11/27/2023 0 Comments Ancient obsidian mirror![]() The mirror is currently in the collection of the British Museum. Recent tests on the mirror using trace element analysis show that the mineral structure of Dee’s mirror points to an obsidian source found near Pachuca in central Mexico. The mirror was so fine that some archaeologists believe that it came from the royal palace in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and may have belonged to Emperor Montezuma or one of his chief priests. Pickering gave the curious Mexican mirror to Dee when he was traveling through Europe just a few years before. The volcanic glass mirror ended up in France and was given to Ambassador Pickering. Instead of ending up in Spain, though, French pirates attacked the ship carrying the plundered Aztec goods. It supposedly was part of a shipment of items plundered from the Aztec Empire and sent back to Spain by the conquistador Hernán Cortés himself. The mirror was given to Dee by Sir William Pickering, who was England’s ambassador to France. It was an unusual mirror, round and measuring about nine inches across, made of highly polished obsidian, or volcanic glass. To entertain his queen while she waited outside, John Dee brought out a curious artifact for her examination. Queen Elizabeth refused Dee’s entreaties to enter his home, and Dee struggled to make best of an awkward situation. History does not record her name, but she had been married to Dee for less than two years. Dee was almost 50 at the time and this was his second wife. This esteemed subject was none other than John Dee, who had become famous in Britain and throughout the Continent, for his knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, ancient languages and a whole host of more esoteric subjects. With her entire Privy Council in tow, the dour queen thought it fitting to travel to the village of Mortlake to visit this man on the occasion of the death of his wife. These cosmographic concepts of habitation across cultures are transformed into designed landscapes, cultic caves, tents, campsites, houses, cities, or temples.In March of 1576 Queen Elizabeth the First called on the humble home of one of her most unusual and esteemed subjects. People relied on an ordered and organized spatiotemporal natural world domesticated in culture, into which human life could be embedded and from which life received a deeper spirit and purpose. Since time immemorial and across the world archaic cultures symbolically, mythically, and ritually accompanied the configuration and weighting of the habitat as well as the placement within. Cosmographic concepts of the world edifice can be regarded as holistic, multi-layered models of evolving human ecosystems, which, by using symbolic language, helped man making the world homely and transcending the profane. Thus specific cultural systems including cosmovisions emerged, which allowed man to establish and maintain order and rhythm in personal and social life, interacting with given environmental conditions and to answer the human questions about the whys and wherefores concerning him and the world. In consequence and accompanying hominid evolution, which caused a partially freeing up from strong drives, organizing the world into a meaningful consistent and dynamic framework of interacting subsystems was necessary to integrate and orientate the human lifeworld within changing natural ecospheres. Archaeological and ethnological records worldwide give evidence that, since Palaeolithic time, cosmovisions were an essential part of man’s requirement to organize habitats. These structures offered humans a „domestic” sphere within a realm of wild nature, ensuring stability, centricity, meaning, security, familiarities, knowledge of controlling, social and power classifications. Concepts of housing the world are implemented in the architecture of lodgings, cultic buildings, settlements, territories, and the artificial shaping of the landscape. That way the inconceivable course of events became “tangible” by establishing and constructing spheres of spatiotemporal order. One of the characteristics of the human mode of existence shows up in modelling the structures and processes of the world onto the living space, which consists of certain landscapes, locations, and habitations.
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