The Memory of the Mirror

Mirrors remember their previous owners

This bizarre event took place in France in 1997. It would be fine about 500 years ago, during the struggle with witches, but it happened at the end of the 20th century, the most rational century. The event was extraordinary: antique dealers addressed journalists with the request to warn the collectors of antique things not to buy the mirror, which had the inscription Louis Arpo 1743 on the frame. They said that the mirror had killed almost 38 people during the long history of its existence

Antique dealers decided to address the media as the mirror had disappeared. It was found missing when a criminal law professor asked to take photographs of the mirror to show them at his lectures. "The mirror was kept at a police station after it had killed two people in 1910. However, someone penetrated in storage facilities and stole several things, including the mirror. We think that the thief will try sell it, that is why we are trying to provide as much information as possible about the mirror to warn potential customers of the danger," a spokesman for the French association of antique collectors said.

The mentioned mirror provoked a cerebral hemorrhage for the people that were looking into it. Some people believed that the mirror was reflecting rays of light in a specific way, whereas other believed that it happened because of the mirror's negative energy that it had saved for hundreds of years. There were some people, who thought that the mirror was a window to the other world. There is no common opinion about the antique mirror, but people still try to explain the reason of mysterious deaths that it had caused.

A mirror is like a magnet: it is capable of attracting poisonous evaporation and accumulate it on its surface. Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) had a rather scary theory about it: "Old women, who do not have warm blood in their veins, who have horrible smell coming out of their mouth and eyes, find that their mirrors become blurred, because moisture drops of their heavy breath stick to the clear cold glass. If their saliva drops on fabric, the fabric decays. If a child sleeps with an old woman, its days will become shorter and her days will become longer, and a child will die." (Tommasso Campanella, Del senso delle cose e della magia, IV, 14).

French scientists discussed the same question in a hundred years too. A document of the Paris Academy of Sciences, dated 1739, runs: "When an old woman approaches a clear mirror and spends a lot of time in front of it, a mirror absorbs a lot of her bad juices. The chemical analysis showed, the juices were very poisonous."

Some researchers use this property of mirrors to explain a superstition, which says that one should not come up to a mirror during an ailment. Poisonous substances that a sick person breathes out stay on the glass of a mirror and then evaporate, causing damage to the health of the people, who inhale the poisonous air.

However, it was not the chemical sediment of the Louis Arpo mirror that had killed its owners. Poisonous substances on a mirror can be washed away with water very easily. The mirror has been certainly washed many times. However, a mirror might save some information - it would not be insane to suppose that a mirror has a memory.

A mirror in a house witnesses all events that happen there. A mirror reflects dramas and tragedies, stupid and funny things, it reflects beauty and ugliness. At times, people wish a mirror could show episodes hat it used to reflect years ago, to playback the past. A. Vulis wrote in his book Literary Mirrors: "A mirror is always the present, without the past and without the future. A mirror is the incarnation of amnesia.  It is a streaming moment that disappears forever once it has been reflected."

It is really very hard to believe that a mirror is like a video camera, but it is not excluded that mirrors are capable of remembering something. Visual images are not likely, but it is possible that a mirror can "remember" peculiar features of its owner, like other things can. Doctor Hans Berendt from Israel conducted an interesting experiment with a woman, who had extraordinary sensual abilities. He asked her to explain the feelings that she experienced from unknown objects inside two identical boxes. The woman said that she had felt a strange feeling of a push from one box, but the thing in the other box was completely different. She said, there was something ancient about it, a dilapidated amphitheatre with huge ancient amphoras. When the doctor opened the boxes, the woman found windowpane pieces in one of them and ancient Roman coins that archaeologists had found in Bethlehem. Glass fragments in the first box were taken from a window that was broken with a powerful blast in Jerusalem that had killed dozens of people.

If all things have certain memory properties, a mirror is not an exception, especially when it comes to the mirrors with silvery amalgams, because silver is the metal of a strong informational capacity. One shall assume that a mirror can radiate the information that it has saved before. This radiation might affect a human being.

One should be very careful before hanging an old mirror in a room. It might be filled with the negative energy. An old mirror with rich history often causes strange dreams full of bizarre images, it might evoke unusual desires, inexplicable fears and so on. Most likely, a mirror remembers the condition, emotions and feelings that a human being had. Most likely, a mirror keeps the information, and remembers not images, but the meaning of them. This meaning might affect the mind of a new owner.

Vitaly Pravdivtsev