|
|
In fiction, folklore, and popular culture, a doppelgänger is a ghostly double of a living person, often perceived as a
sinister form of bilocation. In
the vernacular, the word
doppelgänger has come to refer (as in German) to any double
or look-alike of a person. The
word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision,
in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection.
They are generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a
doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger,
while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In Norse mythology, a
vardøger is a ghostly
double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in
advance.
On 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet,
drowned in the Bay of
Spezia near Lerici. On 15 August,
while staying at Pisa, Percy's wife Mary Shelley wrote a letter
to Maria
Gisborne in which she relayed Percy's claims to her that he had met his own
doppelgänger. A week after Mary's nearly fatal miscarriage, in the early hours of 23 June, Percy
had had a nightmare about the
house collapsing in a flood, and
- ... talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions
lately — he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the
terrace & said to him — "How long do you mean to be content" — No very
terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley
had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs
Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much
imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or
otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [15 June]
at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as
she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or
jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as
from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back
except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground)
she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him
no more she cried — "Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he
be gone?" Shelley, said Trelawny — "No Shelley has past — What do you mean?"
Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved
indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time
she saw him.
Percy Shelley's drama Prometheus Unbound (1820)
contains the following passage in Act I: "Ere Babylon was dust, / The Magus
Zoroaster, my dear child, / Met his own image walking in the garden. / That
apparition, sole of men, he saw. / For know there are two worlds of life and
death: / One that which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave,
where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / Till death
unite them and they part no more...."
Izaak Walton claimed
that John Donne, the English
metaphysical poet, saw his wife's
doppelgänger in 1612 in Paris, on the same night as the stillbirth of their
daughter.
- Two days after their arrival there, Mr. Donne was left alone, in that
room in which Sir Robert, and he, and some other friends had dined
together. To this place Sir Robert returned within half an hour; and, as
he left, so he found Mr. Donne alone; but, in such ecstacy, and so
altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him in so much
that he earnestly desired Mr. Donne to declare befallen him in the short
time of his absence? to which, Mr. Donne was not able to make a present
answer: but, after a long and perplext pause, did at last say, I have seen a
dreadful Vision since I saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me
through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child
in her arms: this, I have seen since I saw you. To which, Sir Robert
replied; Sure Sir, you have slept since I saw you; and, this is the result of
some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake.
To which Mr. Donnes reply was: I cannot be surer that I now live, then
that I have not slept since I saw you: and am, as sure, that at her second
appearing, she stopped, looked me in the face, and vanished.
This account first appears in the edition of Life of Dr John Donne
published in 1675, and is attributed to "a Person of Honour... told with such
circumstances, and such asseveration, that... I verily believe he that told it
me, did himself believe it to be true." At the time Donne was indeed extremely
worried about his pregnant wife, and was going through severe illness himself.
However, R. C. Bald points out that Walton's account "is riddled with
inaccuracies. He says that Donne crossed from London to Paris with the Drurys in
twelve days, and that the vision occurred two days later; the servant sent to
London to make inquiries found Mrs Donne still confined to her bed in Drury
House. Actually, of course, Donne did not arrive in Paris until more than three
months after he left England, and his wife was not in London but in the Isle of Wight. The
still-born child was buried on 24 January.... Yet as late as 14 April Donne in
Paris was still ignorant of his wife's ordeal."
In January, Donne was still at Amiens.
His letters do not support the story as given.
Carl Sandburg's
biography contains the following:
- A dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter. On the
evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at
home, just after the first telegrams of November 7 had told him he was elected
President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full
length, but with two faces.
- It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down
again there in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got
up again, mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back,
and haunted him. He told his wife about it; she worried too.
- A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces
again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then
wouldn't come back, he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected
to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live
through his second term.[9]
This is adapted from Washington in Lincoln's Time (1895) by Noah Brooks, who claimed that
he had heard it from Lincoln himself on 9 November 1864, at the time of his
re-election, and that he had printed an account "directly after." He also
claimed that the story was confirmed by Mary Todd Lincoln, and partially confirmed by
Private Secretary John Hay (who
thought it dated from Lincoln's nomination, not his election). Brooks' version
is as follows (in Lincoln's own words):
- It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in
thick and fast all day and there had been a great "hurrah, boys," so that I was
well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my
chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it (and
here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position), and looking in
that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed
had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being
about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps
startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On
lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and
then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler — say five shades — than
the other. I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the
excitement of the hour forgot all about it — nearly, but not quite, for the
thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as if something
uncomfortable had happened. When I went home again that night I told my wife
about it, and a few days afterward I made the experiment again, when (with a
laugh), sure enough! the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in
bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to
show it to my wife, who was somewhat worried about it. She thought it was a
"sign" that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the
paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the
last term.
Lincoln was known to be superstitious,
and old mirrors
will occasionally produce double images; whether this Janus illusion can
be counted as a doppelgänger is perhaps debatable, though probably no more than
other such claims of doppelgängers. An alternate consideration, however,
suggests that Lincoln suffered vertical strabismus in his left eye, a disorder which could induce visions of a vertically displaced image.
Near the end of Book XI of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit
("Truth and Fiction"), Goethe wrote, almost in passing:
- Amid all this pressure and confusion I could not forego seeing Frederica
once more. Those were painful days, the memory of which has not remained with
me. When I reached her my hand from my horse, the tears stood in her eyes; and I
felt very uneasy. I now rode along the foot-path toward Drusenheim, and here one of the most singular
forebodings took possession of me. I saw, not with the eyes of the body, but
with those of the mind, my own figure coming toward me, on horseback, and on the
same road, attired in a dress which I had never worn, — it was pike-gray
[hecht-grau], with somewhat of gold. As soon as I shook myself out of
this dream, the figure had entirely disappeared. It is strange, however, that,
eight years afterward, I found myself on the very road, to pay one more visit to
Frederica, in the dress of which I had dreamed, and which I wore, not from
choice, but by accident. However, it may be with matters of this kind generally,
this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting. The
pain of quitting for ever noble Alsace,
with all I had gained in it, was softened; and, having at last escaped the
excitement of a farewell, I, on a peaceful and quiet journey, pretty well
regained my self-possession.
This is a rare example of a doppelgänger which is both benign and reassuring.
To some this may not be so reassuring, however.
A famous Victorian apparition was the strange appearance of Vice-Admiral
Sir George Tryon. He
walked through the drawing room of his family home in Eaton Square, London, looking straight ahead, without exchanging a
word to anyone, in front of several guests at a party being given by his wife on
22 June 1893 whilst he was supposed to be in a ship of the Mediterranean
Squadron, manoeuvering off the coast of Syria. Subsequently it was reported that
he had gone down with his ship, the HMS Victoria, that very same night,
after it had collided with the HMS Camperdown following an
unexplained and bizarre order to turn the ship in the direction of the other
vessel
|
 Copyright(c) 2007
- 2020. All rights reserved.
|
