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Editor's note:
In many cultures, a broken mirror is said to bring seven years of bad luck, a superstition that is believed to go back to the Greeks and the Romans. But the ancient Maya believed mirrors were a channel for supernatural communication, and artists represented such interactions on sculptures.
Inscriptions on display at the British Museum in London and Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City illustrate some of these beliefs. According to James L. Fitzsimmons, a scholar of the Indigenous religions of the Americas, the sculptures show what were believed to be “interactive experiences,” in which the ruling classes acquired the power to figuratively visit divine beings with the help of mirrors. The text on these inscriptions is written backward and was probably designed to be viewed with a mirror.
Today those pieces of art are hung like paintings on walls rather than placed overhead above doorways as they originally were, so today’s visitors may not see the “wondrous, terrifying and whimsical world of the supernatural as the ancient Maya intended,” Fitzsimmons writes. Perhaps if they did, “a broken mirror would inspire wonder rather than fear.”
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