The concept of an other-world on the other side of the mirror is firmly embedded in our cultural consciousness, or akashic memory, or whatever the currently-in-vogue name for yeah, everybody knows about that is.
Mirrors (quoth the Font of All Knowledge) themselves are thousands of years old: eight thousand for the oldest incarnations in obsidian; various polished substances around six; but the concept of mirror-as-gateway is much more recent — I can't find a single citation verifiably earlier than Lewis Carroll! A large part of this is possibly that mirrors, up until very recently, weren't very large: they were mostly hand-held objects, too small to even consider stepping through, and rarely affixed to walls, and it was only around the late ninteenth century that full-length mirrors became feasible.
It's actually difficult to find any mythological references to mirrors, since myth, literature, and art are all themselves so often metaphorically described as mirrors. There is, of course, Yata no Kagami, said to be the mirror hung by Ama-no-Uzume to lure Amaterasu from her hiding-place; of probably loosely the same vintage, but half a world away, is Tezcatlipōca, the malefic deity known as [the] Smoking Mirror. Allegedly there is also a Jewish myth (which, if it is a real myth and not a modern invention, is quite possibly older than the previous two put together) involving a mirror possessed by a demon. None of these feature mirrors as portals or gateways.
(possibly TBC)
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