Black Cats and Evil Eyes by Chloe Rhodes

Author:Chloe Rhodes [Chloe, Rhodes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843179160
Publisher: Michael O' Mara Books

COVERING MIRRORS AFTER A DEATH IN THE HOME

In the superstition-riddled sixteenth century, mirrors were seen as portals into an unnatural, alternative world presided over by the Devil. Anyone showing the sin of vanity by staring for too long at their reflection risked seeing a vision of Satan standing beside them. This was particularly terrifying in times when many people believed their reflection to be an embodiment of their soul (see Breaking a Mirror), and while their soul was outside their own body, it was vulnerable to being snatched, either by the Devil himself, or by the departing spirit of the recently deceased.

Their body too, was under threat of possession by another soul while their own was trapped in the looking glass, and it seems that a combination of all these fears fuelled the custom of covering mirrors in a house where someone had died. The earliest known reference in print to the practice comes from the 1780s and it seems to have been prevalent throughout the nineteenth century and was still common in the early 1900s. In his 1911 study of mythology The Golden Bough, the Scottish anthropologist, Sir James George Frazer gives the most thorough explanation of the practice to be found in print: ‘It is feared that the soul, projected out of the person in the shape of his reflection in the mirror, may be carried off by the ghost of the departed, which is commonly supposed to linger about the house till the burial.’

Other variations on the theme co-existed with this one, including the belief that if you look into a mirror in a room in which someone has recently died, an apparition of the corpse looking over your shoulder will appear in the reflection. This belief is common in Europe and America, where mirrors were used to catch ghosts. An old New Orleans voodoo technique was employed to trick spirits into being captured: a large mirror was placed in a doorway so that the ghost would walk into it thinking it was entering a room. Instead it would be trapped forever behind the glass.

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