September 10, 2022 • 43 mins
Smoking pools of dark reflection. Propagator of uncanny doubles. Gateway to inverse kingdom. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the world of mirrors, discussing their predecessors, their invention and way humans relate to the world on the other side. (originally published 8/5/2021)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
We're going into the Vault for an older episode of
the show. This one originally aired on August five, and
it's part one of our series about the Mirror Uh.
This is going to be a series that I think
will span all of the Vault episodes this month, So
(00:26):
settle in for part one. In those days, the world
of mirrors and the world of men were not as
they are now, separate and unconnected. They were, moreover, quite
different from one another. Neither the creatures, nor the colors,
nor the shapes of the two worlds were the same.
The two kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in peace,
(00:50):
and one could pass back and forth through mirrors. One night, however,
the people of the mirror world invaded this world. Their
strength was great, but after many bloody battles, the magic
of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. The Emperor pushed back the invaders,
imprisoned them within the mirrors, and punish them by making
(01:11):
them repeat, as though in a kind of dream, all
the actions of their human victors. He stripped them of
their strength and their own shape, and reduce them to
mere servile reflections. One day, however, they will throw off
that magical lethargy. The first to awaken will be the
fish deep in the mirror. We will perceive a very
(01:33):
faint line, and the color of this line will be
like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin
to stir. Little by little, they will differ from us.
Little by little, they will not imitate us. They will
break through the barrier of glass or metal, and this
time will not be defeated. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
(01:58):
Your Mind, the production of by Heart Radio album Hey you,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're kicking
off a series of episodes about the mirror as a
human invention. This is actually an idea that I guess
(02:19):
we talked about doing before, but but it was prompted
by a recent listener suggestion from a listener named Heather.
So thanks for the idea, Heather. Yeah, this is this
is gonna be one that will be at least two episodes,
maybe more, because there's so many different angles you can
take once you start gazing into the mirror. Uh. You
have the history of the technology, various cultural traditions involving mirrors,
(02:41):
the psychology of mirrors. So we'll just see, we'll see
how far we get and if we ever make it
back out again. You know, that opening reading from Bores
made me think, how do you know that you're not
the one inside the mirror and that the the other
side of the mirror is the real world. That's a
very bores question to ask. Yes, yeah, that that cold
opening is from animals that live in the mirror, Which
(03:04):
is a just a couple of page section in the
Book of Imaginary Beings by Jore Louis Borges, which is
a fabulous little book. I recommend anyone interested in creatures
and sort of poetic dreamlike interpretations of creatures to pick
that up. It's it's a lot of fun with Borges
writing about established creatures from different mythologies, but also as
(03:26):
in this case, seemingly you know, just dreaming up something
of his own, uh, which which I like quite a bit. Um.
He was certainly an author who was captivated by by
mirrors and additions in addition to things like dreams and mazes,
and he has other works that involved mirrors, such as
covered mirrors, and also an excellent poem simply titled Mirrors. Uh.
(03:47):
There's one passage from that that I always come back to. UH.
This goes as follows. I see them as infinite elemental
executors of an ancient pact to multiply the world, like
the act of begetting sleepless bringing doom. So is the
them there the mirrors or the creatures inside the mirrors?
(04:07):
It is? It's just the mirrors here, right, I think so.
I think he's just talking about mirrors in this case
as opposed to beings within the mirror. But I think
one of the great things about both of these were
excited here is that that is that that Borges understood
the weirdness of mirrors in a way that I think
we all connect to at times. But then we're we
(04:29):
live in such a mirrrored age that we we often
forget it. We often let the weirdness of mirrors pass
us by. UH. And it's only when we were reminded
of the strangeness of the whole scenario, UH, that that
once again we enter this kind of mind set. Also,
just generally, like borrees to to read motivations into inanimate objects.
(04:51):
But another way I wanted to get us started today
is with a very strange fact that many people may
have considered before, but many may not have. I don't
think I had really thought about this before we started
doing this episode. So I want you to start by
closing your eyes and picturing your own face. You got it, right,
You know what you look like, So you think about
(05:12):
the lines, the colors, the proportions. Um, maybe the little
asymmetries the way your hair parts, or maybe you have
a mole on one side or one iris that's a
little bit different than the other. Uh. If you're practiced
at getting photographed, you probably know you have a good side, right.
You know, most people who get their picture taken a lot,
they figure out which side of their face they like better,
(05:34):
and they kind of orient to position that one for
the camera. But now we want you to consider that
it is almost a guarantee that this face you're imagining
right now, your own face, is not really what you
look like to other people. And this is not just
because of the fuzziness of memory and imagination, but because
(05:55):
it's almost certain that your mental image of your own
face is based mostly on your experience of looking in
a mirror, and a mirror does not show you the
version of yourself that people see when they look at you, because,
as you know, the image in a mirror is reversed
your mental image of your own face, unless for some
(06:18):
reason it's based on something other than looking in a
mirror is inverted from reality. Isn't that bizarre? It is? Yeah, again,
this is something that I think most of us have
encountered since we're very young. You know, it's it's it's
one of the first sort of tricks of the mirrors
that you learn, uh, and we grow accustomed to it,
and then we forget that it's strange. Um. Another way
(06:41):
of thinking about this goes as follows. So, if you
hold a dagger in your right hand and you confront
your reflection in a mirror, like hold it out, brandish
the dagger against your reflection. Okay, you're holding it in
your right hand, but your reflection is technically holding the
dagger in its left hand. So this night against smack
(07:01):
a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious.
But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the
the idea that that you are using opposite hands to
hold it, and not merely in a reflective sense. But
if you were to like take that individual out of
the mirror, if they could actually climb out of the
mirror and stand next to you, they would be holding
their dagger in the opposite hand. Another way of looking
(07:21):
at it is that the mirror world is a world
of reversed chirality. Chirality is a term that's often used
to describe, like molecules, the handedness of molecules. So you
can have a molecule that has the same chemical constituents,
but one is the left handed orientation and the other
is the right handed orientation. The versions of images you
(07:43):
see reflected in a mirror have opposite chirality of the
versions that exist in the real world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now I have to admit I had never thought about
this dagger um explanation until I was reading about the
great person Active Glass, which was in the possession of
the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard Dr John D. And
(08:08):
as Benjamin Woolley points out in his book The Queen's
Conjure Um, this was This is one of several I
think curios that Dr D kept in his study. And
you know, amid his library. He had a famous library
of books. Um. And there's another mirror that he had
in his possession that we'll get to in a bit.
But as far as the Great perspective glass went, it
(08:29):
was said that anyone who lunged at the mirror with
a dagger or sword found their reflection lunging back at
them with like hand and weapon. And again, of course,
this is not the typical way of mirrors, and the
effect was said to be quite unsettling. You know, if
you were visiting Dr D, he would he would, he
might show you this mirror, and then when you were
you know, when you realize there was something strange about this,
(08:52):
he would explain the effect to you via mathematics of perspective.
So I found that interesting as well, especially since Dr
D was also very interested in things like divination and
um and uh and and and you know, alchemical matters. Uh.
This seems to be an artifact that he would use
to explain just merely like the mathematics of perspective and optics.
(09:14):
So it sounds like what's being described here is something
that you can actually find today known as a non
reversing mirror, sometimes called a true mirror. And this is
typically done by having two mirrors that are at a
right angle to each other, and then having the subject
stands so that they're looking at the at the vertex
where these two mirrors come together. Uh. And so the
(09:35):
way that actually works out is that the reflections of
the mirrors are reflected in the mirrors at the angles.
So what you actually see is your correct handed version
of yourself. Yeah. Now, um, one of these other mirrors
survives to this day, and we'll get to it in
a bit. But as far as I know, the Great
(09:55):
Perspective Glass either did not survive or there's no there's
no artifact that is now own as the Great Perspective Glass.
So I think it's just mostly speculation and exactly what
this mirror might have looked like. But but I was
looking around and I found that you had multiple optical
devices at the time were referred to with the term perspective.
(10:16):
And we also see this reflected in the work of
William Shakespeare. Uh, there's a the for instance, the play
Richard the Second. Uh, there's a there's a crucial scene
that involves a mirror. But there's some there's some wonderful
lines that refer to it. Quote for sorrow's eye glazed
with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects,
(10:39):
like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon show us nothing but confusion.
I to ride distinguished form. Well, I'm still trying to
sort that one out. That that is complex imagery. Yeah, yeah,
I don't think Richard the Second has really been adapted
as much, or perhaps has performed as much as some
of the other plays. Um. But it looks like there
(10:59):
was there was a recent performance of it that was
filmed um in Britain that had what I think Daniel
Tennant in it, playing the title role. But I was
looking around online to find some some footage of that
particular scene and I couldn't. I couldn't find it. So
I have to admit it's not one of the Shakespeare
plays that I'm super familiar with. I know, the movie
(11:21):
adaptation of Richard the Third with Ian McKellen as Richard,
and and it's got Jim Broadbent is a particularly bizarre Buckingham. Uh.
That's a good one. Yeah, I fondly remember that one
for sure. Now all of this reminds me of another
reality about mirrors that I think underlines just how strange
they are to us, and that is we tend to
(11:43):
not really understand what we're looking at with a mirror.
I know this is one of your favorite facts. This
has come up several times. Yeah, I have brought this
up before. Um, this is really interesting though. So back
in two thousand five, a psychology study from the University
of Liverpool judge that will tend to not really understand
how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they don't understand that the
(12:05):
location of the viewer matters and determining what is visible.
So this study investigated people's perception and knowledge of of
a planner mirror reflections. One researcher on this study, Dr
Marco Bertamini, pointed out that the Venus effect is a
great example of this. So um, the Venus effect. It
basically works like this. If you consider the seventeenth century
(12:27):
painting UH the the the Rugby Venus by Diego Velaquez,
which you can you can look up if you look
up a picture of if you just do a search
for r O K E b Y Venus, you'll see this.
It is uh a nude woman reclined on a uh
sort of a bed and a cupid cherub type being
(12:48):
is holding a mirror so that she can look in it.
She's looking away from us, the viewer. She's looking in
the mirror, and we the viewer, see her face in
the mirror. And of course this this raises the question
what is she looking at in the mirror. Well, we,
as the viewer of this painting, we tend to assume
she is looking at her own image. This is some
sort of a you know, a contemplation of vanity or
(13:09):
what have you. But if we can see her face,
if you, the viewer, can see her face in the mirror,
that means she's looking at your face. She's not looking
at herself, She's looking at you. That's a good point. Yeah,
I would not have noticed. I initially saw this and
assumed she was looking at herself. But absolutely we see
her face directly in this mirror, and that means she
(13:32):
would see our face directly in the mirror. Because I
think the the optics term for this is that the
on flat reflective surfaces, the angle of incidence of the
light waves bouncing off is reproduced across what's called the normal.
So if you imagine a line hitting the mirror perpendicular
to the mirror surface. The angle of viewing relative to
(13:55):
that perpendicular line is then reproduced on the other side
of it. Yeah. So yeah, that means if you can
see their face, they can see your face. I want
to read a quick quote from Burdamini here, uh in
reference to this paper. Uh. He's quoted as saying, quote,
mirrors make us see virtual objects that exist in a
virtual world. They are windows onto this world. On the
(14:19):
one hand, we trust what we see, but on the
other hand, this is a world that we know has
no physical existence. This is one of the reasons why
throughout history people have been fascinated by mirrors. I know
this is something I've brought up before, but I think
the fact that also helps explain why we mirrors are
weird to us is that if you ever encounter a
(14:40):
mirror in a video game, First of all, there's a
very good chance that the mirror does not work. You
know that it's just kind of a weird flat surface,
and you might just in passing say, huh, I wonder
why none of the mirrors in Silent Hill work. Is
Maybe it's just because this is a haunted place and
mirrors don't work here. Um. But of course the reality
and I stink is quite complicated. This changes with the
(15:03):
evolution of of of video game programming. But uh, it's
my understanding that yet to create a mirror, Uh, it
requires a great deal of work. And if you encounter
a working mirror in a video game, it's essentially um
the programmer showing off to a certain extent, right, And
that in some of the older cases, at least, to
create the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video
(15:24):
game where you're you know, creature or being your avatar
is reflected, they would have to actually reproduce that being.
So they would have to do in the context of
the game what a mirror appears to do in our reality. Right,
So like across from the bathroom, you'd have a a
chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same with
(15:48):
like a mirror image of your thing moving around in there,
and you're just seeing it through windows. Yeah, as if
the Yellow Emperor has punished this other being and made
them stand in that little room and reproduce all of
your movements. That's great. This may have changed. I don't
know a lot about how video games work, but you
hear the phrase when people are bragging about how cool
the new video games and processors are, and all that
(16:10):
they talk about ray tracing. I think that actually does
have to do with simulating the pathways of rays of light.
So maybe that would change how mirrors work in games.
I'm not sure. Yeah, it would make it sounds like
like it potentially could, Yeah, because we would be talking
about actually creating a virtual world with working optics um
which which I think is often one of the Yeah.
(16:31):
Once you start reading about how optics have worked, how
lighting a room works in a video game, it gets uh,
it's it's it's rather complicated, but fascinating and ultimately makes
you rethink about how light works in our reality and
how we perceive it to work. Right. Okay, So anytime
(16:54):
we talk about an invention, we like to talk about
what came before, what was there before the such a
thing as an artificial mirror, And in this case, I
think the evidence is pretty clear naturally reflective surfaces. So
I was looking around at some papers about the prehistory
of mirrors, and almost all authorities that I could find
(17:14):
seem to agree that by far, the most common natural
reflective surface for our pre technological ancestors would have been
a very still body of water. Now, of course, not
all bodies of water are are useful in this regard.
Rushing rivers and ocean waves are not very reflective. But
still bodies of water, quiescent bodies of water under the
(17:37):
right circumstances can form extremely clear reflective surfaces. So these
in the natural world might have been pools or ponds,
or water collected in rock or clay containers. In fact,
I was reading a paper about the the ancient history
of mirrors by a scholar named J. M. Enoch, published
(17:58):
in the journal Optometry and Vision Science in the year
two thousand six. It was called history of Mirrors dating
back eight thousand years and Enoch points out something interesting
that that I didn't find anywhere else. He says that
quote from approximately seven twenty two BC onward, Chinese characters
for mirrors, known as Gion and Jing were best translated
(18:19):
as a large tub filled with water. M interesting. This
is a great point. Reminds me of a couple of things.
First of all, obviously we have to acknowledge the myth
of Narcissus uh in the Greek tradition, the what the
mighty hunter who becomes captivated by his own reflection falls
in love with his own reflection in the water. Right now,
(18:39):
by the time that myth was floating around, there were
already artificial mirrors, but just the idea of looking in
a still pond and seeing your reflection, it's clear that
is a phenomenon that goes back, you know, as far
as as the history of the earth, and so this
would have been something that was there was experienced by
not just our human ancestors, but pre human ancestors. This
(19:00):
also reminds me of the nineteen five Japanese anthology film
that some of you may have seen, called Kaiden Um.
It has a several different just very visual, almost psychedelic
um you know, haunted sequences. One of them is in
a cup of tea, and it concerns a ghostly reflection
(19:20):
in a cup of tea, a reflection that doesn't match
up with the real world, and I've always found that
one particularly creepy. Well, think about how common mirrors are
in horror movies. I think this is not a coincidence,
And though this does play into it, I think it's
also not just the fact that you can close a
medicine cabinet door that has a mirror on it and
(19:41):
suddenly reveal something that wasn't there behind you before. Though,
that that's a big one. I think there's very clearly
a natural anxiety people have about things they might see
in a mirror that they don't expect to do, you
know what I mean. And like a lot of old
ghost stories concerned this. But but horror movies today are
still reproducing this a fact, there's something behind your shoulder
(20:01):
that you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I
think A great short story example of this can be
found in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which,
from my mindy is just one of his absolute best
best works. Uh. It concerns seeing something. It concerns a
haunted mirror and things seen in a haunted mirror, and
I have to admit I'm a sucker for a good
(20:23):
haunted mirror movie. Um. The film Oculus comes to mind,
which I think I've mentioned before, is a bit of
a bit of a gut punch of a film. But
but it really does some some fabulous things. It's been
a long time I remember that one goes a lot
more nuts than I expected it too. Yeah. Yeah, they
do some great stuff with like characters losing track of
(20:43):
time and you really you really grow to hate that mirror.
We we've spoken about films and what do you do
with an inhuman adversary and how do how do you
depict them as having like a Will and U and
actually being an evil enemy in a in a film
elm and and they were able to pull that off
in Oculus, like you really you really hate that haunted
(21:04):
near by the end of the film. Yeah. Now, I
wanted to take a brief moment to uh, to do
a digression on something that I just thought was really interesting.
Which are some of the most amazing natural reflective surfaces
on Earth, which are flooded salt flats. For example, the
biggest salt flat in the world, the Solar de Uni
(21:25):
in the southwest of Bolivia. This is actually it's it's
a remarkable landscape. It's been used as a set for
a number of films. I think there was a battle
sequence set here in The Last Jedi Um. But if
you haven't seen pictures of Solar de Uni, that's s
A L A R space D space, U, Y, you
and I. It is absolutely magical looking it and it
(21:49):
calls to mind the you know, the Kenny Rogers song
in the Big Lebowski I tripped on a cloud and
fell eight miles high. There's just photo after photo. This
is clearly a heaven for photographers and especially photographers who
want to capture really psychedelic, unreal looking imagery. And I
found a really good one that was highlighted on NASA's
website that was taken by someone named Jason Wherta or
(22:12):
I'm not sure it's pronounced Jason's j h E I
s O N where to And so a lot of
these images show what looks like someone just standing in infinity,
like someone just standing in the middle of a mirror
that stretches to eternity in all directions. Yeah, it's like
sky below, sky above, and then a person standing and
(22:33):
possibly upon it, or standing in some cases standing upon
the feet of their own reflection. And it can be
difficult to tell which side is the reflection in which
is the reality, right, and a lot of so the
one highlighted by NASA is in the nighttime, but in
the daytime, especially if there's a lot of cloud cover,
you see all the clouds reflected in the in the
(22:53):
surface of the of the salt flat, and it's just unbelievable,
but it's so remarkable looking, mainly because it is so
flat and shallow. This the Salt Flat covers more than
ten thousand square kilometers, and yet its altitude varies by
no more than a few feet across the entire plane.
So when nearby lakes overflow during the rainy season, the
(23:15):
Salt Flat will fill up with a very shallow sea
of water. I think the depth is never more than
than a few feet. In some places it appears to
be only inches deep, and that means that it forms
this gigantic, incredibly still puddle of water stretching for miles,
and a very still puddle like that can essentially create
(23:36):
a gigantic mirror, reflecting the sky all the way to
the horizon, and in some places you can just walk
on it like it's so shallow it looks like you
are walking out over the mirror that goes on forever.
So one thing I was wondering about is why exactly
does water reflect images like this while so many other
materials don't. In researching this, it seems like this is
(23:59):
one of those questions that has a simple answer and
a very complicated answer. And I think I'm going to
stick with the simple one, at least for now. So
the simple version is basically, all objects reflect light. That's
how we can see them, right. You know, objects around
you don't produce their own light. They're reflecting light from
the environment, from the sunlight or from light bulbs. And
(24:20):
what makes mirrors or mirror like pools of water special
is the way they reflect the light. Whereas most objects
tend to scatter the light they reflect in all different
directions at once, objects that form mirror like reflections tend
to reflect photons back in parallel instead of scattering them
in different directions. Uh. And so you can explain this
(24:44):
basically in terms of things like still water or mirrors
being much smoother and flatter at the molecular level than
other surfaces. And by virtue of being smoother and flatter
than other surfaces, the light that reflects off of these
materials stays organized in its original arrangement rather than being
(25:05):
bounced off in all different directions and turning the signal
into noise, turning the original image into just a blur.
And there's actually a term for this in physics, in
the physics of light. It's specular reflection versus diffuse reflection,
so specular reflection specular means like a mirror, mirror like
reflection versus diffuse reflection, which is the way most things
(25:28):
reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over the place.
For a very rough analogy, you can kind of imagine
you you line up a bunch of those tennis ball
shooter guns. I'm not sure what those are called, but
you have played tennis with one of those things. Okay,
well they they've got them in some tennis clubs. They'll
like shoot tennis balls at you and you can hit
them back. Uh. So you take a bunch of those
(25:49):
tennis ball shooter guns, you line them up in some
kind of arrangement, and then you shoot them all at
a wall. You can imagine how this would go. If
the wall is extremely flat, the balls will probably bounds
back in parallel in something close to their original arrangement
as they were shot at the wall. But if you
shoot them at a wall that is not very flat,
(26:09):
that has a bunch of bumps and contours and different
stuff poking out on it, they will just bounce all
over the place. Now this might be kind of confusing
because you can think of all kinds of objects that
seem perfectly smooth, and yet you can't see your reflection
in them, like a white sheet of paper. You know,
your printer paper is very smooth, and while it reflects
(26:30):
a lot of light, that's the you know, the white
color coming off of it, it clearly isn't specular reflection.
You can't see images reflected in it. So the main
issue with surfaces like this is that while they might
be relatively smooth at the macroscopic scale, at the microscopic scale,
these surfaces are not actually smooth. Now, remember when you're
(26:52):
when you're talking about light, the tennis balls you're shooting
at the surface are photons, and so it matters is
the molecular level. Uh Rabbi attached to picture for you
to look at what paper looks like under a scanning
electron microscope, and it is not smooth at all. Now,
it looks like some sort of kind of like crazy
fiber art or or you know, if you'll occasionally find
(27:14):
homemade paper that that looks like it's barely usable because
it's so rustic and rough, and you can see all
the different grains and the you know, the the and
the like the remnants of plants in it. That's kind
of what this looks like. It looks like a tattered
portion of I don't know, some sort of a bog
mummy shroud. Oh yeah, yeah, that's very good. It looks
(27:34):
like a million mummies all unraveled at the same time
into a pile. And and and now you're using it
to to print out your resume, yeah, or even a
plate of noodles of some kind. It has that more
of that appearance than anything like a flash sheet of paper. Yeah.
It's made out of fibers. And and once you zoom
into the level that would be relevant to how photons
are reflected off of it, those fibers are incredibly apparent.
(27:57):
But surfaces that produce a clear specular reflection tend to
be very smooth and flat, even at the molecular level,
so that they can again reflect those rays of light
in parallel formation instead of scattering them all over the place.
And uh, And I think it's interesting to observe how
sometimes even smooth, relatively non reflective surfaces can start to
(28:20):
display some amount of specular reflection when they become wet.
So think about the way that something that is normally
not doesn't have specular reflection at all, you know, a
rough concrete surface or or black asphalt street, you know.
But now imagine it's raining, and suddenly these surfaces becomes
(28:40):
slick with with rain water they can start to turn
into a kind of hazy mirror in the rain. So
what we're left with here is that there are natural
mirrors in the environment, mostly flat, shallow, stable bodies of water.
And then there are also, you know, somewhat less clear
but still at least partially mirror like phenomena that occur transiently, say,
(29:04):
just whenever it rains and certain types of surfaces get wet.
Even a normally non reflective rock surface can start to
become a little bit like a mirror once it gets
slicked with rain. So this experience of seeing reflections would
go deep, deep, back into prehistory. But I guess the
question we want to think as well. Okay, so a surface,
(29:24):
a very still surface of a pool can show your reflection.
You might see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock.
But what is the earliest evidence we have of people
intentionally making mirrors as a deliberate piece of technology. Because
you with a still pool of water, you can't take
it with you somewhere or hang it up on your wall.
What are the earliest artifact mirrors in the archaeological record?
(29:47):
And so what I found was that probably the oldest
mirrors made by humans were obsidian mirrors. The the oldest
examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in
modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the
Neolithic settlement of Chattelhoyuk, which is an extremely fascinating archaeological site.
(30:09):
I know we've talked about it on the show a
number of times before. A kind of proto city. Imagine
a city without streets, with houses all bunched together and
sharing walls that you would access through openings in the
roofs of the houses and uh, and you got a
very very interesting settlement with lots of cool stuff about
(30:29):
that we can infer about their culture, religious beliefs and
all that um, but also a very early site for
the discovery of mirrors. So again I want to reference
that paper I mentioned earlier by J. M. Enoch. Enoch
writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region
of Chatte Hooyuk from approximately six thousand BC s that's
(30:51):
roughly eight thousand years ago. Uh in these graves contained
obsidian mirrors. These mirrors were apparently made by takeing a
piece of obsidian, grinding it down to a sort of circular,
flat or more often slightly convex surface, and polishing it
until highly smooth and reflective. And there's a picture that's
(31:13):
reproduced in nux paper, reproduced in color, I think because
it's so striking showing that in in full sunlight and daylight,
this mirror from the ancient, ancient world still produces a
pretty clear picture. Yeah, I mean, there is a certain
darkness to it. It is quite literally a black mirror,
but you see color in it, you see the you know,
(31:34):
the details of the face. It is an effective mirror.
It's uh, you know, it's if we were forced to
use this today. Obviously there are certain places you would
be able to use it. You can't imagine your dentist
using an obsidian mirror to uh, you know, to to
to look around in your mouth. But if you just
had to use this in the morning, I mean, it
could work. This kind of reflection seems like the sort
(31:56):
of reflection you could theoretically like shave or apply make
up to that sort of thing. Now, obsidian to refresh
is a glass like volcanic rock formed by the rapid
solidification of lava without crystallization. So it's found in places
that have undergone what's called rhyolitic eruptions, so you can
(32:18):
find these. You can find this occurring in various places
around the world where there's quickly cooling lava. Humans have
been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though obviously depending
on where those humans are, they're going to have less
or more access to it, depending on you know, what
their their local environment is like, and how far they've
they've traveled, and how how far they're trading. Now we
(32:41):
know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently, or
at least this is what Plenty of the Elder points
out that it was discovered by a Roman explorer by
the name of obsidious, you know, whilst traveling in Ethiopia.
Obsidia sounds like a pejorative adjective that I would have
to look up, you know, like a like an eighteenth
(33:01):
century document would insult someone by calling them obsidious. Yes,
here's a quote from Plenty in translation obviously quote. Among
the various kinds of glass, we may also reckon obsidian
glass a substance very similar to the stone which Obsidious
discovered in Ethiopia. This stone is of a very dark
(33:22):
color and sometimes transparent, but it is dull to the
site and reflects, when attached as a mirror to walls,
the shadow of the object rather than the image. What
does that mean, the shadow rather than the image. Well,
I think this is you know, this is one of
those cases where we we have to read read into
(33:42):
what plenties talking about here and assume that he might
be dealing with secondhand or third hand information about it. Uh.
And I guess it has to do with the sort
of image you see reflected in Obsidian that it may
it has a dark appearance to it, So I can
imagine that being described as being Oh well, it doesn't
actually reflect the image. It reflects the shadow of the image,
(34:03):
you know, almost like it's this kind of like window
into a ring raithed world where everything has this darker
semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I was
wondering if it was possible that could be referring to
the idea of the reversed handedness of the image in
the mirror. But but then again, Plenty would have been
familiar with mirrors. I mean they had mirrors by the
(34:24):
Roman period with with other types of mirrors made from
other types of materials. So he yeah, he would have
been familiar with how mirrors worked and would have known
that generally they reflect a you know, an image with
reverse handedness. But there are several more things I wanted
(34:45):
to note about the ancient Anatolian obsidian mirrors that are
again brought up in that paper by Enoch. So one
of the things is that he quotes a scholar named
Dr James Connolly who's done work with with Chattelhoy in
this region. Uh Connolly giving his opinion that quote their
uses mirrors in the sense that a reflective surface was
(35:07):
the functional surface cannot be disputed, So Connolly saying, there's
no confusion about what this artifact is supposed to be. Clearly,
this is a mirror used for looking in and seeing
a reflection. Uh. So descriptions of some of these artifacts,
Enoch rights that one specimen stands upright on a small
flattened base, and the finest one was set into lime plaster.
(35:29):
These mirrors were believed to have originated in the graves
of females based upon the contents of the grave. Okay,
so these are typically grave goods, more often associated with women.
They they are sometimes set into a kind of stand
or have some kind of holder or handle. And then
also uh Enoch wrights quote. Obsidian objects were among early
(35:50):
exports from Anatolia, and they were used for spears, arrowheads
and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry. It is reasonable to
conject sure that mirrors were also exported from there. Connolly
suggests that the first shaping slash grinding of an Anatolian
mirror surface was quite coarse. The surface was then polished
(36:11):
with a fine grained material such as silt, and buffed
with materials such as leather. Uh. And then I wanted
to note another interesting thing I came across that this
was just a note about the production of these mirrors.
I mentioned already that the mirrors from the ancient world, Uh,
sometimes we're slightly convex, So that would mean they're they're
(36:31):
kind of like the mirror that you would use to
see around the corner when you're making a blind turn
on the road. Right, Like, they bend outwards so that
there there are a cone that points towards you in
the middle, as opposed to concave, which would be more
like a bowl bending away from you. From your perspective,
Convex is like a bowl upturned bending towards you. So
why would they be a little bit convex? Well, I
(36:53):
was reading an article in Archaeology Magazine by James F.
Vetter called Grinding It Out that concerns these ancient obsidian mirrors,
and it concerns experimental archaeology attempts to reproduce by hand
these types of mirrors, given the the techniques and materials
that would have been available to the ancient people who
(37:14):
made them. And the interesting thing I wanted to notice
in a is in a paragraph here that I'll just
read from better quote. All of the mirrors produced good images,
and all were slightly convex, as expected from manual grinding,
in which linear and rotary motions result in greater pressure
being applied around the perimeter of the surface. The only
(37:36):
technical reference that I've seen to an obsidian mirror from
Chattelhoyac states that it is slightly convex. With special preparation
of a core and great care during the grinding process,
one could probably make a nearly flat mirror with no
obvious distortions in the image. So he's saying that if
you are grinding and polishing an obsidian mirror by hand,
(37:58):
it is just natural that the process creates a mirror
that is slightly convex because of the way you're like
polishing it with circular motions, you tend to grind away
the outer edge more than you grind away the middle.
But anyway, this started getting the gears turning in my
brain because if you were living in a culture that
did create artificial mirrors, but just as a sort of
(38:21):
byproduct of the of the technical production process that creates
the mirrors, the mirror you have is likely to be
a little bit convex. Does this change something about people's
self image within these cultures? The same way that our
self image is distorted by the fact that all mirrors
at least are basically all mirrors, reverses your handedness and
(38:42):
gives you this inverted picture of your own face. Would
people within say, an ancient Anatolian civilization that had slightly
convex mirrors, think of their own faces as slightly convex
compared to what they actually were. I don't know, just
something interesting to think about and also, like you probably
wouldn't want to overstate this because again, these mirrors would
(39:04):
not be extremely convex, just slightly convex, but still might
have some kind of effect on on how people viewed themselves.
I mean, if you want to see what a convex uh,
if you don't have a convex mirror and you want
to see what your image would look like, they're just
look at your reflection in the back of a spoon,
all right. It would tend to kind of like magnify
and distort the features in a in a somewhat strange way.
(39:26):
Sometimes it will make your your nose in the middle
of your face look very big and the outsides look
kind of like they're receding away. But it can also
cause strange effects with say the perspectives of different objects
being reflected at different distances from a convex mirror. So,
for example, I think of you know you talked about
a poem about mirrors at the beginning. I think of
(39:49):
the poem by John Ashbury self Portrait in the convex Mirror.
Do you know that one? I don't think I know
this one? Now, Well, he's in this poem he's talking
about a painting by Parmesanino of himself in a convex mirror,
and uh and so Ashbury writes, as parmesan Nino did
it the right hand bigger than the head, thrust at
the viewer and swerving easily away, as though to protect
(40:11):
whatever it advertises. So again, I imagine the effect would
be small here. But but yeah, I like this idea
that the different physical properties of mirrors could lead to
different self image cultures. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I guess
you would have to factor in like when mirrors are
used and how they're being used. Are they being used
(40:33):
casually by individuals just to see what they look like,
or are they more the domain of like of priests
and uh and religious authorities. Oh yeah, that's something I
guess we haven't even really gotten much into so far.
Is is the religious use of mirrors, which does seem
to be well attested in the ancient world, mirrors as
devices for divination or other forms of religious rituals. And
(40:56):
if you want to know more about that, you're gonna
have to come back for part two, because we will
pick up with more discussion of obsidian mirrors and how
they they factored into practices in Mesoamerica and in the
pursuit of divination. So come back for part two and
you'll be under the eye of the god of smoking mirrors.
That's right. And who knows what else we'll get into. Uh,
(41:17):
you know, eventually we're definitely going to get into metal
mirrors and the sort of mirrors of that you know
and love from the world around you or have come
to despise and and see as umu as as perverse objects,
so as as Bores did in that one poem. Uh.
And then eventually I think we'll also get into some
other examples of mirror psychology, like what what happens when
(41:42):
we are subjected to mirrors? How does it change the
way we think about ourselves or others? Uh? So there's
a lot of stuff to explore. We'll see, we'll see
if we can fit it all into a into just
a second episode, but this might be a topic that
goes for a third episode or maybe even more, who knows,
who knows infinite episodes like and you know, infinity mirrors.
(42:03):
I'm down. Let's just keep buffing it all right. In
the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes
of stuff to blow your mind. You can find them
in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed wherever
you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two
season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesday's Listener Mail on Monday's
Weird House cinemon Fridays, that's the episode where we just
(42:24):
talk about some sort of strange and interesting film, and
then on the weekends we have a rerun Gotta Catch
the Ball. Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just
to say hello, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
(42:53):
your Mind, It's production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen me to
your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
We're going into the Vault for an older episode of
the show. This one originally aired on August five, and
it's part one of our series about the Mirror Uh.
This is going to be a series that I think
will span all of the Vault episodes this month, So
(00:26):
settle in for part one. In those days, the world
of mirrors and the world of men were not as
they are now, separate and unconnected. They were, moreover, quite
different from one another. Neither the creatures, nor the colors,
nor the shapes of the two worlds were the same.
The two kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in peace,
(00:50):
and one could pass back and forth through mirrors. One night, however,
the people of the mirror world invaded this world. Their
strength was great, but after many bloody battles, the magic
of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. The Emperor pushed back the invaders,
imprisoned them within the mirrors, and punish them by making
(01:11):
them repeat, as though in a kind of dream, all
the actions of their human victors. He stripped them of
their strength and their own shape, and reduce them to
mere servile reflections. One day, however, they will throw off
that magical lethargy. The first to awaken will be the
fish deep in the mirror. We will perceive a very
(01:33):
faint line, and the color of this line will be
like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin
to stir. Little by little, they will differ from us.
Little by little, they will not imitate us. They will
break through the barrier of glass or metal, and this
time will not be defeated. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
(01:58):
Your Mind, the production of by Heart Radio album Hey you,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're kicking
off a series of episodes about the mirror as a
human invention. This is actually an idea that I guess
(02:19):
we talked about doing before, but but it was prompted
by a recent listener suggestion from a listener named Heather.
So thanks for the idea, Heather. Yeah, this is this
is gonna be one that will be at least two episodes,
maybe more, because there's so many different angles you can
take once you start gazing into the mirror. Uh. You
have the history of the technology, various cultural traditions involving mirrors,
(02:41):
the psychology of mirrors. So we'll just see, we'll see
how far we get and if we ever make it
back out again. You know, that opening reading from Bores
made me think, how do you know that you're not
the one inside the mirror and that the the other
side of the mirror is the real world. That's a
very bores question to ask. Yes, yeah, that that cold
opening is from animals that live in the mirror, Which
(03:04):
is a just a couple of page section in the
Book of Imaginary Beings by Jore Louis Borges, which is
a fabulous little book. I recommend anyone interested in creatures
and sort of poetic dreamlike interpretations of creatures to pick
that up. It's it's a lot of fun with Borges
writing about established creatures from different mythologies, but also as
(03:26):
in this case, seemingly you know, just dreaming up something
of his own, uh, which which I like quite a bit. Um.
He was certainly an author who was captivated by by
mirrors and additions in addition to things like dreams and mazes,
and he has other works that involved mirrors, such as
covered mirrors, and also an excellent poem simply titled Mirrors. Uh.
(03:47):
There's one passage from that that I always come back to. UH.
This goes as follows. I see them as infinite elemental
executors of an ancient pact to multiply the world, like
the act of begetting sleepless bringing doom. So is the
them there the mirrors or the creatures inside the mirrors?
(04:07):
It is? It's just the mirrors here, right, I think so.
I think he's just talking about mirrors in this case
as opposed to beings within the mirror. But I think
one of the great things about both of these were
excited here is that that is that that Borges understood
the weirdness of mirrors in a way that I think
we all connect to at times. But then we're we
(04:29):
live in such a mirrrored age that we we often
forget it. We often let the weirdness of mirrors pass
us by. UH. And it's only when we were reminded
of the strangeness of the whole scenario, UH, that that
once again we enter this kind of mind set. Also,
just generally, like borrees to to read motivations into inanimate objects.
(04:51):
But another way I wanted to get us started today
is with a very strange fact that many people may
have considered before, but many may not have. I don't
think I had really thought about this before we started
doing this episode. So I want you to start by
closing your eyes and picturing your own face. You got it, right,
You know what you look like, So you think about
(05:12):
the lines, the colors, the proportions. Um, maybe the little
asymmetries the way your hair parts, or maybe you have
a mole on one side or one iris that's a
little bit different than the other. Uh. If you're practiced
at getting photographed, you probably know you have a good side, right.
You know, most people who get their picture taken a lot,
they figure out which side of their face they like better,
(05:34):
and they kind of orient to position that one for
the camera. But now we want you to consider that
it is almost a guarantee that this face you're imagining
right now, your own face, is not really what you
look like to other people. And this is not just
because of the fuzziness of memory and imagination, but because
(05:55):
it's almost certain that your mental image of your own
face is based mostly on your experience of looking in
a mirror, and a mirror does not show you the
version of yourself that people see when they look at you, because,
as you know, the image in a mirror is reversed
your mental image of your own face, unless for some
(06:18):
reason it's based on something other than looking in a
mirror is inverted from reality. Isn't that bizarre? It is? Yeah, again,
this is something that I think most of us have
encountered since we're very young. You know, it's it's it's
one of the first sort of tricks of the mirrors
that you learn, uh, and we grow accustomed to it,
and then we forget that it's strange. Um. Another way
(06:41):
of thinking about this goes as follows. So, if you
hold a dagger in your right hand and you confront
your reflection in a mirror, like hold it out, brandish
the dagger against your reflection. Okay, you're holding it in
your right hand, but your reflection is technically holding the
dagger in its left hand. So this night against smack
(07:01):
a bit of like like like an overstatement of the obvious.
But I think that's kind of shocking, you know, the
the idea that that you are using opposite hands to
hold it, and not merely in a reflective sense. But
if you were to like take that individual out of
the mirror, if they could actually climb out of the
mirror and stand next to you, they would be holding
their dagger in the opposite hand. Another way of looking
(07:21):
at it is that the mirror world is a world
of reversed chirality. Chirality is a term that's often used
to describe, like molecules, the handedness of molecules. So you
can have a molecule that has the same chemical constituents,
but one is the left handed orientation and the other
is the right handed orientation. The versions of images you
(07:43):
see reflected in a mirror have opposite chirality of the
versions that exist in the real world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now I have to admit I had never thought about
this dagger um explanation until I was reading about the
great person Active Glass, which was in the possession of
the Elizabethan Polly math and wizard Dr John D. And
(08:08):
as Benjamin Woolley points out in his book The Queen's
Conjure Um, this was This is one of several I
think curios that Dr D kept in his study. And
you know, amid his library. He had a famous library
of books. Um. And there's another mirror that he had
in his possession that we'll get to in a bit.
But as far as the Great perspective glass went, it
(08:29):
was said that anyone who lunged at the mirror with
a dagger or sword found their reflection lunging back at
them with like hand and weapon. And again, of course,
this is not the typical way of mirrors, and the
effect was said to be quite unsettling. You know, if
you were visiting Dr D, he would he would, he
might show you this mirror, and then when you were
you know, when you realize there was something strange about this,
(08:52):
he would explain the effect to you via mathematics of perspective.
So I found that interesting as well, especially since Dr
D was also very interested in things like divination and
um and uh and and and you know, alchemical matters. Uh.
This seems to be an artifact that he would use
to explain just merely like the mathematics of perspective and optics.
(09:14):
So it sounds like what's being described here is something
that you can actually find today known as a non
reversing mirror, sometimes called a true mirror. And this is
typically done by having two mirrors that are at a
right angle to each other, and then having the subject
stands so that they're looking at the at the vertex
where these two mirrors come together. Uh. And so the
(09:35):
way that actually works out is that the reflections of
the mirrors are reflected in the mirrors at the angles.
So what you actually see is your correct handed version
of yourself. Yeah. Now, um, one of these other mirrors
survives to this day, and we'll get to it in
a bit. But as far as I know, the Great
(09:55):
Perspective Glass either did not survive or there's no there's
no artifact that is now own as the Great Perspective Glass.
So I think it's just mostly speculation and exactly what
this mirror might have looked like. But but I was
looking around and I found that you had multiple optical
devices at the time were referred to with the term perspective.
(10:16):
And we also see this reflected in the work of
William Shakespeare. Uh, there's a the for instance, the play
Richard the Second. Uh, there's a there's a crucial scene
that involves a mirror. But there's some there's some wonderful
lines that refer to it. Quote for sorrow's eye glazed
with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects,
(10:39):
like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon show us nothing but confusion.
I to ride distinguished form. Well, I'm still trying to
sort that one out. That that is complex imagery. Yeah, yeah,
I don't think Richard the Second has really been adapted
as much, or perhaps has performed as much as some
of the other plays. Um. But it looks like there
(10:59):
was there was a recent performance of it that was
filmed um in Britain that had what I think Daniel
Tennant in it, playing the title role. But I was
looking around online to find some some footage of that
particular scene and I couldn't. I couldn't find it. So
I have to admit it's not one of the Shakespeare
plays that I'm super familiar with. I know, the movie
(11:21):
adaptation of Richard the Third with Ian McKellen as Richard,
and and it's got Jim Broadbent is a particularly bizarre Buckingham. Uh.
That's a good one. Yeah, I fondly remember that one
for sure. Now all of this reminds me of another
reality about mirrors that I think underlines just how strange
they are to us, and that is we tend to
(11:43):
not really understand what we're looking at with a mirror.
I know this is one of your favorite facts. This
has come up several times. Yeah, I have brought this
up before. Um, this is really interesting though. So back
in two thousand five, a psychology study from the University
of Liverpool judge that will tend to not really understand
how mirror reflections work. Specifically, they don't understand that the
(12:05):
location of the viewer matters and determining what is visible.
So this study investigated people's perception and knowledge of of
a planner mirror reflections. One researcher on this study, Dr
Marco Bertamini, pointed out that the Venus effect is a
great example of this. So um, the Venus effect. It
basically works like this. If you consider the seventeenth century
(12:27):
painting UH the the the Rugby Venus by Diego Velaquez,
which you can you can look up if you look
up a picture of if you just do a search
for r O K E b Y Venus, you'll see this.
It is uh a nude woman reclined on a uh
sort of a bed and a cupid cherub type being
(12:48):
is holding a mirror so that she can look in it.
She's looking away from us, the viewer. She's looking in
the mirror, and we the viewer, see her face in
the mirror. And of course this this raises the question
what is she looking at in the mirror. Well, we,
as the viewer of this painting, we tend to assume
she is looking at her own image. This is some
sort of a you know, a contemplation of vanity or
(13:09):
what have you. But if we can see her face,
if you, the viewer, can see her face in the mirror,
that means she's looking at your face. She's not looking
at herself, She's looking at you. That's a good point. Yeah,
I would not have noticed. I initially saw this and
assumed she was looking at herself. But absolutely we see
her face directly in this mirror, and that means she
(13:32):
would see our face directly in the mirror. Because I
think the the optics term for this is that the
on flat reflective surfaces, the angle of incidence of the
light waves bouncing off is reproduced across what's called the normal.
So if you imagine a line hitting the mirror perpendicular
to the mirror surface. The angle of viewing relative to
(13:55):
that perpendicular line is then reproduced on the other side
of it. Yeah. So yeah, that means if you can
see their face, they can see your face. I want
to read a quick quote from Burdamini here, uh in
reference to this paper. Uh. He's quoted as saying, quote,
mirrors make us see virtual objects that exist in a
virtual world. They are windows onto this world. On the
(14:19):
one hand, we trust what we see, but on the
other hand, this is a world that we know has
no physical existence. This is one of the reasons why
throughout history people have been fascinated by mirrors. I know
this is something I've brought up before, but I think
the fact that also helps explain why we mirrors are
weird to us is that if you ever encounter a
(14:40):
mirror in a video game, First of all, there's a
very good chance that the mirror does not work. You
know that it's just kind of a weird flat surface,
and you might just in passing say, huh, I wonder
why none of the mirrors in Silent Hill work. Is
Maybe it's just because this is a haunted place and
mirrors don't work here. Um. But of course the reality
and I stink is quite complicated. This changes with the
(15:03):
evolution of of of video game programming. But uh, it's
my understanding that yet to create a mirror, Uh, it
requires a great deal of work. And if you encounter
a working mirror in a video game, it's essentially um
the programmer showing off to a certain extent, right, And
that in some of the older cases, at least, to
create the effect of a reflecting mirror in a video
(15:24):
game where you're you know, creature or being your avatar
is reflected, they would have to actually reproduce that being.
So they would have to do in the context of
the game what a mirror appears to do in our reality. Right,
So like across from the bathroom, you'd have a a
chirality reverse reflection of the bathroom with the same with
(15:48):
like a mirror image of your thing moving around in there,
and you're just seeing it through windows. Yeah, as if
the Yellow Emperor has punished this other being and made
them stand in that little room and reproduce all of
your movements. That's great. This may have changed. I don't
know a lot about how video games work, but you
hear the phrase when people are bragging about how cool
the new video games and processors are, and all that
(16:10):
they talk about ray tracing. I think that actually does
have to do with simulating the pathways of rays of light.
So maybe that would change how mirrors work in games.
I'm not sure. Yeah, it would make it sounds like
like it potentially could, Yeah, because we would be talking
about actually creating a virtual world with working optics um
which which I think is often one of the Yeah.
(16:31):
Once you start reading about how optics have worked, how
lighting a room works in a video game, it gets uh,
it's it's it's rather complicated, but fascinating and ultimately makes
you rethink about how light works in our reality and
how we perceive it to work. Right. Okay, So anytime
(16:54):
we talk about an invention, we like to talk about
what came before, what was there before the such a
thing as an artificial mirror, And in this case, I
think the evidence is pretty clear naturally reflective surfaces. So
I was looking around at some papers about the prehistory
of mirrors, and almost all authorities that I could find
(17:14):
seem to agree that by far, the most common natural
reflective surface for our pre technological ancestors would have been
a very still body of water. Now, of course, not
all bodies of water are are useful in this regard.
Rushing rivers and ocean waves are not very reflective. But
still bodies of water, quiescent bodies of water under the
(17:37):
right circumstances can form extremely clear reflective surfaces. So these
in the natural world might have been pools or ponds,
or water collected in rock or clay containers. In fact,
I was reading a paper about the the ancient history
of mirrors by a scholar named J. M. Enoch, published
(17:58):
in the journal Optometry and Vision Science in the year
two thousand six. It was called history of Mirrors dating
back eight thousand years and Enoch points out something interesting
that that I didn't find anywhere else. He says that
quote from approximately seven twenty two BC onward, Chinese characters
for mirrors, known as Gion and Jing were best translated
(18:19):
as a large tub filled with water. M interesting. This
is a great point. Reminds me of a couple of things.
First of all, obviously we have to acknowledge the myth
of Narcissus uh in the Greek tradition, the what the
mighty hunter who becomes captivated by his own reflection falls
in love with his own reflection in the water. Right now,
(18:39):
by the time that myth was floating around, there were
already artificial mirrors, but just the idea of looking in
a still pond and seeing your reflection, it's clear that
is a phenomenon that goes back, you know, as far
as as the history of the earth, and so this
would have been something that was there was experienced by
not just our human ancestors, but pre human ancestors. This
(19:00):
also reminds me of the nineteen five Japanese anthology film
that some of you may have seen, called Kaiden Um.
It has a several different just very visual, almost psychedelic
um you know, haunted sequences. One of them is in
a cup of tea, and it concerns a ghostly reflection
(19:20):
in a cup of tea, a reflection that doesn't match
up with the real world, and I've always found that
one particularly creepy. Well, think about how common mirrors are
in horror movies. I think this is not a coincidence,
And though this does play into it, I think it's
also not just the fact that you can close a
medicine cabinet door that has a mirror on it and
(19:41):
suddenly reveal something that wasn't there behind you before. Though,
that that's a big one. I think there's very clearly
a natural anxiety people have about things they might see
in a mirror that they don't expect to do, you
know what I mean. And like a lot of old
ghost stories concerned this. But but horror movies today are
still reproducing this a fact, there's something behind your shoulder
(20:01):
that you didn't expect to see their Yeah, yeah, I
think A great short story example of this can be
found in Stephen King's short story The Reaper's Image, which,
from my mindy is just one of his absolute best
best works. Uh. It concerns seeing something. It concerns a
haunted mirror and things seen in a haunted mirror, and
I have to admit I'm a sucker for a good
(20:23):
haunted mirror movie. Um. The film Oculus comes to mind,
which I think I've mentioned before, is a bit of
a bit of a gut punch of a film. But
but it really does some some fabulous things. It's been
a long time I remember that one goes a lot
more nuts than I expected it too. Yeah. Yeah, they
do some great stuff with like characters losing track of
(20:43):
time and you really you really grow to hate that mirror.
We we've spoken about films and what do you do
with an inhuman adversary and how do how do you
depict them as having like a Will and U and
actually being an evil enemy in a in a film
elm and and they were able to pull that off
in Oculus, like you really you really hate that haunted
(21:04):
near by the end of the film. Yeah. Now, I
wanted to take a brief moment to uh, to do
a digression on something that I just thought was really interesting.
Which are some of the most amazing natural reflective surfaces
on Earth, which are flooded salt flats. For example, the
biggest salt flat in the world, the Solar de Uni
(21:25):
in the southwest of Bolivia. This is actually it's it's
a remarkable landscape. It's been used as a set for
a number of films. I think there was a battle
sequence set here in The Last Jedi Um. But if
you haven't seen pictures of Solar de Uni, that's s
A L A R space D space, U, Y, you
and I. It is absolutely magical looking it and it
(21:49):
calls to mind the you know, the Kenny Rogers song
in the Big Lebowski I tripped on a cloud and
fell eight miles high. There's just photo after photo. This
is clearly a heaven for photographers and especially photographers who
want to capture really psychedelic, unreal looking imagery. And I
found a really good one that was highlighted on NASA's
website that was taken by someone named Jason Wherta or
(22:12):
I'm not sure it's pronounced Jason's j h E I
s O N where to And so a lot of
these images show what looks like someone just standing in infinity,
like someone just standing in the middle of a mirror
that stretches to eternity in all directions. Yeah, it's like
sky below, sky above, and then a person standing and
(22:33):
possibly upon it, or standing in some cases standing upon
the feet of their own reflection. And it can be
difficult to tell which side is the reflection in which
is the reality, right, and a lot of so the
one highlighted by NASA is in the nighttime, but in
the daytime, especially if there's a lot of cloud cover,
you see all the clouds reflected in the in the
(22:53):
surface of the of the salt flat, and it's just unbelievable,
but it's so remarkable looking, mainly because it is so
flat and shallow. This the Salt Flat covers more than
ten thousand square kilometers, and yet its altitude varies by
no more than a few feet across the entire plane.
So when nearby lakes overflow during the rainy season, the
(23:15):
Salt Flat will fill up with a very shallow sea
of water. I think the depth is never more than
than a few feet. In some places it appears to
be only inches deep, and that means that it forms
this gigantic, incredibly still puddle of water stretching for miles,
and a very still puddle like that can essentially create
(23:36):
a gigantic mirror, reflecting the sky all the way to
the horizon, and in some places you can just walk
on it like it's so shallow it looks like you
are walking out over the mirror that goes on forever.
So one thing I was wondering about is why exactly
does water reflect images like this while so many other
materials don't. In researching this, it seems like this is
(23:59):
one of those questions that has a simple answer and
a very complicated answer. And I think I'm going to
stick with the simple one, at least for now. So
the simple version is basically, all objects reflect light. That's
how we can see them, right. You know, objects around
you don't produce their own light. They're reflecting light from
the environment, from the sunlight or from light bulbs. And
(24:20):
what makes mirrors or mirror like pools of water special
is the way they reflect the light. Whereas most objects
tend to scatter the light they reflect in all different
directions at once, objects that form mirror like reflections tend
to reflect photons back in parallel instead of scattering them
in different directions. Uh. And so you can explain this
(24:44):
basically in terms of things like still water or mirrors
being much smoother and flatter at the molecular level than
other surfaces. And by virtue of being smoother and flatter
than other surfaces, the light that reflects off of these
materials stays organized in its original arrangement rather than being
(25:05):
bounced off in all different directions and turning the signal
into noise, turning the original image into just a blur.
And there's actually a term for this in physics, in
the physics of light. It's specular reflection versus diffuse reflection,
so specular reflection specular means like a mirror, mirror like
reflection versus diffuse reflection, which is the way most things
(25:28):
reflect light, just kind of bouncing it all over the place.
For a very rough analogy, you can kind of imagine
you you line up a bunch of those tennis ball
shooter guns. I'm not sure what those are called, but
you have played tennis with one of those things. Okay,
well they they've got them in some tennis clubs. They'll
like shoot tennis balls at you and you can hit
them back. Uh. So you take a bunch of those
(25:49):
tennis ball shooter guns, you line them up in some
kind of arrangement, and then you shoot them all at
a wall. You can imagine how this would go. If
the wall is extremely flat, the balls will probably bounds
back in parallel in something close to their original arrangement
as they were shot at the wall. But if you
shoot them at a wall that is not very flat,
(26:09):
that has a bunch of bumps and contours and different
stuff poking out on it, they will just bounce all
over the place. Now this might be kind of confusing
because you can think of all kinds of objects that
seem perfectly smooth, and yet you can't see your reflection
in them, like a white sheet of paper. You know,
your printer paper is very smooth, and while it reflects
(26:30):
a lot of light, that's the you know, the white
color coming off of it, it clearly isn't specular reflection.
You can't see images reflected in it. So the main
issue with surfaces like this is that while they might
be relatively smooth at the macroscopic scale, at the microscopic scale,
these surfaces are not actually smooth. Now, remember when you're
(26:52):
when you're talking about light, the tennis balls you're shooting
at the surface are photons, and so it matters is
the molecular level. Uh Rabbi attached to picture for you
to look at what paper looks like under a scanning
electron microscope, and it is not smooth at all. Now,
it looks like some sort of kind of like crazy
fiber art or or you know, if you'll occasionally find
(27:14):
homemade paper that that looks like it's barely usable because
it's so rustic and rough, and you can see all
the different grains and the you know, the the and
the like the remnants of plants in it. That's kind
of what this looks like. It looks like a tattered
portion of I don't know, some sort of a bog
mummy shroud. Oh yeah, yeah, that's very good. It looks
(27:34):
like a million mummies all unraveled at the same time
into a pile. And and and now you're using it
to to print out your resume, yeah, or even a
plate of noodles of some kind. It has that more
of that appearance than anything like a flash sheet of paper. Yeah.
It's made out of fibers. And and once you zoom
into the level that would be relevant to how photons
are reflected off of it, those fibers are incredibly apparent.
(27:57):
But surfaces that produce a clear specular reflection tend to
be very smooth and flat, even at the molecular level,
so that they can again reflect those rays of light
in parallel formation instead of scattering them all over the place.
And uh, And I think it's interesting to observe how
sometimes even smooth, relatively non reflective surfaces can start to
(28:20):
display some amount of specular reflection when they become wet.
So think about the way that something that is normally
not doesn't have specular reflection at all, you know, a
rough concrete surface or or black asphalt street, you know.
But now imagine it's raining, and suddenly these surfaces becomes
(28:40):
slick with with rain water they can start to turn
into a kind of hazy mirror in the rain. So
what we're left with here is that there are natural
mirrors in the environment, mostly flat, shallow, stable bodies of water.
And then there are also, you know, somewhat less clear
but still at least partially mirror like phenomena that occur transiently, say,
(29:04):
just whenever it rains and certain types of surfaces get wet.
Even a normally non reflective rock surface can start to
become a little bit like a mirror once it gets
slicked with rain. So this experience of seeing reflections would
go deep, deep, back into prehistory. But I guess the
question we want to think as well. Okay, so a surface,
(29:24):
a very still surface of a pool can show your reflection.
You might see a very hazy reflection in a wet rock.
But what is the earliest evidence we have of people
intentionally making mirrors as a deliberate piece of technology. Because
you with a still pool of water, you can't take
it with you somewhere or hang it up on your wall.
What are the earliest artifact mirrors in the archaeological record?
(29:47):
And so what I found was that probably the oldest
mirrors made by humans were obsidian mirrors. The the oldest
examples of these, I believe, are still from Anatolia in
modern day Turkey, specifically found in graves associated with the
Neolithic settlement of Chattelhoyuk, which is an extremely fascinating archaeological site.
(30:09):
I know we've talked about it on the show a
number of times before. A kind of proto city. Imagine
a city without streets, with houses all bunched together and
sharing walls that you would access through openings in the
roofs of the houses and uh, and you got a
very very interesting settlement with lots of cool stuff about
(30:29):
that we can infer about their culture, religious beliefs and
all that um, but also a very early site for
the discovery of mirrors. So again I want to reference
that paper I mentioned earlier by J. M. Enoch. Enoch
writes that archaeologists have found graves associated with the region
of Chatte Hooyuk from approximately six thousand BC s that's
(30:51):
roughly eight thousand years ago. Uh in these graves contained
obsidian mirrors. These mirrors were apparently made by takeing a
piece of obsidian, grinding it down to a sort of circular,
flat or more often slightly convex surface, and polishing it
until highly smooth and reflective. And there's a picture that's
(31:13):
reproduced in nux paper, reproduced in color, I think because
it's so striking showing that in in full sunlight and daylight,
this mirror from the ancient, ancient world still produces a
pretty clear picture. Yeah, I mean, there is a certain
darkness to it. It is quite literally a black mirror,
but you see color in it, you see the you know,
(31:34):
the details of the face. It is an effective mirror.
It's uh, you know, it's if we were forced to
use this today. Obviously there are certain places you would
be able to use it. You can't imagine your dentist
using an obsidian mirror to uh, you know, to to
to look around in your mouth. But if you just
had to use this in the morning, I mean, it
could work. This kind of reflection seems like the sort
(31:56):
of reflection you could theoretically like shave or apply make
up to that sort of thing. Now, obsidian to refresh
is a glass like volcanic rock formed by the rapid
solidification of lava without crystallization. So it's found in places
that have undergone what's called rhyolitic eruptions, so you can
(32:18):
find these. You can find this occurring in various places
around the world where there's quickly cooling lava. Humans have
been drawn to it since prehistoric times, though obviously depending
on where those humans are, they're going to have less
or more access to it, depending on you know, what
their their local environment is like, and how far they've
they've traveled, and how how far they're trading. Now we
(32:41):
know this material as obsidian. Uh. And this apparently, or
at least this is what Plenty of the Elder points
out that it was discovered by a Roman explorer by
the name of obsidious, you know, whilst traveling in Ethiopia.
Obsidia sounds like a pejorative adjective that I would have
to look up, you know, like a like an eighteenth
(33:01):
century document would insult someone by calling them obsidious. Yes,
here's a quote from Plenty in translation obviously quote. Among
the various kinds of glass, we may also reckon obsidian
glass a substance very similar to the stone which Obsidious
discovered in Ethiopia. This stone is of a very dark
(33:22):
color and sometimes transparent, but it is dull to the
site and reflects, when attached as a mirror to walls,
the shadow of the object rather than the image. What
does that mean, the shadow rather than the image. Well,
I think this is you know, this is one of
those cases where we we have to read read into
(33:42):
what plenties talking about here and assume that he might
be dealing with secondhand or third hand information about it. Uh.
And I guess it has to do with the sort
of image you see reflected in Obsidian that it may
it has a dark appearance to it, So I can
imagine that being described as being Oh well, it doesn't
actually reflect the image. It reflects the shadow of the image,
(34:03):
you know, almost like it's this kind of like window
into a ring raithed world where everything has this darker
semblance to itself. Oh yeah, that's interesting. And I was
wondering if it was possible that could be referring to
the idea of the reversed handedness of the image in
the mirror. But but then again, Plenty would have been
familiar with mirrors. I mean they had mirrors by the
(34:24):
Roman period with with other types of mirrors made from
other types of materials. So he yeah, he would have
been familiar with how mirrors worked and would have known
that generally they reflect a you know, an image with
reverse handedness. But there are several more things I wanted
(34:45):
to note about the ancient Anatolian obsidian mirrors that are
again brought up in that paper by Enoch. So one
of the things is that he quotes a scholar named
Dr James Connolly who's done work with with Chattelhoy in
this region. Uh Connolly giving his opinion that quote their
uses mirrors in the sense that a reflective surface was
(35:07):
the functional surface cannot be disputed, So Connolly saying, there's
no confusion about what this artifact is supposed to be. Clearly,
this is a mirror used for looking in and seeing
a reflection. Uh. So descriptions of some of these artifacts,
Enoch rights that one specimen stands upright on a small
flattened base, and the finest one was set into lime plaster.
(35:29):
These mirrors were believed to have originated in the graves
of females based upon the contents of the grave. Okay,
so these are typically grave goods, more often associated with women.
They they are sometimes set into a kind of stand
or have some kind of holder or handle. And then
also uh Enoch wrights quote. Obsidian objects were among early
(35:50):
exports from Anatolia, and they were used for spears, arrowheads
and knives, axes, scrapers, and jewelry. It is reasonable to
conject sure that mirrors were also exported from there. Connolly
suggests that the first shaping slash grinding of an Anatolian
mirror surface was quite coarse. The surface was then polished
(36:11):
with a fine grained material such as silt, and buffed
with materials such as leather. Uh. And then I wanted
to note another interesting thing I came across that this
was just a note about the production of these mirrors.
I mentioned already that the mirrors from the ancient world, Uh,
sometimes we're slightly convex, So that would mean they're they're
(36:31):
kind of like the mirror that you would use to
see around the corner when you're making a blind turn
on the road. Right, Like, they bend outwards so that
there there are a cone that points towards you in
the middle, as opposed to concave, which would be more
like a bowl bending away from you. From your perspective,
Convex is like a bowl upturned bending towards you. So
why would they be a little bit convex? Well, I
(36:53):
was reading an article in Archaeology Magazine by James F.
Vetter called Grinding It Out that concerns these ancient obsidian mirrors,
and it concerns experimental archaeology attempts to reproduce by hand
these types of mirrors, given the the techniques and materials
that would have been available to the ancient people who
(37:14):
made them. And the interesting thing I wanted to notice
in a is in a paragraph here that I'll just
read from better quote. All of the mirrors produced good images,
and all were slightly convex, as expected from manual grinding,
in which linear and rotary motions result in greater pressure
being applied around the perimeter of the surface. The only
(37:36):
technical reference that I've seen to an obsidian mirror from
Chattelhoyac states that it is slightly convex. With special preparation
of a core and great care during the grinding process,
one could probably make a nearly flat mirror with no
obvious distortions in the image. So he's saying that if
you are grinding and polishing an obsidian mirror by hand,
(37:58):
it is just natural that the process creates a mirror
that is slightly convex because of the way you're like
polishing it with circular motions, you tend to grind away
the outer edge more than you grind away the middle.
But anyway, this started getting the gears turning in my
brain because if you were living in a culture that
did create artificial mirrors, but just as a sort of
(38:21):
byproduct of the of the technical production process that creates
the mirrors, the mirror you have is likely to be
a little bit convex. Does this change something about people's
self image within these cultures? The same way that our
self image is distorted by the fact that all mirrors
at least are basically all mirrors, reverses your handedness and
(38:42):
gives you this inverted picture of your own face. Would
people within say, an ancient Anatolian civilization that had slightly
convex mirrors, think of their own faces as slightly convex
compared to what they actually were. I don't know, just
something interesting to think about and also, like you probably
wouldn't want to overstate this because again, these mirrors would
(39:04):
not be extremely convex, just slightly convex, but still might
have some kind of effect on on how people viewed themselves.
I mean, if you want to see what a convex uh,
if you don't have a convex mirror and you want
to see what your image would look like, they're just
look at your reflection in the back of a spoon,
all right. It would tend to kind of like magnify
and distort the features in a in a somewhat strange way.
(39:26):
Sometimes it will make your your nose in the middle
of your face look very big and the outsides look
kind of like they're receding away. But it can also
cause strange effects with say the perspectives of different objects
being reflected at different distances from a convex mirror. So,
for example, I think of you know you talked about
a poem about mirrors at the beginning. I think of
(39:49):
the poem by John Ashbury self Portrait in the convex Mirror.
Do you know that one? I don't think I know
this one? Now, Well, he's in this poem he's talking
about a painting by Parmesanino of himself in a convex mirror,
and uh and so Ashbury writes, as parmesan Nino did
it the right hand bigger than the head, thrust at
the viewer and swerving easily away, as though to protect
(40:11):
whatever it advertises. So again, I imagine the effect would
be small here. But but yeah, I like this idea
that the different physical properties of mirrors could lead to
different self image cultures. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I guess
you would have to factor in like when mirrors are
used and how they're being used. Are they being used
(40:33):
casually by individuals just to see what they look like,
or are they more the domain of like of priests
and uh and religious authorities. Oh yeah, that's something I
guess we haven't even really gotten much into so far.
Is is the religious use of mirrors, which does seem
to be well attested in the ancient world, mirrors as
devices for divination or other forms of religious rituals. And
(40:56):
if you want to know more about that, you're gonna
have to come back for part two, because we will
pick up with more discussion of obsidian mirrors and how
they they factored into practices in Mesoamerica and in the
pursuit of divination. So come back for part two and
you'll be under the eye of the god of smoking mirrors.
That's right. And who knows what else we'll get into. Uh,
(41:17):
you know, eventually we're definitely going to get into metal
mirrors and the sort of mirrors of that you know
and love from the world around you or have come
to despise and and see as umu as as perverse objects,
so as as Bores did in that one poem. Uh.
And then eventually I think we'll also get into some
other examples of mirror psychology, like what what happens when
(41:42):
we are subjected to mirrors? How does it change the
way we think about ourselves or others? Uh? So there's
a lot of stuff to explore. We'll see, we'll see
if we can fit it all into a into just
a second episode, but this might be a topic that
goes for a third episode or maybe even more, who knows,
who knows infinite episodes like and you know, infinity mirrors.
(42:03):
I'm down. Let's just keep buffing it all right. In
the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes
of stuff to blow your mind. You can find them
in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed wherever
you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on two
season Thursdays, The Artifact on Wednesday's Listener Mail on Monday's
Weird House cinemon Fridays, that's the episode where we just
(42:24):
talk about some sort of strange and interesting film, and
then on the weekends we have a rerun Gotta Catch
the Ball. Huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio
producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just
to say hello, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
(42:53):
your Mind, It's production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i Heart
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