It’s pure folklore, or is it? Jake Gyllenhaal appearing on the Ellen show revealed his disfigured hand after the talk show host asked him about the incident.
“A mirror broke in the middle of the scene, I hit a mirror and it broke,” Gyllenhaal explained. “And it cut my hand.”
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“Did you punch it?,” DeGeneres continued.
‘No, I looked at it really hard,” he joked with a smile. “It broke and then my hand was hurt.”
‘Do you want to see it? It’s gross,” he asked.
Gyllenhaal flipped his hand over to reveal a deep stitched-up gash, while the audience gasped in the background.
It is said that when you break a mirror, your cosmic penance is to endure seven years of bad luck, unless you can find a way to counteract the negative effects. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to prevent all that karmically bad juju after you break a mirror, although you might have to get a little dirty or soggy. It’s still preferable to spending the rest of your seven year sentence wondering why your car keys keep breaking off in the ignition or why you keep missing the bus.
The origin of the “break a mirror, face seven years of bad luck” superstition can be traced back to the Romans, who were the first to create glass mirrors. Just because your culture invents something totally useful like a mirror doesn’t mean you can’t still have some irrational beliefs about its use. The Romans, along with the Greek, Chinese, African and Indian cultures, believed that a mirror had the power to confiscate part of the user’s soul. If the user’s reflected image became distorted in any way, this could mean a corruption of his or her soul.