Obsidian
DESCRIPTION:
Naturally occurring volcanic glass that is formed from quickly cooled lava. Black and opaque in color, with a high shine.
COMPOSITION:
Mostly silicon dioxide, with magnesium oxide and iron oxide (SiO2, MgO, Fe3O4)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
Used for divination, allowing the user to see deeper truths and subconscious thoughts
The rumor goes that in 1770, England came close to passing a law allowing a man to divorce his wife if she had used makeup to convince him she was prettier than she really was. Whether she did it “by scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips,” she could be tried for witchcraft and her punishment would be justified, because—well, look at her red lips and smooth skin. Who looks like that?? She’s obviously a liar.
If the law sounds like a myth, that’s because it is, or at least it’s an inverted version of a story told in Irish, British, and Norse mythology. In the story of the loathly lady, a haggard old woman is shown kindness by a young man and reveals herself to be young and beautiful. The story is happy instead of scary because her face changes in the right direction—natural beauty is the ultimate reward. No one is suing their wife for being suspiciously pretty without lipstick.
There is no proof that the Hoops and Heels Act of 1770 existed. In a law journal article from 1971, “The Law Passed by Everyone but Parliament,” D. Dean Willard found no evidence that the House of Commons or the House of Lords ever considered such a bill. But I’m less surprised that people want to believe it existed than I am at the possibility that it may have been fake all along. Everything about it feels real, from the hypocritical insistence that women wearing wigs was deceitful but men’s powdered hair and heels were an acceptable form of self-presentation, to the assumption that a woman’s worth was tied to her beauty, which both must exist and be natural. Even if it was never a law, many women have been punished for it anyway.
No matter how much progress Western society has made in its attitudes toward makeup, beauty, and fashion, the undercurrent of this cultural conversation is that these things aren’t “real.” But neither are our physical traits. Our bodies? Malleable through age, tattoos, surgery, accidents, and fluctuations in our weight. Our voices? Easily changed by habit and hormones. Our senses? Again, subject to age and accidents. We need physical form to exist but our bodies are not us—or at least not the totality of us. What we project to others is always partially a choice, one that’s treated as an unfortunate inevitability of living in a society that requires social interaction and clothing. The assumption is we’d all strip down to the “real” if we could. At least, that’d be the virtuous thing to do. How déclassé to want to draw attention to oneself any other way. How gaudy to declare your desire to be seen.
Obsidian is hot, violent lava that cools into inky glass with sharp edges and a reflective surface. It’s used to pierce through skin as a spearhead or blade and through perceptions as a scrying stone, which allows you to see your past, present, and future stripped of all the gloss. According to Pliny the Elder, obsidian was used as a mirror, though it wasn’t great at the job. “It is dull to the sight, and reflects, when attached as a mirror to walls, the shadow of the object rather than the image.” It’s this quality that lent obsidian the metaphysical property, recognized across multiple cultures, of being a literal black mirror. The fractured nature of our psyches! The duality of man! It’s all there in the stone. If it doesn’t show you your exact self, it must be showing you something deeper, a “real” you beneath the face you sell to the rest of the world.
Whereas pyrite makes you aware of an outward and an inward self, obsidian is used to make you confront what you have been hiding from others, or from yourself. “This beautiful and powerful stone can help cut through the drivel, shatter illusions, and uncover lies,” one gem website claims. “It can help you remove any blockages in your being and see through the facades.” In its surface, you’re supposed to find deep truths that maybe you’re too scared to admit to yourself; the tough love side of self-care. But what is truth depends on what’s considered dishonest, and on who is passing judgment.
I don’t remember feeling the need to wear makeup for men. That’s not to say the influence wasn’t there, but who could possibly unearth subconscious motivations during puberty? Makeup was what my mom wore sometimes, and what her friends wore more often, and therefore what I figured was—like drinking alcohol and paying rent—the realm of adults. You don’t do it to make yourself look better, I thought; you do it because you’re a grown-up.
While middle school involved some silver eyeshadow and sticky lip gloss, eighth grade was when I got serious with an Urban Decay sparkly black eyeliner pencil. I didn’t know how to apply it just to my lash line, so I settled for filling in my entire eyelid, leaving it raw and tender from glitter abrasion. The first time I did it I didn’t quite recognize myself, but I told myself that was the point. Children don’t wear eye makeup, and I was no longer interested in being a child. If a teenager is who I wanted to be, this is how I needed to look. My appearance told a story, and I was aware of what my choices said to those who looked at me, and about my relationship to the things I didn’t choose. After all, I didn’t have to wear eyeliner, but being a girl who wore dark black eyeliner carried a set of other definitions, ones I hoped would be applied to me. Perhaps now I’d be seen as punk, or cool, or rebellious, not a child who was into her American Girl dolls for far longer than was probably healthy.
Obsidian is hot, violent lava that cools into inky glass with sharp edges and a reflective surface. It’s used to pierce through skin as a spearhead or blade and through perceptions as a scrying stone, which allows you to see your past, present, and future stripped of all the gloss.
Costume is another word for lie, but just because I wasn’t yet the rebel I wanted to be didn’t mean my look wasn’t authentic. I chose what I wore, how I presented myself, because I liked how dark eyeliner and ripped jeans and old T-shirts and studded belts looked and felt. Frilly blouses felt unnatural, but my black sweatshirt covered in pins and buttons felt like me, whoever that was. When I looked in the mirror, I saw both sides of the reflection: the person I was and the person I wanted to be—or at least as close to that person as you can get when you’re fifteen. No outfit perfectly bridged the gap between perception and reality.
The word glamour comes from the Scotch, who altered the word grammar, which was associated with the mysterious art of studying literature. A glamour was a spell of perception, first understood as magic to affect the subject’s eyesight. In 1721, the Oxford English Dictionary cited a glossary of poetry that said, “When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator.” Later, a glamour became a sort of influencing charm specifically tied to getting what you want by making yourself beautiful. To be glamorous was to be so bewitching, so alluring that you were in complete control not just of what your subject saw of you, but how they then reacted. And that came out of a control of yourself.
In her essay “Thoughts on a Word: Glamour” for the New Inquiry in 2012, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano described glamour as a checklist of items that unlocks certain treatment if we can tick each box. There are appearances we culturally agree upon to mean something more than just what they are, such as red lipstick as the sign of a vamp, white cotton as a sign of innocence, or a suit as a symbol of a woman’s embrace of masculine power. “It’s not hard to get glamour ‘right,’ but since glamour is a set of references—a creation instead of a state of being—you do have to get it right in order to be seen as glamorous as opposed to pretty, polished, or chic,” she writes. It is literally a spell, a collection of ingredients when, mixed in the right way, produce an otherworldly outcome. “We don’t stumble into glamour; we create it, even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. Call glamour a performance if you wish. It’s equally accurate to call it an accomplishment.”
Central Mexico lies on an active volcano range, prime ground for obsidian production. That, plus the lack of metal ore in the area, means that obsidian was and is omnipresent in Mesoamerican societies, influencing how tools were used, how society was structured, and how spirituality was interpreted. If volcanoes were the homes of the gods and ancestors, obsidian was, in a sense, the bricks and mortar of those homes. In Maya and Mexica cosmology, obsidian was associated with darkness and cold and offered in conjunction with stones representing light and life. In the Tarascan state, it was a stone of omens and bad dreams but also of power. It embodied the patron deity Curicaueri, who was literally “in Tarascan political-religious praxis a chunk of obsidian from which knives were knapped that would then be carried forth to conquered towns,” according to David Haskell in his article “Tarascan/Purhepecha Monarchs as ‘Stranger Kings’ ” for the University Press of Colorado’s website in 2018. The mineraloid was both symbolic of power and powerful itself, a representation and the real thing.
In Aztec mythology, Tezcatlipoca is the lord of the night sky and of smoking mirrors. He observed the world through the reflection of his obsidian foot (his real one was chomped off by an earth beast when he and Quetzalcoatl created the world). He was the god of fates and the patron god of Aztec royalty, who used obsidian mirrors to pierce the veil between mortality and the gods, a conduit for the gods’ messages. But the royals didn’t just reveal Tezcatlipoca’s will to the people, they revealed the truths of the people, especially those they’d rather hide, to the gods. Obsidian mirrors were affiliated with Tezcatlipoca and allowed the Aztecs to both see and be seen by their master of fate. He revealed himself to humanity only when they revealed themselves in return.
Obsidian was also a healing stone, pulverized and applied to the eyes to clear cataracts. “This ‘vision sharpening’ quality of obsidian may have been a contributory factor in the origin of beliefs concerning the all-seeing nature of Tezcatlipoca, the acknowledged ‘night vision’ of his jaguar alter ego, and the divinatory power of obsidian mirrors,” writes Nicholas J. Saunders in “A Dark Light: Reflections on Obsidian in Mesoamerica.” He continues: “In this way, perhaps, the Aztec (and probably pre-Aztec) use of obsidian directly affected the sense of vision, and thus perceptions of the world.” Obsidian may not be a good functional mirror, but they offer other ways to help us see.
The terrifying thing about any god or spirit or partner is the idea that there is an entity that sees beyond what I present. Some people call that love and find it comforting, but I can’t stop the alarm bells from clanging in the back of my head when someone close to me tells me something they consider obvious about me, though I’ve done nothing to present that truth. That they’ve seen beneath my mask is taken as proof of the power of their feelings, but also often spoken of as “knowing the real me,” and the dichotomy between facade and “real” usually ignores why that facade was put up in the first place. Maybe it was to falsely gain something, but more often my performances are for protection, or to fit in, or to evoke something in myself that doesn’t quite exist yet, or it does exist and I just want to show it off. The problem isn’t that our facades mask our selves and must be stripped away in order for us to be close to family or lovers or god. It starts much earlier than that, in the thinking that such a binary even exists. Instead, the self is just as fluid as anything, existing at various points between what we do, what we feel, and what we want.
The most famous version of the loathly lady story is “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In it, the wife of Bath tells the story of a knight who rapes a young woman. King Arthur is about to put him to death, but Queen Guinevere pities the knight and says if he can figure out what it is all women want, he will be free to go. In his searching he finds an old woman who promises to grant him the answer in exchange for whatever she wants in return. He returns to the court and reveals that what women want is sovereignty over men, something it would have been nice for him to know before he raped the maiden. In exchange, he finds he has to marry the old woman.
On their wedding night he is repulsed by her, and she asks whether he’d prefer an ugly but loyal wife or a beautiful but unfaithful one. Remembering the lesson he learned just recently, he said it was her choice, at which point she rewards him for clearing this very low bar by transforming into a beautiful and loyal wife. Beauty here is not just a reward for a job well done on the knight’s part, but a fundamental truth about his wife. This kind, wise, and forgiving woman is now as beautiful outside as she is inside, as if physical appearance should be a manifestation of inner truth, and as if it’s naturally correlated with youth, smooth skin, and radiant eyes. Why couldn’t her wrinkles be a sign of virtue?
There is a reason we want to cut through the veil. Appearance alters the perception of everything that comes after. Humans trust beautiful people more, and we don’t listen to those we deem ugly. According to a Procter & Gamble study, as reported in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis in 2011, choice of clothing and makeup “increases people’s perceptions of a woman’s likability, her competence and (provided she does not overdo it) her trustworthiness.” In a 2018 article for the New York Times, Eva Hagberg Fisher wrote about choosing outfits for court dates and other events related to a sexual harassment complaint she filed against a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who had harassed her for three years. She had to balance projecting that she was a grad student and also a capable adult, a victim and a strong woman, “just plausibly sexy enough to look like [she] could have been harassed but 100 percent [wasn’t] asking for it.” She mitigated a series of false assumptions with black turtlenecks and loafers and hair tied in a low bun. In 2018, the university suspended the professor.
The problem isn’t that our facades mask our selves and must be stripped away in order for us to be close to family or lovers or god. It starts much earlier than that, in the thinking that such a binary even exists.
Of course, Fisher should not have had to do this. The third-wave feminist recontextualization of women’s makeup and clothing says these are not tools of the patriarchy, but individual choices of self-expression. Women, and people of any gender, are free to wear what they want, for any reason. And they should! Equating makeup with competence is utter bullshit. But there’s a recent backlash to that idea because it doesn’t take into account what other people will interpret about your appearance regardless of your intention. Our appearances, what we want to look like, are influenced by the perceptions of those around us. No, Fisher shouldn’t have had to play into this notion, but what would have happened if she didn’t?
Here’s a quick lesson in astrology: In the zodiac, we have our sun signs and our rising signs. If you’ve ever looked up your horoscope, you know your sun sign. Our sun signs represent our basic personalities, our inner boss, Who We Are when We are at our most Us. However, if you’ve ever looked up your horoscope you’re probably also familiar with the sensation of it getting you completely wrong. If you’re supposed to be a mysterious Scorpio, then why do all your friends think you overshare? If you’re supposed to be a headstrong Aries, why do your coworkers think you’re the one who goes with the flow?
Those who don’t believe in astrology say it’s because it’s a scam, which, fair. But believers often cite rising signs as the culprits digging the ditch between what we put down and what others pick up. Our rising signs are supposedly the masks we present to the world, the way everyone else perceives us regardless of who we are and what we want. There’s a difference between who we are and who everyone else is seeing. But at some point, the mask can become real. If everyone treats you as the masked version of yourself, on some level that’s you. And if that’s who you want to be, all the better.
Even people who insist they don’t give a flying fuck about appearance want to signal something sometimes, whether it’s the effortless cool of the perfect bedhead, or the “don’t talk to me” of large headphones on public transportation. (Even when we want to be ignored, there’s an outfit for that.) Women who don’t wear makeup are signaling just as much as women who do, whether it’s that they’re too tired to use it, they’re rebelling against societal pressure to use it, they physically can’t, or that they’re “above it.” Even a lack of a facade is sometimes a facade. And the facade we present to the world isn’t a direct matter of cause and effect. There are more forces at play, both internal and external.
It may be possible to go through life without ever encountering this gap between presentation and identity, to always be read and understood exactly how you want without having to compromise a single part of your appearance. You choose your makeup, your hairstyle, your outfit, and you waltz into the world and are seen and known exactly the way you planned it. Lucky for you; please let the rest of us know how that works. Because for most of us there are times where that divide makes itself known, when our glamours don’t work. Sometimes it comes as a surprise. Other times, it’s entirely expected. There are glamours we put on ourselves to show the world, but there are also glamours the world puts on us, spells that affect how we perceive ourselves and others that come from outside sources—history, government, prejudice, fear. We can’t even see ourselves clearly. There’s always a layer of dark magic.
When the witch looks into her scrying stone, what she’s looking for is honesty. There is something there—a shape, a voice—that reveals a truth that reality can’t. The art of scrying implies reality is a lie that must be seen through, and is in fact a substitute for the truth.
I did not choose to be mixed race, nor did I choose to be a cis woman. That isn’t to say I wish I could have chosen against those parts of myself (I quite like being both these things), only that they are factors of my identity that are outside of my control. The color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the certain shape of my eyes or lips that signals to people that there is something nonwhite about me, the general presence of my womanhood—these aren’t things I chose. But they are facts of my appearance that affect me, whether it’s in subtle microaggressions or institutionalized racism and sexism.
In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser illustrates his theory of interpellation with a hypothetical scene of a policeman calling out to a passerby on the street, explaining how a call from the police pulls its subject into a relationship with the law. All it takes is a policeman shouting, “Hey, you there!” for the passerby to be transformed from an independent individual into a subject of the police, whether he has done anything wrong or not. We police each other’s outward identifiers every day, turning each other into subjects of our own interpretations. With these forms of identity, the observer makes the call, and we are subjected whether we like it or not. These are the glamours that are cast for us. Because no matter how we style our hair and choose our clothes, other people will come at us with their own conclusions. Our race, our gender identity, our sexual orientations and disabilities and body types and sizes allow others to categorize us without our permission.
There are days when I “dress up” as Indian, which I know is not actually what’s happening but that’s often how it feels, because my Indianness is usually something others can only see if aided by the right accessories. I put on gold filigree earrings or bangles, I choose embroidered scarves. Sometimes I’ll wear a bindi and tell everyone that I’m trying to “decolonize” it, and I am, but I’m also scanning the room and watching an anxious timeline unfold in which another Indian person (or hell, a white person) accuses me of cultural appropriation because they don’t think I’m actually who I am. I would have the exact same genetic mix if I never wore gold, or bindis, or silk. Plenty of Indian women don’t. I know who I am, and I know that others’ perception can’t take my identity away from me. There are days when I pay parts of myself no mind. I know they are there, and that’s enough. But sometimes, I need to know everyone else knows. What good is an identity if you can’t be identified? I want an identity that not only I see.
Metaphysically, obsidian is also used as a shield. It is said to block negativity and provide protection, so its user can obtain clarity of mind without so many external influences. According to the crystal website Charms of Light, it “helps you to know who you truly are.” When we dress up, when we experiment, sometimes it’s because we are trying to obtain that clarity of mind and discover who we are. But sometimes it’s because we already know, and we have nothing to hide. Our presentations aren’t masks but mirrors, an invitation for others to see exactly who we are.
I try to not look at what we have done, as a species, as proof of what we will do or should do, but the fact is, in thousands of years of human history, everyone has expressed some interior aspect of themselves with their exterior presentation. I doubt anyone has ever passed another fully clothed human on the street and simply thought “ahh, a human.” We have dressed up. We have made ourselves things to be looked at. Between the exteriors we’re born with and the exteriors we construct, it seems like it’d be easier if we just stopped assigning ulterior meanings to everything. And clearly there are many places (particularly with those things we don’t choose) where we should. Existing in public becomes an effort in calculation that vacillates between being joyful and terrifying. Will they see what I want them to see? Will they focus on this over that? Will my glamour work, or is everyone else’s more powerful?
Can you tell this is personal? I don’t know why I have always been so desperate to be known. I assume it has something to do with the endless questions about where I’m from. No, where are you really from? But to tell the truth, I was doing this before I learned to think of my race as a condition. I remember turning my butt to a stranger in the hall of my apartment building on Halloween, pointing and bellowing, “I’m not a bunny, I’m a LAMB,” to a woman who dared confuse my costume for the former. I know it’s not the deepest identity crisis, but I was incensed for at least the next two doorbell rings.
But there are moments where the glamours fall within your control. When the things you’ve internalized about bodies, gender, race, age, and abilities burn away like morning fog, and you put on the things you want to put on, and there you are. Exactly the you you want to be and the you you are. We can’t control it all; we know we will still be categorized. But we try to have a say in those categories because the moments when we glimpse what our lives could be like if we felt that way all the time are the ones we live for.
Obviously I’m not the first person to point out the connection between presentation and identity, or that our appearances are masks and also facets of ourselves. Philosophers and artists have devoted a lot of time to the ego and subconscious, to the actor who only reveals himself while playing a role. But much of the conversation around appearance tends to land on the idea that we shouldn’t care. We’re still buying the idea of not judging the book by the cover, that appearance is incidental to the person underneath it. But while appearance is not the only thing, it’s not nothing, and in denying its importance, we deny each other those moments of agency. When you treat the facade as a false self, you miss what it’s trying to tell you.
Ultimately, the drive is to rewrite the checklist. To have our glamours say what we want and not what others have learned to interpret through prejudice, colonialism, or just plain misunderstanding. To bring what we see in the obsidian to life. Our appearances become synecdoche for ourselves, a shorthand for the things we are proud of and the things we are scared of and the things we might not realize we’re projecting. But when we like how we look, it’s because, consciously and unconsciously, all these spells are at work.
How we perceive each other is all we have. We cannot intimately know every person on earth, so we rely on this shorthand for communication, for understanding. That’s why it feels so important, and that’s why we keep reaching for the obsidian in spite of the calls that insist it shouldn’t matter. Not because we’re too vain to think about more important issues, or because society is forcing our hand. We do it because there are things we need to communicate in order to survive and thrive. We do it because what would life even be if we could not be seen? Block out the negativity, look into my reflection. No matter what’s in it, it’s telling you the truth.
