After completing my PhD in Medical Sciences, my passion for research never disappeared. These days, I make time to investigate the subjects that genuinely fascinate me, and one of my favorite areas within witchcraft is exploring its history and tracing how magical practices have developed across cultures and centuries. This time, I chose to bring together the results of a much longer research journey into one article, following the fascinating history of mirrors in witchcraft and the many ways they have been understood and used in magical practice. 

If you enjoy exploring witchcraft through history, practice, and thoughtful guidance, you can also join Letters From The Witch’s Room, my monthly witchcraft mail club, and receive a little more magic in your mailbox each month.

Mirrors in Witchcraft

Few ordinary objects carry as much magical weight as a mirror. It exists in almost every home and, at first glance, there is nothing mysterious about it. Yet it does something no other object does in quite the same way: it presents an entire world before us that looks real, moves with us, and responds to us, but is not the world itself.

The figure inside the mirror appears present, yet we cannot enter its space or touch it. The mirror reverses direction, transforms presence into image, and creates what seems almost like a parallel version of the room in which we stand.

Perhaps this is why, across different magical traditions, the mirror has never been only a tool for looking at ourselves. It has also been a place in which something may be seen, an object capable of carrying or embodying power, and sometimes a surface believed capable of sending something back toward the place from which it came.

When we follow mirrors through magical texts from different periods, something especially interesting emerges: there is no single magical meaning of the mirror.

At one time it is connected with visions and prophecy. Elsewhere it belongs to planetary magic, beauty, and love. In another text it becomes a defense against magical influence. Later still, it develops into a dedicated instrument for scrying.

The thread connecting these uses is more interesting than the familiar modern statement that “the mirror represents the self.”

In the texts themselves, another idea begins to appear:

A mirror receives something without necessarily keeping it. It allows something to appear, and sometimes sends it back.

Greco-Roman Egypt and Late Antiquity: The Mirror as a Way of Seeing the Unseen

One of our most important sources for understanding magic in this period is the collection known as the Greek Magical Papyri, usually abbreviated as PGM.

The Greek-Egyptian Magical Papyri are a collection of magical manuscripts written in Egypt, primarily during the Roman period and Late Antiquity. The surviving texts range approximately from the late 2nd century BCE to the 5th–6th centuries CE and are written mainly in Greek, alongside Demotic Egyptian and Coptic. An important portion of the material has been associated with the so-called “Theban Magical Library,” although the precise findspot of every manuscript is not known. The edition used here is the 1986 English translation edited by Hans Dieter Betz.

Already within these texts we encounter an explicit connection between mirrors and magical sight.

In PGM XIII, in a section known as the Eighth Book of Moses, a collection of magical names is described as useful for several purposes. Among the listed applications are inquiries, prophecies through Helios, and, explicitly:

“prophecies by visions in mirrors.”

The text does not provide a complete recipe for preparing such a mirror. It does not tell us what material the mirror should be made from or how it should be consecrated.

But that short phrase is valuable precisely because of its simplicity. It tells us that receiving visions through mirrors was already part of the magical repertoire of Greco-Egyptian practitioners.

The mirror was not merely symbolic. It could serve as a medium through which information unavailable to ordinary sight might become perceptible.

In PGM IV, a mirror appears in a very different context. Within a magical text addressed to a feminine lunar power we find the words:

“Gaze at yourself… the mirror, love charm of the Nile’s goddess.”

The goddess is instructed to look at herself, while the mirror itself is associated with a love charm.

The passage is highly poetic and magical, so we cannot confidently conclude that the practitioner was physically holding a mirror during the ritual. But the connection between mirrors, seeing, beauty, and love is already present.

This reveals another aspect of the mirror.

A mirror does not merely return light.

It returns an image.

And within magic concerned with attraction, beauty, love, presence, and visibility, the image itself can become significant.

The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden

A source very close in period and geographical origin, but quite different in language and character, is the Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden.

This Egyptian magical and medical manuscript was discovered at Thebes in Egypt in the early 19th century, apparently already divided into two parts. One portion eventually reached London and the other Leiden. The manuscript itself dates to approximately the 3rd century CE and is written mainly in Egyptian using the Demotic script, with numerous glosses and transcriptions in Greek-Coptic characters. It is one of the most important surviving late Demotic manuscripts.

Within it we find the expression “golden mirror” as part of a magical invocation.

There is no instruction to physically use a mirror in that passage, so it would be misleading to call it a mirror spell. The mirror functions more as an image, epithet, or quality attached to a magical power.

The papyrus is nevertheless important for understanding the wider environment in which magical seeing occurred.

It contains numerous forms of divination using bowls, water, oil, and lamps, often described in considerable detail.

These are not mirror spells.

But they depend upon reflective or visually receptive surfaces, and they reveal something important about how magical vision could be understood: the practitioner did not always need to look directly at the entity being invoked.

Instead, a mediating surface could be created, a place in which something unseen might become visible.

Water, oil, polished vessels, and mirrors can therefore be understood as belonging to a broader family of magical technologies in which ordinary sight is redirected through another surface.

Long before the modern black scrying mirror appeared, the ancient magical world was already experimenting with the idea of a space of seeing that was not quite ordinary sight.

The Middle Ages: The Picatrix and the Mirror as an Object of Power

Centuries later, mirrors appear within an entirely different magical system: the Picatrix.

Picatrix is the Latin title of the Arabic work Ghayat al-Hakim, “The Goal of the Wise,” an extensive treatise on astral magic, talismans, astrology, alchemy, and magical philosophy. The original work was written in Arabic in the medieval Islamic world; its exact authorship remains uncertain and it was long attributed to Pseudo-al-Majriti. It is generally associated with the 10th–11th centuries. In the 13th century it was translated into Spanish at the court of Alfonso X and subsequently entered the Latin European magical tradition.

Here, the mirror is no longer connected only with divination.

It enters a highly developed system of planetary images, talismans, colors, metals, incense, clothing, ritual gestures, and celestial correspondences.

The Mirror of Venus

One of the most beautiful examples appears in an invocation of Venus.

The practitioner is instructed to dress in a way appropriate to the nature of Venus, wearing gold and pearls and surrounding herself with things associated with beauty, pleasure, fragrance, and refinement.

Then comes a remarkably simple instruction:

Hold a mirror in the right hand.
Hold an apple or a comb in the left.

Wine, perfume, and incense are placed before the practitioner, who addresses Venus as a power associated with beauty, joy, jewelry, music, marriage, love, and intimacy.

The text later states that the invocation of Venus is intended to obtain “love, affection and intimacy.”

What makes the mirror especially interesting here is that there is no instruction to gaze into it.

It is simply held.

Its role is therefore not necessarily divinatory.

The mirror belongs to the ritual identity of Venus in the same way that the apple, jewelry, perfume, and wine belong to her sphere.

The practitioner is not merely asking Venus for something. She surrounds herself with objects that participate in the nature of Venus, creating a ritual environment in which Venusian qualities become present.

The mirror becomes an attribute of beauty, visibility, attraction, and perhaps of the complicated relationship between seeing and being seen.

And this is not the only planetary appearance of a mirror in the Picatrix.

In sections describing planetary images, the Sun is depicted as a figure riding in a chariot drawn by four horses and holding a mirror in the right hand. Another version of the solar image again includes a mirror.

The Moon, in one tradition, also appears as a crowned figure riding in a chariot drawn by four bulls, holding a staff in one hand and a mirror in the other.

This opens another possible dimension.

The mirror does not belong only to Venus and beauty. It may also belong to the luminaries themselves, the Sun and Moon, the two great celestial powers of light, visibility, and reflection.

The Moon, after all, is visible to us through light that is not generated by the lunar surface but reflected from it.

The mirror fits naturally into a magical worldview concerned with the ways in which light is received, transmitted, and reflected.

A Mirror Pointed Toward the Sky

The Picatrix also contains a curious and very short operation intended to protect an area from hail.

The text reports a procedure attributed to Kothamy, who had read it in a work by Yanbushath. A completely healthy person, with no physical defect, is given a large mirror made of shining metal and instructed to wave or direct it toward the hail clouds.

According to the text, this prevents the hail from falling in that area.

There is no elaborate ceremony here and no spectacular incantation.

As a spell, it may not be the most dramatic example in the magical tradition.

But as evidence for the magical understanding of mirrors, it is fascinating.

The mirror is not directed toward the practitioner.

It is not being used to reveal anything.

It is turned outward, toward a force approaching from the sky.

The text does not explicitly say that the mirror “reflects the hail back,” so we should not put that interpretation into the source.

But the choice of a large, shining metallic mirror, physically directed toward an external threat, transforms the mirror from a passive surface into an object acting upon the world.

And this brings us to my favorite story in the entire survey.

Alexander the Great, the Ring, and the Mirror

Among a series of magical sayings and stories in the Picatrix, we are told of a man who approached Alexander the Great.

The man was wearing a ring engraved with unusual symbols.

Within the magical worldview represented by the text, such engravings were not necessarily decorative. They could belong to a charm or talismanic system intended to carry and exert power.

The man approached Alexander and showed him the ring.

But Alexander received him while holding a clear mirror.

The explanation is explicit: Alexander understood the power of charms and therefore held the mirror in order to reflect any effect that the ring might direct toward him.

The man, according to the story, was astonished that Alexander understood the powers of charms and talismans.

This is a small story, but its implications for mirror magic are enormous.

Here we do not have to guess at the principle.

The text itself says:

reflect any effect.

The mirror does not absorb the power.

It does not destroy it.

It does not overpower it with something stronger.

It simply refuses to remain the final destination.

Whatever reaches the mirror encounters a surface that sends it elsewhere.

This gives us one of the most elegant principles for understanding mirror magic:

The power of a mirror is not necessarily to create new force, but to change the course of a force that has already been sent.

That is quite different from protection imagined as a wall or barrier.

A wall says:

No farther.

A mirror says:

Not here. Back.

That distinction matters, and it will reappear many centuries later in modern mirror spells.

The European Grimoire Tradition: The Mirror Becomes a Window

As we move into the European grimoire tradition and ceremonial magic, the visionary role of the mirror becomes increasingly developed.

One modern source that helps trace this development is William J. Kiesel’s Magic Circles in the Grimoire Tradition.

This is not an ancient magical text but a modern English-language study published in 2015. Kiesel examines European manuscripts and grimoires of ceremonial magic from roughly the 13th century into the modern period, comparing instructions, diagrams, and practices found in sources such as the Heptameron, Solomonic texts, grimoires attributed to Honorius, Agrippa, and later magical traditions.

Kiesel describes forms of scrying in which a practitioner or medium looks into mirrors, crystals, bowls of water, and even pools of ink.

The shared quality is the reflective surface.

This brings us closer to a theory of mirror magic.

Perhaps the important thing is not always the mirror as an object.

Perhaps it is the quality of the surface that reflects.

A mirror, crystal, water, or oil can all create a place where ordinary vision becomes slightly unstable. The eyes look at a physical surface, but attention begins to move beyond the surface itself.

The practitioner starts looking into it.

Kiesel also discusses John Dee and Edward Kelley, whose visionary work involved crystals and other seeing devices, alongside traditions involving obsidian mirrors. He describes practices in which a child or another medium acted as the seer while the magician performed the conjurations and asked questions.

He also mentions a scrying operation involving a mirror anointed with olive oil, while the magician performs the conjuration inside a circle surrounded with verbena.

Here the mirror has become something close to a ritual window.

Not necessarily a literal doorway to another world, but a surface that helps vision and consciousness move from ordinary perception into another state of seeing.

The Late 19th Century: The Black Mirror Takes a Recognizable Form

One of the more intriguing texts in this history appears in an 1898 English edition of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

Agrippa’s original work was written in Latin in the early 16th century and published in an expanded form in 1533. However, the section relevant here, The Magic Mirror: A Message to Mystics, was not written by Agrippa. It was additional material included by the American editor Willis F. Whitehead in the 1898 edition.

That distinction matters.

But precisely because the text is late, it allows us to see how ideas scattered through earlier traditions had begun to crystallize into the object we now immediately recognize as a black scrying mirror.

The reader is given instructions for making a magical mirror from concave glass.

The reverse side is coated with layers of asphaltum until the surface becomes dark and opaque. The author explicitly favors dark mirrors.

The mirror then undergoes a process he calls “magnetizing,” performed through movements of the hands above its surface.

When it is used, the room should be dark.

The practitioner holds the mirror in both hands and is not instructed simply to look at it.

The emphasis is on looking into it.

Not:

look at the mirror.

But:

gaze into it.

A small linguistic difference that contains an entire magical idea.

The surface has stopped feeling like an endpoint.

It has become depth.

The text describes the initial appearance of a milky mist, followed by forms or images that are interpreted as signs that communication is opening.

At this point, the modern magical mirror is already almost fully recognizable:

dark, private, dedicated, kept separately from ordinary household mirrors, and intended specifically for seeing beyond ordinary sight.

The Last Hundred Years: The Mirror Returns to the Witch’s Workroom

In 20th- and 21st-century witchcraft, the mirror did not disappear.

Quite the opposite.

It became an increasingly practical magical tool, used for divination, protection, reversal, magical charging, transformation, and communication with the unseen.

What is striking is how many of the qualities we encountered in much older sources remain present.

Not always in exactly the same form, and not necessarily through conscious imitation, but the principles remain remarkably familiar:

To see. To return. To multiply. To redirect. To alter the movement of power.

Scott Cunningham: Breaking What the Mirror Holds

One simple but striking example appears in Scott Cunningham’s Cunningham’s Book of Shadows.

The book was published posthumously in 2009, although its manuscript dates to the early 1980s. It contains spells, rituals, and notes from Cunningham’s personal work; he became one of the most influential American writers on Wicca and practical witchcraft in the late 20th century.

In the Break-Mirror Spell, the mirror is not used for divination or for sending something back to its source.

Instead, it becomes a physical representation of something the practitioner wishes to break or leave behind.

A problem, habit, hostile person, obstacle, or unwanted situation is visualized in the mirror. The mirror is then broken.

The principle is simple but powerful:

The mirror does not merely reflect reality.

It can be given a reality to hold symbolically, and then the surface holding that reality can itself be changed.

This is almost the opposite of scrying.

In scrying, we allow an image to appear so that we can understand it.

Here, the image appears so that its form can be destroyed.

Judika Illes: A Mirror Charged by the Moon

A gentler approach appears in Judika Illes’s The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells, published in 2004.

The book is a large modern collection of spells from many traditions alongside contemporary magical practices. Illes often functions as a collector and compiler rather than claiming authorship of every operation included in the book.

One practice she records is called the Lunar-Charged Magic Mirror.

Here, the mirror is not activated in a single moment.

It is gradually transformed into a personal magical object.

The mirror is exposed to the full Moon for several hours and then used by its owner over fifteen consecutive nights. The intention is for the mirror to receive lunar power while simultaneously becoming increasingly attuned to the practitioner.

A kind of circuit develops:

Moon → mirror → person → mirror.

The mirror becomes a meeting place between celestial power and individual presence.

This has an interesting echo of the Picatrix, where mirrors appear in relation to planetary and luminary powers. The modern practice, however, makes that relationship intensely personal.

The Mirror Returns to Divination

In Lady Sabrina’s The Witch’s Master Grimoire, published around 2000–2001, we find a form of Mirror Gazing using a three-panel mirror and candlelight.

The book is a modern practical encyclopedia of spells, rituals, charms, and magical tools.

Instead of staring directly at her own reflection, the practitioner focuses on the reflected flame of a candle, softens the gaze, and waits for mist, forms, or images to appear within the mirror.

Almost two thousand years after the magical papyri referred to “visions in mirrors,” the fundamental act remains recognizable.

The mirror becomes a surface where something normally unseen is invited, for a moment, to become visible.

The Mirror Box: Nowhere for the Power to Go but Back

Lady Sabrina also describes an entirely different use of mirrors in a Mirror Box.

Instead of one mirror, the inside of a box is lined with reflective surfaces facing inward. A representation of someone believed to be sending negativity is placed inside.

Symbolically, that person is now enclosed within a space in which every surface reflects back toward the center.

Jason Miller develops a related principle in Protection & Reversal Magick: A Witch’s Defense Manual, first published in 2006 and later updated.

The book is a modern manual of defensive and reversal magic combining elements of ceremonial magic, witchcraft, rootwork, spirit work, and practices involving Hekate.

In Miller’s version, a representation of the sender is also placed inside a box lined with pieces of mirror.

The principle is straightforward:

What is sent is returned.

Miller makes an important observation, however. The mirror itself does not distinguish between “good” and “bad.”

Its principle is simply reflection.

He also cautions against becoming trapped in endless reversal work, where one magical attack produces another and both sides remain locked in escalation.

This brings us directly back to Alexander’s mirror.

Centuries separate the texts, but the principle remains remarkably similar:

A mirror does not necessarily have to stop power. It can change its direction.

Not Only Returning: Redirecting Light

In Creating Circles & Ceremonies, published in 2006, Oberon and Morning Glory Zell describe a gentler use of the same reflective property.

The book gathers rituals and magical practices developed through their decades of involvement in American Pagan and magical communities.

A pentagram or another magical symbol is drawn on a mirror. Candlelight is reflected from the mirror through that symbol and directed toward a person or object intended to receive protection or blessing.

Here the mirror is not returning an attack.

It functions almost like a magical relay:

Light → mirror → symbol → person.

This greatly expands the magical meaning of reflection.

Not everything reflected needs to be something we reject.

A mirror can also receive light, blessing, or intention and redirect it toward the place where we want it to act.

Donald Tyson: Turning the Black Mirror Into a Living Lunar Tool

Donald Tyson takes the magical mirror much further in How to Make and Use a Magic Mirror, published in editions during the 1990s.

Rather than offering a single spell, Tyson presents an entire system for constructing a black mirror, dedicating it to lunar forces, using it for scrying, and eventually connecting spiritual power with the instrument itself.

His mirror is built according to lunar and magical correspondences, charged under the Moon, inscribed with symbols, and treated not as a casual tool but as an object developed through repeated ritual work.

At an advanced stage, Tyson even describes creating or selecting a lunar spirit to work through the mirror.

By this point the mirror is no longer merely an accessory used inside a ritual.

It has become almost a dwelling place for power.

This is a remarkable distance from the ordinary household mirror with which we began, and yet the fundamental physical property of the object has not changed at all.

It still receives.

It still reflects.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley: The Black Mirror and Communication With the Dead

In 2014, Rosemary Ellen Guiley published The Art of Black Mirror Scrying.

Guiley was a prolific writer and researcher in paranormal and occult subjects, and this book focuses specifically on the black mirror as a tool for scrying, spirit communication, and related visionary work.

Her approach is less like a single spell and more like developing an ongoing relationship with a magical instrument.

The mirror is dedicated and kept as a personal tool. During scrying, the eyes are relaxed and the dark surface is approached almost like a deep black pool.

Rather than forcing an image to appear, the practitioner waits for mist, colors, shapes, figures, impressions, or inner knowing to emerge.

Guiley also discusses the mirror as a means of attempting communication with the dead.

And with that, we return almost exactly to the beginning of our journey:

The mirror as a place where something inaccessible to ordinary sight is given a chance to appear.

The Same Mirror, New Uses

The materials and styles of magical practice have changed enormously across two thousand years.

The mirror itself has not.

Modern practitioners may use manufactured glass, acrylic paint, inexpensive mirror tiles, candles from a store, or a black surface created specifically for scrying.

But the magic continues to draw upon the same physical qualities that made mirrors uncanny in the first place.

A mirror can hold an image, and so Cunningham allows it to hold a problem before breaking it.

It can receive light, and so Illes and Tyson charge mirrors with the Moon.

It can multiply reflection, and so mirror boxes surround a symbolic figure with surfaces that return everything toward the center.

It can send something back, and so reversal magic uses the mirror much as the Picatrix says Alexander used one.

And it can receive light and redirect it elsewhere, as in the Zells’ protective work, where candlelight passes through a magical symbol and is reflected toward another person.

Perhaps this is why mirrors have survived so beautifully within witchcraft.

They do not need an abstract magical explanation to demonstrate what they do.

Their behavior is visible.

You send light toward a mirror, and the light returns.

You stand before it, and another image appears.

You place one mirror opposite another, and space seems to continue indefinitely.

You darken the surface, and an object designed to show you the visible world suddenly becomes a place in which you might search for something invisible.

So after more than two thousand years of magical work with mirrors, perhaps the most interesting question remains the same:

If a mirror can change the way something is seen, can it also change the way power moves?