纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 058日本铜镜（8）（在线收听）

And it's this particular ability of Japanese mirrors to allow humans to speak to gods that has ensured the survival of our mirror, which, along with 18 others, was given to the British Museum in 1927 by a great Japanese collector of mirrors. All of these mirrors are made of bronze, and all have the same distinctive matt surface. But it was only in the last few months, while we were preparing for this programme, that a Japanese scholar researching in the British Museum was, for the first time, able to tell us why they all looked like this. It's because all of them came from the same place, all of them were found in a sacred pond beneath the mountain shrine of Haguro-san in the north of Japan. At the beginning of the twentieth century this pond was drained, in order to build a bridge for pilgrims. To the astonishment of the engineers, they found, deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond, around 600 mirrors, ours among them, which over the centuries had been consigned to the water. Here's that same visiting Japanese scholar, the archaeologist Harada Masayuki:

"People started to [make] pilgrimages to the mountain, because they thought there was a god in this mountain. They did consider the landscape quite holy and spiritual; for example, looking at the white snow that stays for a long time, they thought it something mysterious and quite spiritual. So people thought that in that pond there was a god.

一九二七年，我们的这面镜子与其他十八面铜镜一起来到大英博物馆。正是上述沟通人与神的特殊能力让它们留存至今。这些镜子都用青铜制成，表面均没有光泽。直至二。九年，我们才从一位来博物馆做研究的日本学者处了解了这十九面铜镜的渊源。它们都来自同一个地方，日本东北部羽黑山脚下一座著名寺庙的圣池。

二十世纪初，为了给香客修一座桥，人们抽干了池里的水，施工人员惊讶地在池底的淤泥中发现了大约六百面铜镜（我们的这些也在其中），都是在过去的岁月中被托付给池水的。这名日本访问学者、考古学家原田雅之描述道：

信徒们开始上山朝拜，因为他们认为这里的景致神圣庄严，适合众神居住。例如，山顶终年不化的白雪便透着神圣意味。圣池本身也成了朝拜的中心，人们认为池中住着一位神。