#van genep

Tenacious belief everywhere in France even today that the mirror absorbs vital energy, so the mirrors are covered during a death; and that breaking it brings misfortune and desolation.

Formerly made of polished metal (bronze, copper, silver), the Greeks named this divinatory art "catoptromancy" (from "katoptron", "mirror") and Pausanias (…) tells that there was a fountain in Achaia, in which a mirror hanging from a thread was lowered in order to read a patient's chances of survival. When one went up the mirror, and according to the content of the reflection it presaged health or a future death.

Abbot Thiers gives an example of the use of the divinatory mirror in popular magic : "It will be necessary to write with its own blood on its forehead, the name of the three Kings, and the hour of our death will be written on the first mirror in which we will look at ourselves."

Magic mirrors, metallic or crystal, are used by magicians of the Middle Ages, but they will be especially in vogue during the Renaissance. Catherine de Medici claimed to see the actions of her enemies there and the obsidian stone of the magician John Dee is in the British Museum in London.

In the 19th century, Colin de Plancy in his Infernal Dictionary describes sorcerers who "bring the devil into a large mirror so that he shows the past, the present, the future."

Young girls must consult their mirror in total darkness, after having placed it on a cushion, at the first stroke of midnight, to see the face of their future husband.

In Loire Atlantique, the mirror can also show a priest or a nun, indicating that one will end up in a convent; or else an obstacle across a path, which will announce an approaching death.

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