A doppelgänger (pronunciation (help·info)) or fetch is the ghostly double of a living person, a sinister form of bilocation.
In the vernacular, "Doppelgänger" has come to refer (as in German) to any double or look-alike of a person—most commonly an "evil twin". The literal translation of the German word is "double–goer", meaning someone who is acting (i.e. going) the same way as another 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. It is widely known that one must actually touch a doppleganger to die. In Norse mythology, a vardøger is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance.
Contents |
The word "doppelgänger" is a German loanword. It derives from Doppel (double) and Gänger (goer[1]), although the German part word -gänger only occurs in compound nouns. As is true for all other common nouns in German, the word is written with an initial capital letter; however English usage varies.
In English, the word is conventionally uncapitalized (doppelgänger). It is also common to drop the diacritic umlaut, writing "doppelganger". The correct alternative German spelling would be "Doppelgaenger".
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.
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."[3] In January, Donne was still at Amiens. His letters do not support the story as given.[4]
Carl Sandburg's biography contains the following:
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's version is as follows (in Lincoln's own words):
Lincoln was known to be superstitious,[7] 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[8], 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:
This is a rare example of a doppelgänger which is both benign and reassuring.
Robert Dale Owen was responsible for writing down the singular case of Emilie Sagée. He was told this anecdote by Julie von Güldenstubbe, a Latvian aristocrat. Von Güldenstubbe reported that in the year 1845–46, at the age of 13, she witnessed, along with audiences of between 13 and 42 children, her 32-year-old French teacher Sagée bilocate, in broad daylight, inside her school, Pensionat von Neuwelcke. The actions of Sagée's doppelgänger included:
Apparently, the doppelgänger also exerted resistance to the touch, but was non-physical (one girl passed through the doppelgänger's body).[10]
In September 2006 it was reported in Nature [1] that Shahar Arzy and colleagues of the University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland, had unexpectedly reproduced an effect strongly reminiscent of the doppelgänger phenomenon via the electromagnetic stimulation of a patient's brain. They applied focal electrical stimulation to a patient's left temporoparietal junction while she lay flat on a bed. The patient immediately felt the presence of another person in her "extrapersonal space". Other than epilepsy, for which the patient was being treated, she was psychologically fit.
The other person was described as young, of indeterminate sex, silent, motionless, and with a body posture identical to her own. The other person was located exactly behind her, almost touching and therefore within the bed that the patient was lying on.
A second electrical stimulation was applied with slightly more intensity, while the patient was sitting up with her arms folded. This time the patient felt the presence of a "man" who had his arms wrapped around her. She described the sensation as highly unpleasant and electrical stimulation was stopped.
Finally, when the patient was seated, electrical stimulation was applied while the patient was asked to perform language test with a set of flash cards. On this occasion the patient reported the presence of a sitting person, displaced behind her and to the right. She said that the presence was attempting to interfere with the test: "He wants to take the card; he doesn’t want me to read." Again, the effect was disturbing and electrical stimulation was ceased.
Similar effects were found for different positions and postures when electrical stimulation exceeded 10 mA, at the left temporoparietal junction.
Arzy and his colleagues suggest that the left temporoparietal junction of the brain evokes the sensation of self image—body location, position, posture etc. When the left temporoparietal junction is disturbed, the sensation of self-attribution is broken and may be replaced by the sensation of a foreign presence or copy of oneself displaced nearby. This copy mirrors the real person's body posture, location and position. Arzy and his colleagues suggest that the phenomenon they created is seen in certain mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, particularly when accompanied by paranoia, delusions of persecution and of alien control. Nevertheless, the effects reported are highly reminiscent of the doppelgänger phenomenon. Accordingly, some reports of doppelgängers may well be due to failure of the left temporoparietal junction.
See monothematic delusion for a detailed description of various psychological problems including the syndrome of subjective doubles, which may be related to the doppelgänger. See also out-of-body experience for the related work of Olof Blanke.
Doppelgängers, as dark doubles of individual identities, appear in a variety of fictional works from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double to Season of Migration to the North to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In its simplest incarnation, mistaken identity is a classic trope used in literature, from Twelfth Night to A Tale of Two Cities. But in these cases, the characters look similar for perfectly normal reasons, such as being siblings or simple coincidence.
Some stories offer supernatural explanations for doubles. These doppelgängers are typically, but not always, evil in some way. The double will often impersonate the victim and go about ruining them, for instance through committing crimes or insulting the victim's friends. Sometimes, the double even tries to kill the original. The torment is occasionally earned; for instance, in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "William Wilson," the protagonist of questionable morality is dogged by his doppelgänger most tenaciously when his morals fail. When doppelgängers are used as harbingers of impending destruction, they are almost always supernaturally based. [11] Some works of fantasy include shapeshifters, as either talented individuals or as a separate race, who can mimic any person.
Another variant, usually seen in science fiction, involves clones, which creates a genetically identical new being without the memories and experiences of the original. Some futuristic variants in fiction duplicate living beings in their entirety, albeit sometimes with modified memories and motives.
Doubles are also seen in fiction involving time travel and parallel universes. In this case, the doppelgänger really "is" the doubled person, but from a different timeline or different version of the universe.
In Doppelganger, the novel by Marie Brennan, five days after birth, the daughter of a witch undergoes a ritual to give her the ability to use magic; the ritual creates a Doppelganger of the infant which is unable to use magic and is usually killed instantly.
In the Sweet Valley High books, Elizabeth Wakefield was chased by an insane doppelganger - a girl who was not related to her yet looked exactly like her - named Margo Black who attempted to murder her and take her place. Later Margo's twin sister, Nora Chappelle, arrived in town and attempted to kill Jessica, Elizabeth's twin sister, so she could take her place. Neither attempt was successful and the twins lived on to face many more attempts on their lives throughout the series.
In Masashi Kishimoto's hit ninja manga series Naruto, the main character, Naruto Uzumaki, uses Shadow Doppelgangers as a jutsu. Note that in the English anime, Shadow Doppelgangers is translated to Shadow Clones, even though dopplegangers and clones are different.
Why are we here?
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
This page is cache of Wikipedia. History