The Museum itself contains many objects of esoteric interest, notably the magic mirror, or scrying stone, said to have belonged to Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee, with which he and his assistant Edward Kelley communicated with angels at Mortlake. In doing so they formulated the ‘Enochian’ system of magic, as later practised by the Golden Dawn (written up by Meric Casaubon in his 1659 book A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits). Crowley believed himself to be the reincarnation of Kelley. The stone itself is an Aztec obsidian mirror once owned by the 18thC Gothic revivalist Horace Walpole, who loved the idea of its supposed link to the pre-Enlightenment magic of Dee.
In a building packed with the ancient, the alien and the Other, the Egyptian department was of particular interest to Victorian and Edwardian occultists. Among the Bloomsbury objects is the so-called ‘Unlucky Mummy’,1 believed to have an aura of evil, which was discussed by Egyptologist Wallis Budge, Madame Blavatsky, and the spiritualist and crusading journalist W.T. Stead. In 1909 it figured on the front cover of Pearson's Magazine, in an instance of the popular mystique of Egypt at the time. Crowley had already explored the Cairo Museum, where item 666 was the stele of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, and in 1930 he thought he had found the sarcophagus of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu in the British Museum (“BM. Discovered sarcophagus of Ankh-F-N-Khonsu!!!”). Unfortunately it turned out to be the wrong one.
Crowley and J.F.C. Fuller were embarked on publishing an occult journal, The Equinox. Thoughts of The Equinox, in Crowley's account, gave them visions of durability in the face of a coming smash of civilisation and “imminence of world catastrophe”: “We saw the New Zealander sitting on the ruined arch of London Bridge quite clearly.”
This was the once-famous New Zealander of the future who visited the remains of London and sketched the ruin of St. Paul's Cathedral. Thomas Macaulay had conjured him up in an 1840 review of von Ranke's History of the Popes, as an image of the power and endurance of the Roman Catholic Church: an organisation that “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's”.
Like Shelley's ruined statue of Ozymandias, this New Zealander was one of many such images of the sublime vastness of time and the waning fortunes of empires. In the 1770s the same Walpole who owned the Dee scrying stone had already conjured up a “curious traveller from Lima [who] will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's.” He also suggested a future researcher “from the banks of the Oronooko” 2 might one day “revive knowledge of the English language and English gardening”.
And now Crowley and Fuller had an image of their own, not with the cathedral but the Museum: “We could also see the Professor of Archaeology in the University of Lhasa excavating the ruins of the British Museum.” This future Tibetan seems to be particularly excavating the Library, where “He discovered a vast number of volumes of our period purporting to deal with the occult sciences, but there were few indeed of these which had not crumbled into dust. Of those that remained, the vast majority were evidently frivolous. He rejoiced exceedingly to discover one series of volumes, the dignity of whose appearance, the permanence of whose paper, the excellence of whose printing, and the evident care which had been bestowed on their production, showed him at first sight that the people responsible for their production had been at infinite pains to make these volumes testify against the tyranny of time… The first standard work of reference – the key to the wisdom of the buried past.”