The Value of Not Seeing Your Own Reflection

This year I undertook a deep soul overhaul, wrought though sacrifice, made possible by periods of utter solitude I’d undertaken just before. I am a practitioner of Northern Folk Magick. I work with recognized methods and I work with intuited methods. The deities I invoke are of the ancient paths. The spells and charms and hexes and magic I deal with are both ages old and adapted to these times. My great grandfather sold protection charms in his native Staffordshire, my daughter uses spells at college here in the USA, it is who we are, who I am.

First let me give you some background: four years ago my family and I sold our house  and bought ten acres of land in another state. Out right. We kept what belongings (mostly books and arcana) we could not bear to be without, and we set forth. We live here still, off grid, with a hand-built dwelling. No ties to the world except for those we wish to maintain. They are few.

In and of itself, it is a purely magical way to live. We knew that this particular piece of land was the right one for us when two ravens flew over it. At the time it was a flooded overgrown disused hayfield with a new-growth woods covering the back half of it. Which was a steep hill.

It is remote out here, and except when hunters come every season to disturb our world, it is quiet. There is room to examine your soul here. To make offering to deities. To erect harrows. To invoke unseen aid. To celebrate and observe and live as you want.

For the past four years I’ve grown more and more deeply drawn to magically clearing and plumbing my own depths, to addressing my soul’s bruises and scars, my hearts desires, to sorting my true beliefs from things I think are my beliefs. It is deep work. Made from hours of sitting out—all alone– and simply being one with whatever my mind holds, whatever my thoughts think. Until my mind and my thoughts settle, heavy murk separating from superficiality, substance pulling from feelings, issues drawing themselves from memories, memories no longer demanding attention.

This practice, over time, has brought many things to clarity and I have been able to lay many (many) deep bitter things to rest at the same time I am able to locate and raise up the invincible portion of who I am, really. The center of me. The location of my soul. The magical core of self. I speak freely with the dead and with my land.

Through this solitary act of fine-sifting through myself, I saw myself becoming more and more unmeshed, you might say, with the material world and more meshed with the invisible threads that link us to the world beyond the world; more apt and able to lift the fabric in places, to fold it, tug at it, move it as I would, unencumbered with unexamined extraneousness. I found that I had a deeper understanding of the intentions I needed when I acted magically, a more nuanced knowledge of my energies and how they would manifest through whatever I was doing.

There is wisdom borne of four solid years of work that, despite the long and sometimes exhaustingly alone and harrowed hours I’ve spent with me and only me, facing myself with myself, I am truly glad to be illuminated by.

Yet, early in 2019 it dawned on me that it was not quite enough. That there existed a distance between knowing what is and what is. Knowing yourself and being yourself are two distinct experiences. Once I knew myself, once I understood who I am beneath the layers of life energy, between the memories of my moments I carry with me, I was still not myself, I became she who knows herself. The membrane is thin, and barely perceptible, but the fact remains: she cannot be me, herself cannot be myself, not truly.

I undertook the spiritual journey to me.

I have already materially journeyed far away from many paths, here in the forest, and when I want to I can keep well apart from other people. Therefore, I was able to undertake this journey without having to physically journey to undertake it.

I made the decision to cut through the final membrane between knowing me and being me, to stop regarding me from the outside of myself. To facilitate that end, I intentionally did not look in a mirror at myself for nine months. The Russian mystics say that mirrors can pull souls from bodies, perhaps they are right. I purposely chose to not use one for nine months, giving my soul a time of magical and symbolic re-gestation.

Initially, for me, this was a very hard thing to do, even while it was easy enough to vow not to look into a reflective surface for 36 weeks. Mirrored self-images lend substance to our sense of being who we think we are. It is reassuring to see that we are complete, that we have not a hair out of place, that our eyebrows are just so, our lips, our cheeks, our skin, our neck, our contours, our shape, our everything is able to be self-witnessed, self-aware, self-conscious and either left as is or somehow improved upon, superficially.

It is very odd to realize how tightly sewn up we are in looking at ourselves from the outside in. How habitual it is to refer to our own outer picture of self so many times a day.

There, that color is flattering. If only I had better cheekbones. There, that makes me look better. There, not a hair out of place. There, I don’t look so bad. There, I am. Ordinary reflections that we normally take for granted no longer exist for us when we stop looking in a mirror.  The mundane world ceases to inform us of who we are. This was, I found, profoundly magically transformative. Not looking upon yourself is the opposite of donning ceremonial robes, and because it is the opposite, it is the equal in effect.

When I no longer looked at my own reflection, I stopped seeing myself as a reflection and I began to take part in the world via a different spiritually charged place. I stopped seeing me as a reflected entity and I simply became there. There I was. Here I am. Looking, not from the inner remembered image of how I look, but from my eyes outwards. It didn’t happen immediately, and to be honest, I did not know it would happen at all. I undertook a metaphysically inspired departure from seeing myself for nine months, to detach from the person I saw reflected back at me. To see if I could and to see what would become of me, magically speaking, when I did.

I covered what few mirrors I didn’t take down for the nine months. There was nothing in my immediate world that told me how I appeared to be. It sounds like a very horrible insecure-making experience, but it wasn’t at all. The transformation from seeing myself as a reflection and being myself as a self was relatively fast. A few days ended my reflexive ‘want’ to check my image. In a week I stopped feeling like I ought to check my image.  In a few months I stopped recalling when I did.  It was freeing.

I purposely keep myself very simply in day to day life anyway, so very little changed except my looking at myself.  I braided my hair by feel, I got washed, I got dressed and then I was done dealing with my physical appearance. Clothing was worn for practicality, having already been picked out or made the way I wanted it to be. I knew what the clothes looked like, I could see them. I needed to, as they are not part of me, but a part of the living tool-kit out here. I didn’t need to know what my face looked like, though. Or my entire body. I could see most of my various parts.

At first, I could only see the same things every wild creature sees outwardly from myself, from my eyes: the material reality all around me. Then, and I cannot tell you exactly when, the truth dawned on me that I was this reality, that I was not observing it, that I was not tethered to a vision of myself in it, that I was in it. Like a tree. Like a wolf. Like a rock. Like a neo-lithic woman. Not bound by any mirror-reflection-generated secondhand image-memory.

There is no inner and outer reality. There is no self and not self.

Every breath, every movement is part of the same fabric. I once thought this fabric was only made up of threads of immaterial worlds, but the threads are made up of everything: here and there, magic and mundane, self and other. It is neither extraordinary nor pointless, although it is illuminating. Remarkably so.

There is a deep magical energy generated through understanding this. You are no longer limited to anything when you no longer use your mundane eyes to reflect the reality of yourself back at yourself. You begin use your soul not your self-image. When you use your pure soul, unadulterated by the baggage of self-imaging, the energy is pure as well. Pure and unwavering.

I knew that I had changed, had grown more powerful, more focused, more clear when my magical ability could operate remotely, swiftly altering a situation I was nowhere near. I didn’t need to be near, I didn’t need my physical self, my self that reflected me to me, I used my actual self.

As I am a formalist poet (the better the rhyme the more effective the spelling), here is the spell I used, presented as a sonnet:

 

 

Won’t Harm Anyone Again Spell

 

This might seem like a simple spell, but it

Is very effective when performed by

A person with powerful emotions

And / or magical ability. Sit

In a quiet space, and in your mind’s eye

Conjure up a big smoky black orb, spin

The orb, float it, let it settle between

Your two hands. Imagine yourself holding

This orb, imagine this orb getting warm,

Imagine this orb buzzing like some mean

Nasty nightmare hell-wasp that only brings

Pain to a person who has done you harm.

See yourself throw it at them, like a black

Wrecking ball of grief, as you say ‘attack’.

 

 

Having been undertaken, and having been experienced, there is no need for me to continue this non-mirror journey. My magic does not require it; my sitting out does not require it.  I do not think that mirrors, per se, can pull my newly fortified soul away from my body. It is rather interesting to see myself reflected once again, knowing that this mirror image no longer binds me to my estimation of me.  Truthfully, though, I find that, after having spent so many months not looking at them, I still don’t look in mirrors much anymore. I don’t need to, I am here looking at the world from my own self. There’s tremendous magic in that. To access that source of power took a long journey to my authentic self. The self I spent 2019 learning how to not see.

Anzus Laguz Uruz

By Juleigh Howard-Hobson