/x/periment #3: The Apple and the Mirror

The Apple and the Mirror (Performed 11/23/12)

            Divination, as a whole has been a varied and constant part of magic for the history of mankind and the Celts, and later the Irish and Scots, seem to have used food in many different ways to foretell the future, such as this ritual used originally by young ladies to see the face of their future husband and in subsequent times to answer questions through Scrying. The ritual itself is very similar to many others, most notably the Victorian ritual of Stair Walking (discussed in the scrying link) but some sources say this may be an early version of the Western Bloody Mary ritual, so what better place to kick off my series of Thanksgiving Food Divination?

Apple and the Mirror

            The Apple and the Mirror, is a simple ritual involving only a participant, a chair, a mirror, a candle, an apple, and a knife. Before Midnight, the participant sits with his or her back to the mirror, with the candle lit between the mirror and the participant, and he or she carves up an apple into nine pieces, consuming eight of them and throwing the ninth over their shoulder. Then he or she stares into the mirror over the same shoulder until their vision blurs and the image in it becomes distorted to answer his or her question.  Other variants specify that the ritual needs to occur on Halloween, or that the apple’s juice needs to go on the mirror, while others argue that the participant needs to be combing her hair during the process, yet others suggest that the nine pieces be held in nine separate knives over the left shoulder and the participant gazes over their right.

            When I attempted it earlier this evening it took about 30 minutes for me to see heavy distortion in the mirror. For the sake of continuity with other games I asked to see the face of my future lover. I saw what appeared to be a skull over my face, and a waving blue line almost like a serpent or river. Now according to legend seeing a skull in the mirror means that the individual will die before marriage but the legends never mentioned the blue serpent. Although I’m much in love now I suppose we will see if I get married in the long run. I’ll be comparing this result to the other divinations I’ll be trying out this week leading up to Thanksgiving. As for what was seen in the mirror, while a supernatural option is possible, many others also exist most notably apophenia as a result of my general pallor, the low light, and my blurring vision to form some kind of optical illusion of a very symbolic and 2Spooky sign. When analyzing the ritual, the two most important aspects are the symbolism of the apple, which in many cultures is seen as a sacred fruit and heavily involved in both knowledge and love making it a great candidate for romance divination, and the combination between the mirror and the flickering candle flame itself. This age old technique, utilized in dozens of ritual games, was recently studied by an Italian psychological team, their paper, with the ultimate conclusion that gazing into a mirror in low-light conditions results in a distortion and feeling of dread or otherness in the participant, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, as a result of a brain failing in interpretation of the progressively slowing eye movements and manifesting the image from an amalgam of previously stored memories of the image in different contexts, the incoming visual data, and the idea of what it should resemble.  Sort of takes the steam out of Bloody Mary, now doesn’t it? But the study and others has not suggested why this may occur to the brain in these conditions nor has it explained why this technique has been used throughout time for a myriad of uses from divination to communication with the spirit world.

Perhaps this is an instance of a phenomenon being understood by science but it still retaining some of its mystery in its execution. This was a highly subjective experiment, with no images I witnessed in the mirror, showing up in the camera but that does not mean that all future mirror gazing ritual games will be unable to yield objective visualizations. If you try this at home please let me know what, if anything, you see, as well as your thoughts on divination, this ritual, staring into a mirror, and the rest of it.
As an update, I have kept the Yokai for five nights and so far I have been unable to recall a single dream even with varied amounts of sleep and times of going to sleep. I will continue to report as it is for another two nights until I remove the wax, in theory releasing the spirit, on Tuesday (11/26) and will report any phenomenon after that. As for the Devil's Toybox no new phenomenon or audio recordings have been captured. 

Stay tuned for more Food Divination  and Three Kings in the next few days.

Hope to hear from you /x/philes! All the Best.

HospitalCowboy