Mirror, mirror

I recently started watching the tv show Once Upon a Time, and I've been looking at the ancient roots of some of its fairy-tale themes. Magic mirror have always been part of the show, since the evil queen from Snow White is arguably the main character:

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But in a recent episode there was a magic mirror in which absent loved ones appear, shades of Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised:

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Assuming that ancient mirrors were crummy, I wondered if they would seem magical before they provided an accurate reflection. But, first misconception: ancient mirrors were capable of an accurate reflection. Obsidian mirrors recovered from Turkey work well, as this image shows:

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Ancient Greek mirrors were made of copper, iron or silver; glass mirrors are first found in ancient Rome. It seems that even if ancient mirrors did not allow you to count all your nose hairs, they seemed mystical enough for a few legends to grow up around them. 

The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy says that the witches of Thessaly wrote oracles on mirrors, and that Pythagoras foretold the future using a magic mirror. Ancient healers suspended a mirror in water to determine whether a sick person could be healed. These folkloric uses of mirrors are echoed in literature, as with the mirror analogy in Republic 10. The mirror on the moon found in Lucian, in which you could see your family on earth, demonstrates how magical mirrors could seem. However, as Fairytale in the Ancient World explains, the oracular role in Snow White was filled by more typical oracle figures, such as the moon or sun.

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Those glass slippers

I've become quite addicted to Once Upon a Time, the ABC show starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jennifer Morrison (far less annoying than on House, by the way). I love the fantasy elements, and it made me curious about fairy tales in antiquity.

A bit of time with Google Scholar and this monograph have clarified a few things to me, which may be obvious to others:

1) Cinderella and Snow White are basically the same story. There are only so many ways your stepmother can mess with you. As Anderson points out in Fairytale in the Ancient World, "to anyone accustomed to reading folktales in quantity it will come as no surprise to encounter a male Cinderella, an angel as fairy godfather, a Cinderella without a slipper test, and many more such deviations." Female jealousy and infighting occur even now; they were perhaps even more common in an age of narrower female expectations and the frequent deaths of mothers and remarriage of fathers.

2) Happily ever after is an incredibly generous expectation and a modern luxury. The ancient fairy tale heroines Anderson proposes, such as Io and Psyche, make excessive housework and suspended animation seem like a vacation. Io, of course, hopes for nothing more than returning to human forms and living to bear Zeus' child. Hera inflicts household tasks of diabolical complexity on Psyche, such as sorting a enormous pile of mixed grains in a few hours' time and stealing beauty from the goddess of the underworld. It's a compelling story; if you're looking for a starter text for second year Latin, you might want to check out this simplified version.

I tend to be vaguely embarrassed at my romantic notions of the Middle Ages (fed by my historical fiction addiction), but at least in their imaginations medieval people tended to be more idealistic and more generous to their fictional heroes and heroines. I'm not sure whether we have cultural Christianity or Eleanor of Aquitaine's Court of Love to thank for that.

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