John Dee's obsidian mirror, made in Mexico
If you want a simple definition of magical thinking, try this: the world we see can't possibly be all there is.
This basic belief manifests in a thousand different ways, but the one I'm going to focus on today is this: there are other worlds besides the one we live in, and there are ways to cross from one world to another, in both directions. To which a common corollary is, magical power comes from other worlds. The basic paradigm here is the shaman, whose souls leaves his or her body and travels to other worlds in search of knowledge and power, but there are of course many other versions.
In worldwide folklore, one way to access other worlds is with a mirror. This idea appears to be extremely ancient, and it persists to this day in the form of superstitions about covering mirrors after a death in a house and so on. Horror movies love it. One of the amusing things I stumbled across researching this post was detailed instructions on how to create a photograph that seems to show your face and its monstrous reflection.
Egyptian mirror, c. 1500 BC
Mirrors have been endlessly fascinating to humans since we first learned to make them, and they appear in our lore in, again, a million ways. They are just cool objects to play with and think about.
J.W. Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, detail
Our reflections fascinate us. What are they, and what is their connection to us? There is worldwide folklore that associates the reflection with the soul and asserts that injuries to the reflection can hurt the person. (E.g., vampires have no reflections because they have no souls.) There is an even vaster lore in which the reflection soul is trapped, either by an enemy sorceror or a sinister being residing in the reflecting pool. One school of thought maintains that the story of Narcissus as it comes down to us is an altered, civilized version of an ancient story in which Narcissus' soul was trapped by the spirit of a pool. Which is, incidentally, an important caveat about mirror lore, especially in the modern world, which is that it sometimes gets mixed up with denunciations of vanity.
(Here is an excellent Japanese folktale about a mirror spirit that traps humans in a well. If you want more, James Frazier collected hundreds of examples in The Golden Bough, along with the often parallel lore of shadows.)
Mirrors can show you ghosts, or fairies; they can show you the past or the future; they can show you the truth or confound you with demonic lies; they allow sorcerors to project their power out of their bodies, but they can also become gateways that allow enemies to come in and make mischief.
Mirrors, as reflective surfaces, can be used as traps. The most common interpretation of the mirrors Mongolian shamans wear on their costumes is that they hold the helping spirit that guides the shaman through the other worlds, or else the "wind horse" on which the shaman rides. But it is typical of mirror lore that other shamans have different views, for example that mirrors confuse evil spirits, allowing the shaman to bypass them. The mirror is an object of power in a way that seems to transcend the particular interpretation put on it.
The Chinese have what may be the most extensive mirror lore, along with a great many surviving bronze mirrors. These were retained in families for generations and became part of ancestor worship, on the theory that they retained some essence of all the people who had gazed into them.
The Aztec and Maya loved mirrors; that's a Maya king above, staring at a propped-up mirror.
This was a magical, shamanistic act, as you can see in this wonderful painting. On one side of the mirror is the shaman, on the other jaguar spirit that resides in the other lands; speech flowing from this being shows that he is imparting knowledge to the shaman.
One thing that makes modern mirror lore different from older stories is that we have much better mirrors. Many old stories depend on the ambiguity of what could be seen an in imperfect surface like a bowl of water or a polished disk of bronze. For example, one of the standard tricks of "cunning folk" across Europe was to catch thieves by asking victims to stare at the image on a small piece of tin and identify the face they saw; one supposes that they saw the person they already suspected. One could search for one's future spouse in the same way.
So it was a commonplace that what was gleaned from gazing into mirrors might be obscure. As St. Paul wrote, seeing "through a glass darkly" is quite different from seeing face-to-face.
These days mirror lore is dominated by the monstrous: ghost stories, urban legends like Bloody Mary, horror movies with mirror monsters, and so on. Mirrors have joined the vast horror complex by which we make our safe lives more interesting.
The theme of the monster in the mirror has spun off into a hundred metaphorical uses, from a way of understanding anorexia and poor self esteem – which spawned a Sesame Street meme in which Elmo is the monster in the mirror, telling kids that they are ok – to an article I just found called "Covid-19 is our monster and our mirror."
All of which, I think, points to something important about folklore and magical thinking: the what (mirrors are magical) has a way of overriding the why and the how. There is something interesting, uncanny, hard to grasp: dreams, reflections, coincidences. Around these basic themes stories grow like thorny vines around Sleeping Beauty, reflecting the preoccupations of the people who tell the stories. A mirror can hold a shaman's wind horse or a Confucian gentleman's great-grandfather; it can be a symbol of faith or self-loathing; it can be an instrument of power or a crack that allows in demons from hell. It can be, really, anything we can imagine.
Very, very thought-provoking.
ReplyDeleteTwo comments:
1) I tend not to think that horror is just, or even in large part, a way to make our safe lives more interesting; partly, I suppose, this difference is yet another manifestation of of John and mine's ongoing discussion of how unhappy safety leaves us, with me not finding safety makes me unhappy at all. But, more important, I think modern horror, including its fandom, is very directly an expression of the very same deep psychological impulses that motivated the religious and magical thinking you're talking about, long before we lived safe lives, including that fascination (in the fullest sense of the word) with the uncanny. There's so much of the horror-mode in culture now because, for many, religion itself no longer satisfies that. Victoria Nelson, _The Secret Life of Puppets_, makes some good arguments in this vein. Not surprisingly, she dates the big change to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it's not just to do with the rise of modern science. The general movement against "enthusiasm" that became an important part of both Protestant and Catholic adherent-management in the seventeenth century is also important--not to mention, perhaps, a general disgust with religion as too much about embattled identity.
2) "There are other worlds" is a powerful way to describe magical thinking and religious thinking. I wonder how far one could see Platonism as a way to answer intractable philosophical problems by a quasi-magical, or even really quite magical, species of fiat. Many later manifestations of Platonism were, of course, closely bound up with magic. But I wonder if that magic element goes hard straight back to the founder.
Incidentally, Nelson has a whole subtheme about manikins, puppets, automata, and similar things as foci for uncanny fascination, much like you're doing with mirrors. But I found that part of her book frustrating. She doesn't feel it the way you're doing in this post (or maybe she just hasn't found anything as cool as that Maya painting).
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you're right that our fascination with horror flows largely from our attraction to the uncanny or otherworldly, which religion now fails to satisfy. But I still find it interesting that horror seems to me to have a much bigger place in our culture than, say, stories about guardian angels. Why is one mass culture and the other relegated to sappy Chrstian web sites?
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you liked this; I am experimenting with writing about magic. I have a vague notion that I may spend the first few years of my retirement working on a project with the tentative title "The European Magical Tradition," perhaps a series of YouTube videos. As you know, I think a lot of magic is random vague nonsense, so one of the challenges for me is to find ways to keep the discourse somewhat magical and uncanny, not a debunking sort of mode.
This could be extremely popular if you take good care of the production values.
ReplyDelete