THE MAGIC MIRROR.
There is an old superstition, current, probably, in most parts of the
country, that the breaking of a mirror will be followed by bad
luck--usually a death in the family. This is, doubtless, the survival of
a still older superstition--the belief in certain magic qualities of the
mirror, which enabled it in certain circumstances to reflect the distant
and to forecast the future. Nor was this superstition so childish as
were some other popular delusions of old, for it had a certain
philosophic basis. It is the peculiar property of the mirror to
represent truth; to reproduce faithfully that which is; to show us
ourselves as others see us. This is the idea expressed by Hamlet: 'To
hold the mirror up to Nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her
own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.'
The mirror has been, from time immemorial, a favourite form of charm for
the exorcism of devils, and, indeed, to this day some of the African
tribes believe that the best defence they have against their extremely
ugly devil is a mirror. If they keep one at hand, the devil must see
himself in it before he can touch them, and be so terrified at his own
ugliness that he will turn tail and flee.
We may take this symbolically--that a man shrinks from his worst self
when it is revealed to him; but the untutored mind is prone to mistake
symbol for fact. In this way, while the ancient philosophers may have
used the mirror as a symbol of the higher nature of man, so polished and
clarified that it showed him his lower nature in all its deformity, the
crowd came to regard the crystal as an actual instrument of divination.
Some of the oldest romances in the world have to do with the magical
operation of the mirror. In the Gesta Romanorum there is a story of a
knight who went to Palestine, and who while there was shown by an
Eastern magician in a mirror what was going on at home. In the Arabian
Nights the story of Prince Ahmed has a variant, an ivory tube through
which could be discovered the far-distant--a sort of anticipation of Sam
Weller's 'double million magnifying gas microscope of hextra power.'
In the story of Prince Zeyn Alasnam, the enchanted mirror was able to
reflect character, and was called the Touchstone of Virtue. Here again
we have Hamlet's idea of holding the mirror up to Nature. The young
King, Zeyn Alasnam, had eight beautiful statues of priceless value, and
he wanted a ninth to make up his set. The difficulty was to find one
beautiful enough; but the Prince of Spirits promised to supply one as
soon as Zeyn should bring him a maiden at least fifteen years old, and
of perfect beauty; only the maiden must not be vain of her charms, and
she must never have told an untruth. Zeyn employed his magic mirror, and
for a long time without success, as it always became blurred when he
looked into it in the presence of a girl. At last he found one whose
image was faithfully and brilliantly reflected--whose modesty and
truthfulness were attested by the mirror. He took her with reluctance to
the Prince of Spirits, because he had fallen in love with her himself;
but his faithfulness to the contract was duly rewarded. On returning
home, he found that the ninth statue, placed on its pedestal by the
Prince of Spirits according to promise, was no cold marble, but the
peerless and virtuous maiden whom he had discovered by means of his
mirror.
Paracelsus, in one of his treatises on Magic, gives the following
account of the uses to which 'the witches and evil spirits' sometimes
put the mirror.
'They take a mirror set in a wooden frame and put it into a tub of
water, so that it will swim on the top with its face directed towards
the sky. On the top of the mirror, and encircling the glass, they lay a
cloth saturated with blood, and thus they expose it to the influence of
the moon; and this evil influence is thrown towards the moon, and
radiating again from the moon, it may bring evil to those who love to
look at the moon. The rays of the moon, passing through the ring upon
the mirror, become poisoned, and poison the mirror; the mirror throws
back the poisoned ether into the atmosphere, and the moon and the mirror
poison each other, in the same manner as two malicious persons, by
looking at each other, poison each other's souls with their eyes. If a
mirror is strongly poisoned in this manner, the witch takes good care of
it; and if she desires to injure someone, she takes a waxen image made
in his name, she surrounds it with a cloth spotted with blood, and
throws the reflex of the mirror through the opening in the middle upon
the head of the figure, or upon some other part of its body, using at
the same time her evil imagination and curses; and the man whom the
image represents may then have his vitality dried up, and his blood
poisoned by that evil influence, and he may become diseased and his body
covered with boils.'
This, of course, is not divination, but sorcery.
Paracelsus gives very minute directions for the making of a magic
mirror. The material should be the 'electrum magicum,' which is a
compound of ten parts of pure gold, ten of silver, five of copper, two
of tin, two of lead, one part of powdered iron, and five parts of
mercury. When the planets Saturn and Mercury conjoin, the lead has to be
melted and the mercury added. Then the metal must cool, while you wait
for a conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn and Mercury; when that occurs,
you melt the amalgam of lead and mercury, and add the tin, previously
melted in a separate crucible, at the exact moment of conjunction. Again
you wait for a conjunction of either of the above-named planets with
the Sun, when you add the gold; with the Moon, when you add the silver;
with Venus, when you add the copper. Finally, when a conjunction of
either of the planets occurs with Mars, you must complete your mixture
with the powdered iron, and stir up the whole molten mass with a dry rod
of witch-hazel.
Thus far your metal; but the mirror is not made yet. It must be of about
two inches diameter, and must be founded in moulds of fine sand at the
moment when a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus occurs. The mirror must
be smoothed with a grindstone and polished with tripoly and a piece of
lime-wood; but all the operations must be conducted only when the
planetary influences are favourable.
By selecting the proper hours, three different mirrors may be prepared,
and then, at a time of conjunction of two 'good' planets, while the Sun
or Moon 'stands on the house of the lord of the hour of your birth,' the
three mirrors should be placed in pure well-water and left for an hour.
After this they may be wrapped in clean linen and kept ready for use.
With a mirror made in this way from the 'electrum magicum,' Paracelsus
says:
'You may see the events of the past and the present, absent friends or
enemies, and see what they are doing. You may see in it any object you
may desire to see, and all the doings of men in daytime or at night. You
may see in it anything that has been ever written down, said, or spoken
in the past, and also see the person who said it, and the causes that
made him say what he did, and you may see in it anything, however secret
it may have been kept.'
Mirrors made of the 'electrum magicum' are warranted antipathetic to all
evil influences, because there is hidden in the metal a 'heavenly power
and influence of the seven planets.'
The plastic and creative power of the mind is the power of imagination;
but the power of imagination is, or should be, controlled by the will.
It is not alone the mediaeval dabblers in the occult who have adopted, or
endeavoured to adopt, various means for suspending the will and making
the imagination passive.
The ancient Pythoness, as Dr. Franz Hartmann, the modern German exponent
of the Science of Magic, pointed out, attempted to heighten her
receptivity by the inhalation of noxious vapours; uncivilized peoples
use poison, or the maddening whirl of the dance; others use opium, Indian
hemp, or other narcotics--all for the same purpose, to suspend the will,
render the mind a blank, and excite the brain so as to produce morbid
fancies and illusions. The fortune-teller and the clairvoyant employ
methods of their own for concentrating their attention, so as produce a
condition of mental passivity. The Indian adept prides himself on being
able to extract volition and suspend imagination by the mere exercise of
will.
A favourite device to bring about mental passivity has always been by
staring at mirrors, or crystal, or sheets of water, or even pools of ink.
'There are numerous prescriptions for the preparation of magic mirrors,'
says Dr. Hartmann in his work on Magic, 'but the best magic mirror will
be useless to him who is not able to see clairvoyantly, while the
natural clairvoyant may call that faculty into action by concentrating
his mind on any particular spot, a glass of water, ink, a crystal, or
anything else. For it is not in the mirror where such things are seen,
but in the mind; the mirror merely serves to assist in the entering of
that mental state which is necessary to produce clairvoyant sight. The
best of all mirrors is the soul of man, and it should be always kept
pure, and be protected against dust, and dampness, and rust, so that it
may not become tarnished, but remain perfectly clear, and able to
reflect the light of the divine spirit in its original purity.'
A German writer of the fifteenth century takes a less favourable view of
what he calls pyromancy, although pyromancy is really divination by
fire. He reports the practices of certain Masters of Magic, who made
children look into a wretched mirror for the purpose of obtaining
information in an unholy manner. 'Young boys are said to behold future
things and all things, in a crystal. Base, desperate, and faint-hearted
Christians practise it, to whom the shadow and the phantom of the devil
are dearer than the truth of God. Some take a clear and beautifully
polished crystal, or beryl, which they consecrate and keep clean, and
treat with incense, myrrh, and the like. And when they propose to
practise their art, they wait for a clear day, or select some clean
chamber in which are many candles burning. The Masters then bathe, and
take the pure child into the room with them, and clothe themselves in
pure white garments, and sit down and speak in magic sentences, and then
burn their magic offering, and make the boy look into the stone, and
whisper in his ears secret words which have, as they think, some holy
import, but which are verily words of the devil.'
A sixteenth-century German tells of a man at Elbingen, in Prussia, who
'predicted hidden truths' by means of a mirror, and sold the knowledge
to his customers. Many crystal-seeing old hags are referred to as being
upon terms of intimacy with Black Kaspar. Indeed, in German literature,
both historical, philosophical, legendary, and romantic, we find endless
references to the magic mirror and the divining crystal.
Modern romancists still find dramatic use for the old superstitions.
Quite recently a novel of the present day centred its interest upon an
ancient mirror, which exchanged its reflection for the mind of him who
gazed into it--a practical and startling realization of the idea that
the glass reveals one's true self. Then, not to multiply incidents,
Wilkie Collins, in The Moonstone, introduces what Mr. Rudyard Kipling in
another story calls the 'ink-pool'; and readers of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti will recall to mind the doings of the Spirits of the Beryl.
In a large number of stories the magic mirror is not a looking-glass at
all. But the beryl, the ink-pool, Dr. Dee's famous spherical speculum,
the rock crystal, or even a glass of water, may all, according to the
adepts, have the same properties as Vulcan's mirror, in which Penelope,
the wife of Ulysses, beheld, according to Sir John Davies, a vision of
all the wonder and grandeur of Queen Elizabeth's Court to be. Even a
polished sword-blade has been asserted to have made an effective magic
mirror, and it is recorded that Jacob Boehme penetrated into the
innermost secrets of nature and the hearts of men by means of a tin cup.
As to cups, the Septuagint gives one to understand that the cup placed
by Joseph in the sack of Benjamin in Egypt was not an ordinary
drinking-vessel, but a divining-cup. Now, the way of divining with a cup
was to fill it with pure water, and to read the images which were then
reflected.
Some writers have supposed, from the mention of Urim and Thummim in
Exodus, that divination by mirror was a recognised institution among the
Jews. Urim signifies 'lights,' and Thummim 'reflections,' and the names
were applied to the six bright and six dark precious stones on the
breastplate of the high priest when he went to seek special revelations.
Cambuscan's mirror was, according to Chaucer, of Oriental origin. It was
given by the King of Tartary to the King of Araby, and it seemed to
possess all the virtues of several kinds of magic mirrors. Thus it
showed whether love was returned, whether an individual confronted with
it were friend or foe, and what trouble was in store for those who
consulted it. Merlin's mirror, also called Venus's looking-glass, had
some of these properties, but was made in Wales, and was given by
Merlin to King Ryence. It revealed what was being done by friend or foe
at a distance, and it also enabled the fair Britomart to read the
features, and also the name, of her future husband.
The consultation of a pool, on certain special occasions, for the
lineaments of 'the coming man,' has been a common enough practice with
love-sick damsels in much more recent times.
The wonderful looking-glass of Lao, described by Lien Chi Altangi in
Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, reflected the mind as well as the
body, and the Emperor Chusi used to make his ladies dress both their
heads and their hearts before it every morning. Great, however, as are
the Chinese in divination, and numerous as are their superstitions, we
do not find, _pace_ Oliver Goldsmith, that the mirror occupies any
prominent place in their magic.
One of the most famous dealers in catoptromancy (divination by mirror)
in this country was Dr. John Dee, who flourished about the middle of the
sixteenth century. He had a speculum called the Shew Stone, and
sometimes the Holy Stone, with which he divined by the aid of a medium
named Kelly. This Kelly was a notoriously bad character, so his example
does not carry out the popular idea that the seer must be a stainless
child, or some absolutely pure-minded being. Dr. Dee professed to have a
number of regular spirit-visitors, whom he described with much
circumstantial minuteness, and thus his mirror-magic seems to have
possessed more of the character of spiritualistic manifestations than
of the usual Oriental crystallomancy.
The famous Cagliostro--Prince of Scoundrels, as Carlyle called him--used
a bottle of pure water, into which he directed a child to gaze, with
results which were not always satisfactory.
The Orientalist, Lane, published some sixty years ago, or more, a
circumstantial narrative of an experience he had with an Egyptian
magician, along with Mr. Salt, a British Consul. Invocations were
liberally used, in order to summon the two genii of the magician, and
verses were recited from the Koran, in order that the eyes of the
medium--a boy--should be opened in a supernatural manner. The magician
selected one at random from a group of boys, and drew in the palm of the
boy's right hand a magic square, inscribed with Arabic figures. He then
poured ink into the centre, and told the boy to gaze fixedly, while he
himself proceeded to drop more written invocations, on slips of paper,
into a chafing-dish.
For some time the boy saw nothing but the reflection of the magician,
and then he began to describe various scenes. At last Lane asked that
Lord Nelson should be called up, and the boy said that he saw a man in
dark-blue clothes, with his left arm across his breast. It was explained
that the boy saw things as in a mirror, and that Nelson's empty right
sleeve worn across the breast naturally appeared in the glass as the
left arm. Now, the boy may have heard of Nelson, but could scarcely have
seen him, though the figure of so famous a man must have been familiar
to the magician. Hypnotism has, therefore, been suggested as the
explanation of what Lane witnessed, and which seemed so miraculous at
the time.
Many scholars, philosophers, and scientific students of mediaeval times,
who had no pretence to magic, had yet firm faith in the power of
mirrors, constructed in a special manner and under auspicious planetary
influences, to reveal both the distant-present and the future.
One of the modern adepts was a French magician, who foretold by his
mirror the death of a Prince, and the regency of the Duc d'Orleans.
There are many published prescriptions for the making of a magic mirror,
but that which has already been given from Paracelsus is a fair specimen
of the ultra-scientific method. Among directions for the use of the
crystal may be cited those of Barth:
'When a crystal has been ground and polished, it is dedicated to some
spirit or other; this is called its consecration. Before being used, it
is charged--that is, an invocation is made to the spirit, wherein a
vision is requested of the things that one wishes to experience.
Ordinarily, a young person is chosen to look into the glass and behold
the prayed-for vision. After a little time the crystal becomes enveloped
in a cloud, and a tiny vision appears, which represents in miniature the
persons, scenes, and things that are necessary to supply the required
information. When the information has been obtained, the crystal is
discharged, and after receiving thanks for the services he has
performed, the spirit is dismissed.'
In modern crystal-gazing and mirror-reading, however, there is no
invocation.
An American spiritualist says that he once put a crystal into the hands
of a lady who knew nothing about its reputed virtues, but who
straightway began to describe a scene which she saw in it, and which
turned out afterwards to be a simultaneous incident at Trebizond. The
mediumistic influence of the spirit of a North American Indian may not
commend the story to non-spiritualists.
The experiences of the Countess Wurmbrand, as related in her curious
book, Visionen im Wasserglass, are more matter-of-fact, perhaps, but
were also assisted by a mysterious spirit, who enabled her to read
pictures in the glass and to describe them to her husband. She was more
successful in her time than more recent experimenters and psychologists
of her own country have been since.
The Society for Psychical Research have given much attention to the
subject, and have reported some remarkable observations--especially
those of Miss Goodrich, a lady who has made several scores of
experiments of her own in crystal-reading, always taking notes
immediately. She tried the back of a watch, a glass of water, a mirror,
and other reflecting surfaces, before arriving at the conclusion that
polished rock crystal affords the best speculum for divination.
Having reached this point, the lady draped her selected crystal in
black, set it where no surrounding objects could be reflected in it, and
sought it when in search of light and leading. Sometimes her
consultations were very practical. Thus, one finds among her notes:
'I had carelessly destroyed a letter without preserving the address of
my correspondent. I knew the county, and searching a map, recognised the
name of the town, one unfamiliar to me, but which I was sure I should
know when I saw it. But I had no clue to the name of the house or
street, till at last it struck me to test the value of the crystal as a
means of recalling forgotten knowledge. A very short inspection supplied
me with "Hibbs House," in gray letters on a white ground, and having
nothing better to suggest from any other source, I risked posting my
letter to the address so strangely supplied. A day or two brought an
answer headed "Hibbs House" in gray letters on a white ground.'
Let us take an example of another of Miss Goodrich's crystal-readings,
and let it be remembered that they are all reported as experiments of
our own day:
'One of my earliest experiences was of a picture, perplexing and wholly
unexpected--a quaint oak chair, an old hand, a worn black coat-sleeve
resting on the arm of the chair--slowly recognised as a recollection of
a room in a country vicarage which I had not entered, and but seldom
recalled, since I was a child of ten. But whence came this vision? What
association has conjured up this picture? What have I done to-day? At
length the clue is found. I have to-day been reading Dante, first
enjoyed with the help of our dear old vicar many a year ago.'
And again: 'I happened to want the date of Ptolemy Philadelphus, which I
could not recall, though feeling sure that I knew it, and that I
associated it with some event of importance. When looking in the
crystal, some hours later, I found a picture of an old man, with long,
white hair and beard, dressed like a Lyceum Shylock, and busy writing in
a large book with tarnished massive clasps. I wondered much who he was,
and what he could possibly be doing, and thought it a good opportunity
of carrying out a suggestion which had been made to me of examining
objects in the crystal with a magnifying-glass. The glass revealed to me
that my old gentleman was writing in Greek, though the lines faded away
as I looked, all but the characters he had last traced, the Latin
numerals LXX. Then it flashed into my mind that he was one of the Jewish
Elders at work on the Septuagint, and that this date, 277 B.C., would
serve equally well for Ptolemy Philadelphus. It may be worth while to
add, though the fact was not in my conscious memory at the moment, that
I had once learnt a chronology on a mnemonic system which substituted
letters for figures, and the _memoria technica_ for this date was, "Now
Jewish Elders indite a Greek copy."'
One may, perhaps, find a simple and easy explanation of Miss Goodrich's
mirror-reading, in a theory of unconscious cerebration. The crystal
simply assisted her memory, and recalled incidents and scenes, just as
a chance odour, a bar of music, a word, a look, a name, will often do
for most of us. Clearly there is nothing necessarily either magic or
spiritualistic in this particular example of the magic mirror.
There are, however, some other experiments recorded which seem to be
only explainable on a theory of telepathy; but Mr. Max Dessoir,
commenting on the evidence of Miss Goodrich in an American Review,
attributes the whole phenomena merely to 'revived memory.'
This is all very well as to past events, but what shall we say to a case
such as the following, among Miss Goodrich's experiments?
'In January last I saw in the crystal the figure of a man crouching at a
small window, and looking into the room from the outside. I could not
see his features, which appeared to be muffled, but the crystal was
particularly dark that evening, and the picture being an unpleasant one,
I did not persevere. I concluded the vision to be a result of a
discussion in my presence of the many stories of burglary with which the
newspapers had lately abounded, and reflected with a passing
satisfaction that the only windows in the house divided into four panes,
as were those of the crystal picture, were in the front attic, and
almost inaccessible. Three days later a fire broke out in that very
room, which had to be entered from outside through the window, the face
of the fireman being covered with a wet cloth as a protection from the
smoke, which rendered access through the door impossible.'
Was this coincidence, or prevision, or what Mr. Dessoir calls the
'falsification of memory'? The thing was either a miracle, which none of
us is prepared to accept, or the after-confusion of a vague foreboding
with an actual occurrence in the mind of the observer. Mr. Dessoir
suggested another explanation of crystal pictures in the doctrine of the
double consciousness of the human soul; but that opens up another
subject.
While we have seen that mirror and crystal-reading is one of the most
ancient of occult practices, we have also seen that it is practised in
our own country even at this day. Moreover, it is said that there is in
England a wholesale manufacture of magic mirrors as a regular
industry--the site of which, however, the present writer is unable to
specify.