At midnight the mirror is not a window but a door standing ajar, and the face within it is not always the one you show the day. Tonight you go to meet what you have been carrying and leave it on the far side of the glass.
This working reaches toward the release of an old self, a role outworn, a shape of sorrow you have mistaken for your name. The mirror receives what you set down in it, and the bell seals the parting. What you leave in the silver at midnight does not follow you back into the morning.
The Working
- At the stroke of midnight, sit before a mirror with a single candle lit between you and the glass.
- Lay a line of salt along the mirror’s lower edge, the threshold you will not let it cross.
- Look into your own eyes until the face begins to loosen from the name you call it by.
- Speak aloud what you leave behind, the grief, the guilt, the self you have outgrown, as though speaking to the one in the glass.
- Recite the incantation, and on the final line, cover the mirror with a dark cloth.
- Ring the bell once, clear and final, into the covered dark.
- Snuff the candle and leave the mirror veiled until first light.
The Incantation
Face in the silver, face I wore,
stay behind the midnight door.
Salt to hold you, cloth to keep,
go you now to the glass’s deep.
What I was, I leave with you;
what I am walks on anew.
Bell, be rung and part us clean,
I am not the thing I’ve seen.
In the morning, uncover the mirror and meet a plainer face than the one you left. The other stays where you set it down.