Ye Magick Mirrour of Old Japan

IN old Japan the mirror occupies a peculiarly important place. Travellers in that land of strange arts and quaint customs tell us of mirror-worship as one of its forms of primitive religion. In old Japan the mirror is not, as in our Western civilization, a mere article of furniture, an accessory of the toilet, or a means for covering up the otherwise indecorate breadth of wall above a mantel-piece. One finds the mirror in Japan surrounded with pomp and circumstance on every hand. It is prominent amongst the symbolic objects that constitute the imperial regalia of the Shogun. One sees it depicted in Japanese pictures of the infernal regions. In the temples of the old Shinto religion, precious old mirrors are enshrined in costly arks, only to be exhibited on the occasion of some great ceremony. Innumerable mirrors, some of them of old date, but mostly of modern manufacture, are to be found hung upon the walls of the Shinto temples. There they have been deposited as votive offerings by women who had perhaps nought else so precious to offer. As the Japanese warrior offers as a votive gift to the temple his cherished sword, so the Japanese lady bestows her treasured mirror. There they hang in thousands, swords and mirrors, side by side, thank-offerings to the gods. In the scant furniture of the Japanese ménage, the mirror, reposing in its place upon the lady’s toilet-table, forms the one significant object; the central feature to suit which all the rest is subordinated. The mirror enters into the myths of the Japanese race: it is the emblem of light, or the sun, and of the divine right of the dynasty. In the trousseau of the bride the mirror is the most precious object—her one cherished possession. The first-made mirror—or the one held to be such in the estimation of the Japanese, and venerated accordingly—is enshrined in the great sacred twin-palace at Isé, the holy spot to which pious pilgrims turn their steps with devoted zeal. Its origin is related in the famous myth of the sun-goddess, Amaterasu oho-mi-kami, who, on one occasion, withdrew offended to a rocky cavern, leaving the world in darkness. From this retreat she was enticed by the other gods, after many curious artifices had been tried, by their successful making of a mirror, in which seeing her face reflected, she was impelled by jealousy and curiosity to venture forth. This mirror was fashioned by the Vulcan of the Shinto Olympus to imitate the sun, being in shape a disk with eight rays. In modern Japanese heraldry the sun, as blazoned upon the national flag, is a red orb with sixteen red rays, not pointed as in European heraldry, but widening out to the margin of the flag. Some hold that the Japanese imperial crest, the kiku, which resembles a flower with sixteen petals joined and rounded at the outer extremities, and issuing from a small central disk, is also a blazon of the sun; others hold it to represent the chrysanthemum. In Japanese pictures of the sun-goddess myth, the mirror is always represented as of the eight-point form. Tradition states that the flaw still to be seen in its surface was caused by a blow it received when the gods thrust it into the half-opened doorway of the rocky cavern as the sun-goddess peeped out. The standard version of the entire myth is to be found in a memoir on the Shinto Temples of Isé by Mr. Ernest Satow, in the second volume of the “Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan” (1873-74). In the British Museum, in Dr. Anderson’s collection of Japanese drawings, No. 1905, there is a silk roll painted in colours, depicting the scene outside the cavern. It is without signature or seal, and the artist is unknown. A further myth narrates the subsequent history of the mirror. It was handed by the sun-goddess to her grandson Nini-gi no mikoto when he descended from heaven to subdue the earth, along with the sacred sword and the sacred seal-stone (the three sacred treasures of the Japanese regalia), with these words: “Look upon this mirror as my spirit: keep it in the same house and on the same floor with yourself, and worship it as if you were worshipping my actual presence.” Nini-gi no mikoto founded the empire of Japan, and is worshipped as the first Shogun, all subsequent sovereigns claiming divine right by descent from him. All mirrors in Shinto temples, whether exposed to view or concealed in shrines or arks, are imitations of this one, though some are regarded as being representative of other secondary deities. At Isé, where the first mirror is preserved, each mirror is enclosed in a box standing on a stand, and covered with a cloth of silk. The mirror is itself wrapped in a brocade bag, which is never opened or renewed, but which, when nearly worn out, is enclosed in a new bag. Over the numerous wrappings is a cage of wood with gold ornaments, draped with a curtain of coarse silk. At festivals, when they open the shrines, all that can be seen is the boxes with the coverings over them.