Mirrors have a magical tradition all their own. All over the world there are superstitions involving the human reflection, suggesting that perhaps the person we see in the mirror is quite capable of taking on a life of her own if we’re not very careful.
When I was young, children were warned that if they looked in the mirror too much ‘The Devil would come and get them.’ There were all sorts of strange rituals requiring you to look in the mirror at midnight and promising you would see your future husband or the year of your death if you did.
Indeed, so nervous were people about ‘mirror power’ that when someone in the house died, mirrors were either covered or turned to face the wall until after the funeral. The thinking behind this was that the soul of the deceased might get caught up in the mirror and remain to haunt the family.
About twenty years ago (it might be a little more) I remember reading of an experiment where volunteers were sat in front of a flexible metal mirror which was controlled by four motors. The motors could be themselves controlled by the subject. At first, when they sat in front of the mirror, the volunteers were faced with a distorted image, like you get in a fairground Hall of Mirrors. The purpose of the exercise was to manipulate the motors to produce a normal looking reflection. In other words – do you know what you look like?
The results were interesting. Some people found the distorted images gave them headaches, made them feel dizzy or sick. One apparently fainted. And many, the ones who persevered admitted they had forgotten what they looked like and wanted to look in a real mirror to check!
Do we really need a mirror to tell us who we are? Possibly we do. Maybe this explains how some people’s self image is so terribly low that the media can sell the idea of skeletal models to them. Maybe it explains how easy it is to distort reality.
The idea that if you break a mirror you will suffer seven years’ bad luck must also be rooted in the idea that a mirror contains something of the self. If the mirror is broken, something of the self must have been damaged along with it.
So we can take this thinking a little further – if the image we have of ourselves is distorted deliberately by a third party, our very self can be affected because in reality most of us don’t really know much about ourselves. The experiment above suggests that some people (perhaps many) aren’t even sure what they look like. In these days of digital photography and photographic enhancements and airbrushing, it might be fun to present someone with several pictures of themselves, each subtly altered and ask them to choose which was the ‘real’ one. The results could be very enlightening!
But on a more serious note, such image manipulation, amongst a population that aspires to be airbrushed to perfection yet lacks true knowledge of itself could become a powerful weapon in the hands of unscrupulous politicians.
Perhaps it’s time we became afraid….
Seeking the Green by Tylluan Penry, published soon by Capall Bann. For more info please watch this space!