsettling, look away, breathe, come back or stop.
Close it out properly
The step everyone skips. Turn the lights back on, drink some water, move around, touch objects nearby. Then write down what came up, without interpreting it yet. Reading it back three weeks later beats decoding it in the moment.
Once a week is plenty. Consistency matters more than length, true here just as it is for obsidian meditation, whose framework is very close to this one.
Many practitioners keep a stone on the wrist or in hand during the exercise: the feel of something smooth and cool gives a concrete anchor when your gaze drifts far. It also makes closing the session easier.
Mistakes that ruin a session
Five missteps come up constantly, and they explain most of the "it just didn't work for me":
- Going fully dark, without at least a little light there's no reflection at all, so nothing to see;
- Placing the light source in front of you, it bounces off the surface and washes everything out;
- Staring intensely, the eye tenses, waters, and the gaze stays locked. Letting go is what does the work;
- Expecting a specific answer, showing up with a closed question to resolve usually means seeing nothing, or worse, seeing exactly what you'd already decided to see;
- Running long sessions back to back, past fifteen or twenty minutes, eye fatigue and a sense of unreality take over without adding anything.
A sixth, less obvious one: interpreting on the spot. A shape glimpsed in dim light isn't a message. Writing it down and returning to it later is more honest, and usually more revealing.
Choosing and caring for an obsidian mirror
Might as well say it upfront: I don't make mirrors. My studio works beads and set pieces, not the polishing of large discs, which is its own craft. What follows is buying advice with nothing to sell you.
Genuine obsidian
Opaque and black, never translucent through its thickness. It's cool to the touch and warms slowly, and may show fine bubbles or a faint sheen in raking light. Medium hardness, it scratches.
Tinted black glass
Often too perfect: no inclusions, edges too regular, translucent at the rim, lighter in the hand. It warms up quickly. Frequently sold for far more than it's worth, under flattering names.
Three practical criteria: a polish with no micro-scratches (tilt the piece toward a window, they show up fast and ruin the reflection), a diameter of 4 to 6 inches for everyday use, larger gets unwieldy, smaller and the reflection is too small, and a perfectly flat face, since the smallest dip distorts the image. For everything on imitations and inflated prices, my guide to obsidian pricing and value covers the pitfalls.
On care, obsidian is glass at 5 to 5.5 on the Mohs scale, it scratches and doesn't take impact well. A dry microfiber cloth, never an abrasive cleaner, store it flat wrapped in cloth. Full details in cleaning obsidian, and for the energetic side, in cleansing and charging.
People often ask if I'll start making them. The answer is no, and not just for practical reasons: I'd be uncomfortable selling something whose implied promise is to show you the future. A bracelet, at least, never promises more than it delivers.
If you're new to this stone, the full picture, origin, varieties, properties, care, is gathered in the complete obsidian guide.
Precautions & good practice
This is the part most pages on the topic skip, and it matters more than anything else here. Prolonged gazing under low light produces transient dissociative effects, a sense of unreality, a feeling of being outside yourself. For most people this fades within a few minutes once the lights come back on. For some, it doesn't.
A few simple rules:
- Ten minutes, not more, and one session a week when you're starting out;
- Always close the session properly: light, movement, water, contact with ordinary objects;
- Stop the moment it feels unpleasant. There's nothing to gain from pushing through;
- Don't practice this if you're going through a hard stretch, if you're prone to anxiety, dissociative episodes or depression, or if you're grieving recently, seeing the face of someone you've lost can be overwhelming, and that's exactly what Caputo's experiment describes;
- Adults only, and never under the influence of alcohol or any substance.
If a sense of unreality lingers after a session, or shows up outside of one, stop the practice and talk to a healthcare professional, see our medical disclaimer for more on where this kind of practice ends and medical care begins. Obsidian is also generally described as a direct stone, one to ease into gradually, a subject I cover fully in obsidian safety and precautions.
Keep in mind, the divinatory practices described here come from spiritual tradition and belief. They have no demonstrated predictive value, are not medical claims, cure no disease, and never replace the advice of a healthcare professional. Don't base any major decision, about health, money, or a relationship, on what you believe you saw in a mirror.
Frequently asked questions
How do you use a black obsidian scrying mirror?
Can an obsidian mirror show you the future?
Why do people see faces in a black mirror?
Where does the black obsidian scrying mirror come from?
How long should a session last?
How do you tell a real obsidian mirror from glass?
Are there any contraindications?
Obsidian for everyday
Bracelets, necklaces, pendants and rings in natural obsidian, handmade in France, the material of the seers' mirrors, in a quieter form.