Mirrors and their reflections

Somewhere in the world there must be a mine of mirrors. Mirror is not something created but something born … What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing.1

Reality is like a kaleidoscope: a cacophony of mirrors reflects itself fractally and with infinite precision. But in reality, every reflection is different from every other reflection. Each soul experiences the world in a slightly different way, while at the same time having something of every other soul. It is possible to dive infinitely deep into any image and discover everything through it.

The “not” is the mirror image of the “is”. What is flows from what isn’t, and what isn’t receives what is. Death is the “not” of life, and it is in everything, even deeply intertwined with life itself, fiber by fiber. When I remind myself of this, I feel comforted.

Are the images shown in mirrors symmetric? I mean this: when I look in a mirror, it appears as though the image is flat whereas what is outside the mirror is deep. So then, when the mirror looks at me, do I appear flat to it? Are we each others’ images—that is, each others’ mutual representations? Or is it the case that a mirror is a special kind of thing that creates images which are in some way different from the ones found outside mirror-space? If this is the case, then we would expect this world also to be a representation of some other world (which is, loosely speaking, the idea of Platonism).

According to Plotinus, images are a special kind of thing that appears on the surface of the mirror; they are induced by real beings but are not themselves fully real:2

If, then, there really is something in mirrors, let there really be objects of sense in matter in the same way; but if there is not, but only appears to be something, then we must admit, too, that things only appear on matter, and make the reason for their appearance the existence of the real beings, an existence in which the real beings always really participate, but the beings which are not real, not really; since they cannot be in the same state as they would be if real beings did not really exist and they did.

On mirroring between people:

The entirely natural way in which a room of mirrors sprung up in the middle of a large city: There were polished mirrors, and people went there, and they took LSD and looked at themselves and at each other, and whenever anyone made a movement, everyone else would copy it. It was never explained to any of them. It was self-explanatory. It was the most unremarkable thing. Someone exiting might exclaim only: “how rare it is to see a piece of nature so authentically preserved here in the middle of the city!”

So then, is imitation really artificial—or is it natural? (See also the section on Zerbino in Água Viva.)

  1. Água Viva on mirrors ↩
  2. Enneads III.6.13.43–55, trans. Armstrong, quoted by Jonathan Grieg (2024), Proclus on Sensible Substance and Particulars (handout) ↩