There is something inherently unsettling about a mirror in a darkened room. In daylight it is ordinary, useful, barely noticed. At night, particularly by candlelight, it becomes something else. The glass seems deeper, the room inside it slightly less trustworthy, and you become very aware that the person looking back at you is doing exactly what you are doing.
Mirrors have gathered an extraordinary amount of folklore around themselves. They have been covered after deaths, consulted for divination, blamed for bad luck when broken and treated as objects capable of revealing things that ordinary sight cannot. In stories, they show the future, expose spirits, trap souls and occasionally contain reflections that behave as though they have ideas of their own.
The Mirror belongs to The Shadows because this is not really a story about glass. It is about death, identity and that deeply uncomfortable human suspicion that a reflection might be more than an image.
Your card today is –
XXVII – The Mirror
Victorian Britain developed an elaborate culture of mourning. Death was surrounded by ritual, material objects and prescribed behaviour, from mourning clothes and jewellery to funerary customs and the preservation of physical reminders of the dead. Queen Victoria’s prolonged mourning for Prince Albert helped make bereavement particularly visible within nineteenth-century culture, although many traditions associated with death were considerably older. JSTOR
Among the customs now strongly associated with Victorian mourning is the covering of mirrors in a house where somebody had died. The explanations given for the practice vary considerably, which is usually a good indication that we are dealing with folklore rather than a single neat tradition. One belief held that the soul of the deceased might become trapped in the glass. Another suggested that seeing your own reflection in a house containing a corpse could bring death or misfortune. Elsewhere, mirrors were covered simply because vanity and ordinary domestic life were considered inappropriate during mourning.
The problem is that the phrase “the Victorians believed” can make wildly diverse practices sound universal. They were not. Customs varied by region, religion, community and family, and similar practices appear outside Britain. What is much more interesting is how consistently mirrors become troublesome whenever death is nearby.
A mirror does something no other ordinary household object quite manages. It creates another room inside the room. Everything is present, but reversed. You can see behind yourself without turning around. Your own face appears at precisely the distance of another person standing opposite you. In dim light, reflections become uncertain remarkably quickly.
It is not difficult to see why mirrors became associated with divination. Scrying traditions used reflective surfaces including water, polished objects, crystals and mirrors in attempts to see visions or obtain hidden knowledge. At the turn of the twentieth century, folklorist and psychical researcher Andrew Lang was still writing about “magic mirrors” and crystal gazing as practices that sat somewhere between old magic and contemporary experimental psychology. JSTOR
Then there are the stories in which the reflection itself goes wrong.
A face appears behind you when nobody is there. A dead relative is glimpsed in the glass. A reflection moves a fraction too slowly. Someone looks into a mirror and sees not their present face but themselves older, altered or dead. Folklore loves these tiny violations because they attack something we normally trust without thinking. A mirror is supposed to obey.
The moment it does not, the room changes.
Mirrors also sit beautifully at the meeting point between folklore and psychology. Human perception is not a passive recording device. In poor light, with prolonged staring and strong expectation, faces can appear distorted or unfamiliar. Shadows deepen. Features seem to move. The brain attempts to interpret incomplete visual information, sometimes producing something considerably more interesting than what is actually there.
That does not diminish the folklore. In some ways, it explains why it survives.
The Victorians inhabited a culture fascinated by death, spiritualism and the possibility that personality might somehow continue beyond the body. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychical researchers attempted to investigate apparitions, telepathy and survival after death using methods they hoped would separate genuine phenomena from fraud and imagination. The mirror therefore occupied an intriguing position. It was an ordinary household object already carrying centuries of magical associations, sitting in rooms where the living mourned the dead. Victorian death culture itself placed enormous importance upon objects as ways of maintaining connections with those who had gone. JSTOR
Perhaps that is why covering the mirror feels so powerful.
You are not merely hiding a reflective surface.
You are closing something.
XXVII – The Mirror
The Mirror represents reflection, hidden truths, grief, memory and the uncomfortable things we recognise in ourselves. It asks you to look carefully, but not necessarily literally. Something may be reflecting back an aspect of yourself, your past or your situation that you would rather leave covered.
It can also represent distortion. Reflections reverse things. What appears obvious may not be quite as straightforward as it seems, particularly when fear, expectation or grief is involved. The Mirror advises examination before interpretation.
In its darker aspect, the card warns against becoming trapped by what has already happened. Memory is valuable, but staring backwards indefinitely can turn remembrance into imprisonment. Sometimes the mirror needs uncovering.
Sometimes it needs covering again.
Sources
Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria, Princeton University Press, 1994. JSTOR
Mary Elizabeth Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England, State University of New York Press, 2009. JSTOR
Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev, eds., Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time, Berghahn Books, 2018. JSTOR
Andrew Lang, “Magic Mirrors and Crystal Gazing”, Monthly Review, 1901, reproduced in The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang. JSTOR
Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture”, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2011. JSTOR Daily
