About a week ago, my parents accidentally broke my bedroom mirror. My dad moved the mirror to the back of my door, but then my mom followed up and opened the door while the mirror was leaning on the door. It pushed the mirror forward and hit the floor leaving the mirror’s glass shattered.

“Well, looks like you guys have seven years of bad luck,” I said sarcastically. “I’m excited to see what happens to you guys.”

Some people, myself included, refer to the myth “breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck.” This is believed because the first time humans saw their reflections in a pool of water, they believed the image of themself were their actual soul. I never actually believed in this superstition, it just seemed weird because it’s the people’s physical appearance, so wouldn’t they recognize it?

It was believed that the Romans were the first ones to state that a broken mirror meant bad luck for seven years. They believed it took seven years to renew oneself. After seven years they think that you’ll fully be renewed and recovered after this accident.

I don’t believe that after seven complete years that you’ll be completely renewed.

Even if you had seven years of bad luck, wouldn’t you still have a few things be good? I’ve noticed since my parents have broken my mirror, neither of them have any bad luck so far.

In olden times, mirrors were not cheap but were made in low quality, making it really easy to be held as extremely breakable and fragile. In order to keep the people from breaking it, they had to make up a myth of breaking it would curse you to give you seven years of bad luck, but why seven years?

“If a person who breaks a mirror is too lazy or too busy, to avoid the curse, it just leave the broken pieces the way it was for seven hours. One for each year of bad luck, then pick it up immediately after the hours are up,” MirrorHistory.com said.

It’s not only breaking mirrors that causes bad luck. Other examples could include walking under a ladder while it’s open or opening an umbrella indoors.

According to HowStuffWorks, “If a ladder is up, chances are someone’s standing on it, working, and you don’t want to take the chance of something falling on your head. Nor do you want to risk jostling the ladder and knocking someone down.” Others say it’s because the ladder is positioned in a triangle. If you believed in the Holy Trinity, it was considered that if you walked underneath the ladder, you’d then break the Trinity, with attracted “the devil.” Superstition also includes common ways to break the curse during or after walking under the ladder, such as making a wish as you walked underneath it or even walk underneath it once again.

Now, I’ve never believed in the devil myself. With that being said, I don’t believe in attracting “the devil” either, so I never understood why walking under a ladder would attract the devil anyway.

Other than walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror, opening an umbrella indoors was considered bad luck because of the mechanism the umbrella has. The “wings” of the umbrella were sharp and pointy when it was first invented. To get people to not open them indoors and to keep people safe from being poked, people back then stated it was prohibited so that nobody was in danger.

Now, by the sounds of it, it all sounds like the statements made above were to keep people from doing bad things in the first place. The bad luck from breaking a mirror kept people from breaking mirrors on purpose because of how valuable they were. Bad luck kept people from walking under a ladder to prevent people from knocking people off the ladder on accident, and opening an umbrella would keep people from being hurt.

In my opinion, superstitions sound fake, because it just really sounds like people don’t want us to do bad things. I don’t believe in superstitions because now that I’ve read these facts, it just sounds like other people make these up just to help us not do bad things.