Mirror, Mirror & A History Of The Human Love Affair With Reflection

468 Pages·2004·10.75 MB·English

by  Pendergrast

MIRROR | MIRROR
ALSO BY MARK PENDERGRAST
For God, Country & Coca-Cola:
The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink
and the Company That Makes It
Uncommon Grounds:
The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
Victims of Memory:
Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives
MIRROR | MIRROR
A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection
MARK PENDERGRAST
A Member of the Perseus Book Group
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2003 by Mark Pendergrast
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group Hardback first published in 2003 by
Basic Books
Paperback first published in 2004 by Basic Books All rights reserved. Printed in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pendergrast, Mark.
Mirror mirror : a history of the human love affair with reflection / Mark
Pendergrast.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-465-05470-6 (HC) ISBN 0-465-05471-4 (pbk)
1. Mirrors—History. 2. Reflection (Optics). 3. Reflecting telescopes. I. Title.
TP867.P46 2003
535'.323—dc21
2003002544
2003002544
04 05 06 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents,
Nan and Britt Pendergrast,
mirrors for those who seek peace and
justice in a difficult world.
The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live alone and
smash his mirror.
ANONYMOUS FRENCH PROVERB
Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors. Strange that the ordinary,
worn-out ways of every day encompass the imagined and endless universe
woven by reflections.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
They gave us things like solid water, which were sometimes brilliant as the sun
and which sometimes showed us our own faces. We thought them the children of
the Great Spirit.
CHIEF CAMEAHWAIT OF THE SHOSHONE ,
August 1805, upon receiving mirrors from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Mirrors symbolize reality, the sun, the earth, and its four corners, its surface, its
depths, and all of its peoples.
CARLOS FUENTES
INTRODUCTION
Every morning there you are again. It’s a ritual that humans perform daily,
something so commonplace that we hardly notice it. Perhaps you’re a little
bleary-eyed, but that’s you in the mirror, all right, maybe with a toothbrush in
your mouth or a washcloth in your hand, trying to reorient yourself for another
round in life’s everyday affairs. Like most people, you’ve become so
accustomed to this morning routine that you rarely think about it. Yet it’s almost
unique in the animal kingdom, because the ability to recognize the creature in
the mirror as you seems to be limited to the higher primates and, perhaps,
dolphins and elephants. Other animals see only a rival or a friend.
Mirrors are meaningless until someone looks into them. Thus, a history of the
mirror is really the history of looking, and what we perceive in these magical
surfaces can tell us a great deal about ourselves—whence we have come, what
we imagine, how we think, and what we yearn for. The mirror appears
throughout the human drama as a means of self-knowledge or self-delusion. We
have used the reflective surface both to reveal and to hide reality, and mirrors
have found their way into religion, folklore, literature, art, magic, and science.
Humans have been intrigued with mirrors since prehistoric times. The
ancients—Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs—buried their
dead with magical metal or stone reflectors, to hold the soul, ward off evil
spirits, or allow the body, before taking the final trip to the afterlife, to check its
hair.
Because a round mirror can both reflect the sun and become a miniature
imitation of it, early metal reflectors came to be associated with sun gods. At the
same time, however, mirrors as secular objects were used to apply cosmetics,
foreshadowing thousands of years of people peering into the “flattering glass.”
Yet the magic of mirrors remained. Scryers (gazers into reflective surfaces) in
the Middle Ages used them to look into the mystic future; in this way, mirrors
served as a portal to the divine or demonic. Magicians manipulated them to
create illusions to impress kings and commoners.
And from the earliest times, mirrors have also been used for scientific
applications. According to legend, Archimedes used mirrors to set fire to Roman