Why Were Mirrors Covered When Someone Died?

In a Danish farmhouse in the 1800s, the first thing done after a death was to open a window.

Then the eyes were closed, sometimes with a coin on each lid, and a hymn book was wedged under the chin to keep the mouth shut. The body was laid on rye straw in the best room, the one kept for feasts. An open pair of scissors was placed on the sheet. Sheets were hung in front of the windows, and every mirror and every picture in the room was covered.

We read all this now as grief. The people doing it would have called it common sense. A death opened the house, and for a few days certain doors had to be held open and others kept firmly shut. The mirror was one of the doors.

This post is about why, and about the logic underneath, which is a good deal older than the churchyard those coffins were carried to.

Where the custom was kept

The custom turns up far beyond Denmark, which tells you it answers something deep.

In Denmark it belonged to the death room. The National Museum's account of 19th-century rural funerals has the mirrors and pictures covered while the body lay in the house, and the sheets over the windows taken down only once the coffin had left the farm.

In Victorian Britain and America, the household drew the curtains, stopped the clocks at the minute of death, and covered the mirrors or turned them to the wall. In the Ozark mountains the cloth stayed on until after the funeral.

In Jewish homes the mirrors are covered from the moment of death to the end of shiva, the week of mourning, and many families still do it.

In China, a British official writing in 1910 recorded the same thing, with reasons of its own, which we will come to.

The anthropologist James Frazer, who collected customs like this for a living, called it widespread and thought he knew why. He was probably half right.

Why were mirrors covered?

Ask ten households and you would have gotten several answers. These are the ones that come up again and again.

• The soul could be caught in the glass. A soul newly out of its body is unsure of its way. A mirror looks like a room, and a confused soul might go into it and stay. In Victorian homes this was the plainest reason given.
• The dead might take someone with them. Frazer's explanation was that a reflection was once thought to be part of the soul. The ghost of the dead was believed to linger about the house until the burial, and it might carry off the reflected souls of the living. Covering the glass kept the living out of reach.
• Whoever saw themselves next would die next. In Britain it was said that if you saw your own reflection in a house where someone had just died, you might follow them. In Danish tradition, a glimpse of the dead person in a mirror warned of more deaths in the family.
• The dead should not see themselves. The 1910 Chinese account offers the most human reason of all: a dead man who caught sight of himself would be horrified to find he had become a ghost, and disappointed by how he looked.
• A mirror remembers. The same account records the belief that a mirror stores what passes before it, so a mirror that had reflected a corpse would go on giving off bad luck afterwards.
• The mourner's face does not matter now. In Jewish tradition the most common reasons are that a mourner should not be thinking about appearance, and that prayers are held in the house of mourning and should not be said facing a mirror. Some commentators add older, mystical reasons about images and spirits.

Read together, they say the same thing in different accents. A mirror is a surface that holds a person without their body. In the days when a person had just lost theirs, that was the last thing you wanted in the room…

What else was done in the house of the dead

The mirror never stood alone. In the Danish countryside it was one step in a sequence, and the sequence is where the logic shows. In roughly the order it happened:

1. Before the death, the bed was loosened. A dying person's pillow and duvet might be changed, because a single hen's feather in the bedding could keep them from dying. Hen feathers were restless feathers.
2. At the death, a window was opened so the soul could get out. In many places the church bell was rung for the dead, and the news was told to the animals in the stable and the bees in their hives, so that everyone on the farm knew there was a new master or mistress.
3. The face was closed. Eyes shut, sometimes held down with coins. A hymn book under the chin to close the mouth.
4. The body was laid out and guarded. Rye straw in a room not used every day, crosses of straw on the chest, belly and feet, and an open pair of scissors on the sheet to protect the dead. Candles at the head.
5. The house was blinded. Sheets over the windows. Every mirror and picture in the room covered.
6. Clocks were stopped. In Sønderjylland this too was said to help the soul out.
7. The coffin left by a door that would not be used again. At the threshold it was lifted and lowered three times. Sometimes a window was taken out and the coffin passed through it instead, or a special corpse door was opened in the wall and bricked up again once the dead was through, so that they could not find their way back as a ghost. When the coffin was out, the gate was slammed behind it.
8. On the road, the coffin must not touch the ground. Setting it down in front of a house could mean death in that house.
9. Then the house was given back. The sheets came off the windows, the room was aired, and camphor, lavender, frankincense or sulphur was burned to drive out the smell of death. The best room was cleared for the funeral feast.

Notice what this is. A house is opened in one direction, sealed in every other, and closed again behind the dead. The covered mirror was one seal among many.

The older idea underneath: the soul outside the body

Under all of this lies a belief far older than glass mirrors. Your reflection and your shadow are not just light. They are part of you, and they can be harmed, caught or taken.

Frazer gathered the evidence from half the world. In ancient India and ancient Greece it was a rule not to look at your own reflection in water, and a Greek who dreamed of seeing himself reflected took it as an omen of death. The fear was that the spirits of the water would drag the reflection under and leave the person without a soul. Frazer thought the story of Narcissus, who wasted away gazing at himself in a pool, grew out of exactly that fear.

The same logic ran through the shadow. At Chinese funerals, Frazer reports, most mourners stepped back when the coffin lid was closed, so their shadows would not be shut in with the dead, and the gravediggers tied cloth tightly round their waists to keep their shadows fastened on.

And it ran through pictures. A portrait was widely believed to hold some of the soul of the person in it. That explains a detail in the Danish death room that is easy to skip past. The mirrors were covered, and so were the pictures. Every surface in the room that held a face was put to sleep until the dead had gone.

This is why a mirror is such a strong tool in old witchcraft. It holds a person without their body. Used carefully, that makes it a window. Left uncovered at the wrong moment, it makes it a trap.

House of the dead

Look at the whole sequence again and the rule behind it comes clear. For a few days after a death, the house was a passage, and a passage has to lead somewhere.

So the old households opened exactly one way out: the window, or the corpse door. They closed every way that led nowhere, or back in. The mirror, which looks like a room and is not one. The pictures, which hold faces. The clock, which keeps a house in ordinary time when the dead needed it to step outside time for a while. They guarded the body with iron and straw, and they sealed the way back behind it: the door bricked up, the gate slammed, the coffin kept off the ground all the way to the grave. Then they undid it all. Cloths off, windows open, smoke through the rooms. The house went back to being a house.

This is the backbone of my craft, and the reason I keep returning to these customs. Every working that opens something must close it again. Order matters: you open before you cross, and you seal after. A reflective surface in a room where you are working with the dead is a door you did not mean to open. The old households knew that without being told. Most modern spellwork has forgotten it.

Sortebog No. 2 is my book of the body, of grief and of the old rites around them. It includes a rite of mourning built on a covered mirror, and on the moment it is uncovered, along with what the old folk did when grief or sickness had to be given somewhere other than the living. If you would rather put a mirror to work for you, the Warning Rite in Sortebog No. 1 hangs one by the door to show you what has come in.

If you want to keep the custom today

Most Danes now die in a hospital or a care home, and the house of the dead has moved elsewhere. But the old gestures still work as a way of marking that something has happened. Danish hospital guidance for relatives still mentions families who open a window, so the soul can go, or stop a clock. If someone close to you has died and you want to keep the custom, this is how I would do it.

1. Open a window soon after you hear, even for a minute, even if they died far away.
2. Cover the mirrors in the room where you remember them best, or in the whole house. A dark cloth, a scarf, a sheet. If someone you live with does not want it, cover only your own.
3. Stop one clock at the hour you were told, and leave it.
4. Leave everything as it is until the funeral. Danish custom took the cloths away once the coffin had left; Jewish custom keeps them through the week of mourning. Choose one and keep to it.
5. Then give the house back. Uncover the mirrors, start the clock, open every window and let the air through. Burn something clean if you like, lavender or a little dried rosemary.

None of this is required, and none of it will hurt you if you skip it. It is a way of telling the house, and yourself, that a door opened and has now closed. Grief takes far longer than the days between death and funeral.

The dead who would not stay put. The Danish dead most likely to walk again included men who had moved boundary stones in life. More on that, and on the bog, in Bog Bodies: Sacrifice, Punishment or Something Else?

Cover the glass, open the window, and let the door close behind them.

~ Hazel