General Editor's Preface: How Mirrors Enable Different Ways of Seeing

With this issue on shimmering magic, the first comprised entirely of essays in the areas of anthropology and folklore, we are very pleased to launch what we hope will be a more vigorous collaboration between anthropologists, folklorists, and the historians who have supplied the bulk of the journal's content up to now. Raquel Romberg, one of the associate editors of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, volunteered as guest editor for this issue and arranged a lively discussion of shimmering materials, substances, and objects as they are deployed in ritual situations around the globe.¹ Geographically, the contributors draw on material that comes from the southern United States, from India, and from the East and West Coasts of Africa.

Ritual uses of reflecting materials are not, of course, limited to these present instances. Evidence of divination practices using a broad variety of reflective surfaces has always been widespread. Archeological evidence from Mesoamerican sites shows ritual uses for both crystal and iron ore mirrors.² Catoptromancy, or divination by means of shiny surfaces, was a common practice in classical antiquity, too,³ and reflective surfaces continued to have divinatory uses throughout the medieval period in Europe, where the material substrates are made from a wide array of both reflective and luminous objects and materials, including bowls of water or fire, crystals, precious stones, balls of glass and obsidian, oiled sword or knife blades, oiled bones, and oiled fingernails. In the Christian Middle Ages, divination practices by shiny surfaces, though prohibited, were undertaken by priests using virgin subadolescent children (usually boys), to get answers from spirits about lost, hidden, or stolen objects.⁴ Scrying practices continued in Europe, with John Dee being perhaps the most widely known early modern practitioner; but he was certainly not the only one.⁵

In medieval China, too, mirrors held interest because of their powers over spirits and foretelling properties. Eugene Wang, quoting a Daoist responsible for polishing bronze mirrors, describes some of their effects thus:

The way of the mirror is this. It multiplies and transforms, so that a single entity may become ten thousand; it makes one intelligent, so that one knows future events; it enables human mortals to meet with the myriad gods in heaven. … Finding himself in a cave, the adept ought to hang the nine-inch bright mirror on his back to ward off all the evils. Even though various demons and aged spirits are capable of metamorphosis … they are unable to change their reflections in the mirror into optical phantoms. Once they see their own reflection in the mirror, they will retreat and bow out …⁶

Interestingly, many of these same properties have been appropriated and put to use in the worlds of art and fiction, from the magic mirror of Snow White's wicked stepmother, to Lewis Carroll's classic Alice Through the Looking Glass. Among others, Borges thinks with particular acuity about the bewildering and transformative powers of mirrors in many stories and poems, including the poem "Mirrors," where he speaks of God's "ungraspable architecture,"

Reared by every dawn from the gleamOf a mirror, by darkness from a dream.⁷

Mirrors continue to fascinate with their productive capacity to flip perception, to baffle and enhance vision, allowing for personal transformation as they move viewers in and out of parallel worlds. So also by their varied illumination of the social, technological, and ritual deployments of shimmer, shine, and gleam, the articles in this issue engage the productive capacity of mirrors to enable different ways of seeing. May readers make good use of all they reveal.