In an ongoing consideration of fossil fuels as inherently haunted/demonic materials, I’ve been producing facsimiles of various scrying objects in anthracite, the hardest and most energy-dense form of coal. Versions of scrying–a subset of divinatory practice that involves gazing into some dark and/or reflective surface to see remote events or predict the future–exist in many different cultures around the world. Materials used have included ink, mirrors, water, smoke, obsidian, or simply darkness.
Coal is distinct from most minerals by virtue of its being composed of formerly living organisms; its enormous store of energy thus derives from the complex hydrocarbons produced by the process of these organisms’ slow decay and compression over hundreds of millions of years. In burning coal for energy, we are in a very real sense harnessing the amassed life-force of living things that existed almost a half-billion years ago–consuming in just a few hundred years energy that accumulated over millions. This massive energy burn has allowed us to hyper-accelerate our technological development–but, as with any form of magic that involves the summoning of spirits, there’s always a cost; in magic as well as thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In this sense, the burning of fossil fuels like coal can be seen as a classic Faustian transaction, one with increasingly catastrophic consequences for our own future. It’s interesting to consider that in exhuming and burning the highly compressed residue of animals and plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago to fuel our past 200 years or so of progress, we’ve begun returning the planet's atmosphere to conditions approximating those that prevailed when these organisms were alive, while rendering the environment increasingly inhospitable to our own existence. In this framing, the operative metaphor of haunting—or more pointedly, of a kind of vast goetic summoning (a practice whose primary directive is to “never call up that which you cannot put down”)—seems particularly apt.
Since coal is still being burned for electricity in much of the world–and consequently powering a significant portion of the internet, our own version of “remote seeing,” as well as many other energy-intensive, computation-based activities–I’ve found it compelling to use as a material with which to create these versions of occult objects traditionally used to see the future. Similarly, in light of the increasing pressure our anxieties about the future are exerting on the present, some reflection on our longstanding relationship with divinatory practices as systems of meaning production also seems relevant in this connection. Given that some form of scrying has existed in a wide range of different cultures, it’s felt generative to use these objects as both a material and metaphoric container in which some of these ideas can resonate against each other.
This is an anthracite facsimile of an obsidian scrying mirror currently held in the British Museum, which was formerly owned by Elizabethan-era court mathematician and astrologer Dr. John Dee. Dee had become obsessed later in his life with the practice of scrying, amassing a collection of crystals and mirrors which he used to communicate with angels in his attempts to acquire divine knowledge of the universe’s inner workings. But Dee’s mirror is in fact Aztec in origin, which has been recently confirmed by spectral analysis of the obsidian of which it’s composed. Though the manner in which Dee came into possession of the mirror isn’t recorded, it almost certainly reached Europe by way of the Spanish conquistadors. Such mirrors were widely used by the Aztecs as tools for prophecy and divination, practices overseen by the Aztec god of night and sorcery Tezcatlipoca, whose name translates literally as “smoking mirror.” Tezcatlipoca is usually depicted as carrying one of these round mirrors–the original “black mirrors.”
