Why Mirrors Were Covered
Veiled in mourning, turned from storms: what mirrors meant to a household's spirit.
Of all the objects in an old house, none was treated with more suspicion than the one that showed you your own face. Mirrors were veiled in mourning, turned to the wall during storms, kept out of sickrooms, and denied to infants for a full year. The household was not confused about what glass and silver do. It was worried about what a reflection is.
The oldest logic held that a reflection was a piece of the soul made briefly visible, which explains most of the customs at a stroke. Covering mirrors in a house of mourning, a practice kept in Victorian parlors and in the Jewish tradition of shiva alike, protected the departing soul from being caught in the glass, and spared the grieving the vanity of their own reflection in a week that belonged to someone else. Breaking a mirror damaged the soul it had been holding pieces of, seven years being the time a soul took to renew. And a storm outside was no time to keep a soul's twin shining in the room, drawing attention.
The Gentler Reading
Modern eyes can find these customs morbid, but sit with them and they resolve into etiquette. The covered mirror said: this week, we do not perform. The turned mirror said: tonight, the household closes inward. They were instructions for attention, telling everyone in the house where the eyes and the heart should be.
A mirror, the old customs insist, is not furniture. It is an opening, and like every opening in a house, it deserves to be tended, and occasionally, respectfully, closed.
You need not veil anything. But the next time you drape a cloth over a mirror while moving house, or feel briefly uneasy passing one in the dark, know that you are keeping a very old appointment: the understanding that the house holds more than its inventory, and the glass, sometimes, shows it.
Tend Every Opening
Pieces for the household that minds its doors, its windows, and yes, its glass.
Enter the Sanctum