Breaking a Mirror
Most early mirrors were made of metal or highly polished stone. However, whether they were used for personal care, by Greek philosophers like Socrates in an attempt to ‘know thyself” or by fortune tellers, these early mirrors did not offer a clear image and were easily scratched or dented. Fortunately, in the first century AD, the first metal coated glass mirrors were invented in Sidon (modern Lebanon), according to Pliny the Elder. Glass mirrors were much desired as they offered a more precise image and did not scratch easily. The only problem was, they were easy to break.
So the belief in breaking a piece of apparatus like a glass mirror was bound to be viewed as bad luck- but not just because of their rarity or cost. A variety of cultures in the ancient world, including Chines, Indians, and Africans as well as the Romans and Greeks all held the view that when looking in a mirror an individual’s soul became ‘stored’ in the reflected image. So if that image was destroyed by breaking the glass, so was the soul.
Ancient philosophers and ‘mirror seers’ were particularly affected by the ill-luck attributed to breaking a mirror, as they used mirrors for divination. To break the mirror while communing with the unseen was terrible luck as well as dangerous because it brutally cut the connection with the divine. This was a link that was remembered past antiquity. In his 1777 publication, “Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, the antiquarian John Brand, an observed that “breaking a looking glass is accounted a very unlucky accident. Mirrors were formerly used by Magicians in their superstitions and diabolical operations, and there was an ancient kind of divination by the looking glass.”
However, hope was at hand, and if you did break a mirror, there were ways to free your soul and dispel the bad luck by releasing the trapped spirit from the shattered pieces of glass. Many people gathered up the broken glass and grinding up the particles to free the soul. Alternatively, the fragments were buried under a tree by the light of a full moon. Enslaved Africans in America would take their shattered mirror shards and throw them into a southerly flowing river to carry the bad luck away.
While the idea that breaking a mirror is an old one, the concept of it bringing seven years bad luck is relatively recent, dates to 1851. Before this, references to misfortune from mirror breaking were non-time unspecific. The Lady of Shallot in Tennyson’s poem of 1842 suffered a very generalized kind of misery because of her cracked looking glass. However, once again, folklorists believe this specific seven-year time span stems from the Roman assumption that the body renewed itself every seven years. At least it placed a limit on the unlucky mirror breaker’s ill fortune.
Other superstitions have developed specifically averting evil in any circumstance.