Scrying Mirror w/ Stand

Rough, unpolished obsidian can break into razor-sharp edges, so handle raw specimens with care. Polished and tumbled pieces are safe for everyday handling. Obsidian is brittle glass and can chip if dropped.

Obsidian forms when silica-rich lava cools so quickly that its atoms have no time to arrange into crystals, leaving a natural glass instead of a mineral. People have shaped it into cutting tools since the Stone Age, and into mirrors, blades, and ceremonial objects wherever volcanoes supplied it.

Obsidian is an amorphous volcanic glass, a mineraloid rather than a true mineral, formed by the rapid cooling of silica-rich (felsic) lava at the edges of lava flows and domes. Its glassy structure gives it a conchoidal fracture, breaking into smooth curved surfaces with edges sharp enough to have served as cutting tools for millennia. Brightly colored blue or green pieces sold as obsidian are typically manufactured glass rather than natural volcanic glass.

• At Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic settlement in modern-day Turkey, people polished obsidian into some of the oldest known mirrors, roughly 8,000 years old, and several were buried with their owners.
• The Aztec and other Mesoamerican peoples linked obsidian with Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, and used polished obsidian for divination mirrors as well as for blades and ceremonial tools.
• The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote that obsidian was named for a Roman explorer called Obsius, said to have first found the glassy black stone in Ethiopia, an account recorded in his Naturalis Historia nearly two thousand years ago.