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MIRROR HOURS

Mirror hours

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Who hasn’t glanced at the time just as the clock displayed a number that reads the same forwards and backwards? Who hasn’t woken up to find the numbers on the clock appearing to double? It’s impossible not to be intrigued by what are known as ‘mirror hours’! What are we to make of them? Should we attach any significance to them, or simply brush them aside? Never mind; for the curious, here’s a little angelic tale about them...

The story

Time and mystery have always seemed to go hand in hand. Perhaps because time itself is a mystery to humans! In Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquity, people studied solar and lunar cycles; certain times of day were associated with omens or divine journeys. Other cultural traditions linked each hour of the day to a spirit, an energy or a deity, and established auspicious times for prayers, rituals or protection. Kabbalah — an esoteric Jewish tradition — studied gematria, that is to say, numerical and temporal combinations perceived as divine codes.

Later, in the 18th century, the widespread availability of mirrors and timekeeping instruments enabled the development of a culture of observing signs in everyday life. A century later, at the start of the 19th century, the ‘oracle of the hours’ appeared in almanacs and small books on divination, in which certain hours were associated with omens concerning love, finances and so on. This laid the ‘folkloric’ foundations.

Carl Gustav Jung and modern numerology would go on to establish the psychological and spiritual framework. Jung did so by developing the concept of synchronicity, which would become the preferred explanatory framework for mirror hours. As for numerology, it began to systematically interpret repeating numbers. The advent of technology would bring it all to a head with the arrival of digital clocks in the 1970s. The digitisation of the time became widespread: the symmetries of the digits then became visible. Ten years later, the concept of ‘mirror hours’ was born.

What is the connection with angels?

Doreen Virtue and other authors have popularised modern angelology and the ‘angel numbers’. Mirror hours are often incorporated into this system: each hour is said to correspond to a specific guardian angel. Some ‘angelologists’ even claim that the time of birth determines each person’s ‘spiritual angel’. But what is the truth of the matter?

Hours and angels

Originally, Jewish Kabbalah identified 72 sacred Names in the text of Exodus — names of God, not angels. It was the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance who transformed these into 72 angels, by adding the sacred suffixes -EL and -IAH to each root. The correspondences with dates and times came later. By extension of the same principle, each angel is also assigned a 20-minute slot in the day — a purely arithmetic division (72 × 20 = 1,440 minutes, or 24 hours) which esoteric tradition has adopted, though the precise originator cannot be traced.

These 24 angels are the ones who watch over each mirror hour. To discover the 72 angels and find yours, take a look at our angel calendar.

Find out about reversed mirror hours in our next article!