A doppelgänger ( , also doppelgaenger and doppelganger) is a supernatural double of a living person, especially one who haunts the doubled person.The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985, p. 418. In fiction and mythology and in common parlance, the doppelgänger either is a ghost or a paranormal phenomenon, usually perceived as the harbinger of bad luck. A literary example of a doppelgänger is the evil twin of the protagonist. In modern times, the term twin stranger is occasionally used. Spelling In English, the word doppelgänger is a loanword from the German noun for a person who is a double-walker. The singular and plural forms are the same in German, but English writers usually prefer the plural doppelgängers. In German, there is also a feminine form, (plural ). The first-known use, in the form , occurs in the novel Siebenkäs (1796) by Jean Paul, in which he explains his newly coined word in a footnote; the word also appears in the novel, but with a different meaning. In German, the word is written (as is usual with German nouns) with an initial capital letter: . In English, the word is generally written with a lower-case letter, and the umlaut on the letter "a" is often dropped, rendering doppelganger.Google ngrams.
Mythology and folklore English-speakers have only recently applied this German word to a paranormal concept. Francis Grose's Provincial Glossary of 1787 used the term fetch instead, defined as the "apparition of a person living". Catherine Crowe's book on paranormal phenomena, The Night-Side of Nature (1848) helped make the German word well known. The concept of alter egos and double spirits has appeared in the folklore, myths, religious concepts and traditions of many cultures throughout human history.Leonard Zusne, Warren H. Jones (1989). Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. p. 121. .
In Ancient Egyptian mythology, a ka was a tangible "spirit double" having the same memories and feelings as the person to whom the counterpart belongs. The Greek Princess presents an Egyptian view of the Trojan War in which a ka of Helen misleads Paris, helping to stop the war. This memic sense also appears in Euripides' play Helen. In Norse mythology, a vardøger is a ghostly double who is seen performing the person's actions in advance. In Finnish mythology, this pattern is described as having an etiäinen,Ganander, Christfrid. Mythologia fennica; eller, Förklaring öfver de nomina propria deastrorum, idolorum, locorum, virorum, & c .. Abo, Tryckt i Frenckellska boktryckeriet, 1789.Webb, Stuart. Ghosts. New York, Rosen Pub., 2013. "a firstcomer".Bane, Theresa. Encyclopedia of spirits and ghosts in world mythology. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2016; see also Christfrid Ganander's Mythologia Fennica
Many majority Muslim countries have the concept of a karin or qareen, which is a potentially benevolent or harmful spirit double of the same sex, race and parallel temperament as the person it is connected to. It bears children which are the spirit doubles of the person's children. In some places the karin is the opposite sex of the person it represents. When malicious, it often tries to persuade the person it is connected to into following their bad whims. Some Sufi mystics pictured the karin as a devil residing in the blood and hearts of humans. It is more popular in some countries than others; for example, it is more popular in Egypt than Sudan. In Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), dopple-ganger is listed as a North Country term and as obsolete.
Examples John Donne 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. Rizvan Rizing 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 to me, did himself believe it to be true".
R. C. Bald and R. E. Bennett questioned the veracity of Walton's account.Bald, R. C. John Donne: a Life. Oxford University Press, 1970.Bennett, R. E. "Donne's Letters from the Continent in 1611–12". Philological Quarterly xix (1940), 66–78.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
On 8 July 1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia near Lerici in Italy. On 15 August, while staying at Pisa, Percy's wife Mary Shelley, an author and editor, 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 also
Percy Shelley's drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) contains the following passage in Act I:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Near the end of Book XI of his autobiography, ("Poetry and Truth") (1811–1833), Goethe wrote, almost in passing:
This is an example of a doppelgänger which was perceived by the observer to be both benign and reassuring.
Émilie Sagée Émilie Sagée, a French teacher working in 1845 in a boarding school in what is now Latvia, was alleged to have a doppelgänger which sometimes appeared to those around her, and which would mimic some of her actions. On one occasion her students approached the doppelgänger to touch it, and felt "a slight resistance, which they likened to that which a fabric of fine muslin or crepe would offer to the touch". The story is reported by Robert Dale Owen.
George Tryon A Victorian age example was the supposed appearance of Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon. He was said to have 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 while he was supposed to be in a ship of the Mediterranean Fleet, manoeuvring off the coast of Syria. Subsequently, it was reported that he had gone down with his ship, , the very same night, after it collided with following an unexplained and bizarre order to turn the ship in the direction of the other vessel.
In fiction Literature Lord Byron uses doppelgänger imagery to explore the duality of human nature. In The Devil's Elixirs (1815), one of E. T. A. Hoffmann's early novels, a man murders the brother and stepmother of his beloved princess, finds his doppelgänger has been sentenced to death for these crimes in his stead, and liberates him, only to have the doppelgänger murder the object of his affection. In addition to describing the doppelgänger double as a counterpart to the self, Percy Bysshe Shelley's drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) makes reference to Zoroaster meeting "his own image walking in the garden".Prometheus Unbound, lines 191–199
In Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "William Wilson", the main character is followed by a doppelgänger his whole life, with it troubling him and causing mischief. Eventually, the main character kills his doppelgänger, and realizes that the doppelgänger was only mirroring him. First published in 1839, the story was also included in his 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1846 novel The Double presents the doppelgänger as an opposite personality who exploits the character failings of the protagonist to take over his life. Charles Williams' Descent into Hell (1939) has character Pauline Anstruther seeing her own doppelgänger all through her life.Charles Williams, Descent into Hell, Faber and Faber Clive Barker's story "Human Remains" in his Books of Blood is a doppelgänger tale, and the doppelgänger motif is a staple of Gothic fiction. In Vladimir Nabokov's 1936 novel Despair, the narrator and protagonist, Hermann Karlovich, meets a homeless man in Prague, who he believes is his doppelgänger.
Jorge Luis Borges' The Other (1972) has the author himself find that he's sitting on a bench with his older doppelgänger, and the two have a conversation. In Bret Easton Ellis's novel, Glamorama (1998), protagonist actor–model Victor Ward ostensibly has a doppelgänger that people mistake for Ward, often claiming to have seen him at parties and events Ward has no recollection of attending. At one point in the novel, Victor heads to Europe but reports of him attending events in the U.S. appear in newspaper headlines. Victor's doppelgänger may have been placed by Victor's father, a United States senator looking to present a more intelligent and sophisticated replacement for his son that would improve his own image and boost his poll numbers for future elections. While the novel is narrated by Victor, various chapters are ambiguous, leading the reader to wonder if certain chapters are being narrated by the doppelgänger instead.
In Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline (2002), the heroine meets up with improved look-alikes of her parents and all her neighbors when she enters the Other Mother's world. In Stephen King's book The Outsider (2018), the antagonist is able to use the DNA of individuals to become their near-perfect match through a science-fictional ability to transform physically. The allusion to it being a doppelgänger is made by the group trying to stop it from killing again. The group also discusses other examples of fictional doppelgängers that supposedly occurred throughout history to provide some context.
Film
In Das Mirakel and The Miracle (both 1912) the Virgin Mary (as Doppelgängerin) takes the place of a nun who has run away from her convent in search of love and adventure. Both are based on the 1911 play The Miracle by Karl Vollmöller. The Student of Prague (1913) is a German silent film where a diabolical character steals the reflection of a young student out of his mirror, leading it to return later and terrorise him. Animator Jack King creates a doppelgänger for Donald Duck in Donald's Double Trouble (1946), where the twofold fowl speaks perfectly intelligible English and is well-mannered.
The 1969 film Doppelgänger involves a journey to the far side of the Sun, where the astronaut finds a counter-Earth, a mirror image of home. He surmises his counterpart is at that moment on his Earth in the same predicament. English actor Roger Moore plays a man haunted by a doppelgänger, who springs to life following a near-death experience, in Basil Dearden's The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970). The 1972 Robert Altman film Images has a doppelgänger for the hallucinating character played by Susanna York.
Doppelgängers are a major theme of Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981), where the two protagonists, Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill), have two Doppelgängers. The 1991 French/Polish film, La double vie de Véronique (Polish: Podwójne życie Weroniki), directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and starring Irène Jacob, explores the mysterious connection between two women, both played by Jacob, who share an intense emotional connection in spite of never having met one another.
In 2003, a Japanese thriller film, Doppelganger directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, was released, in which overworked scientist Michio Hayasaki (Koji Yakusho) struggles to meet deadlines and make any further progress on his machine, a chair to enable people with no function of their arms to perform basic tasks. His prototype is impressive, but has many limitations, much to the disappointment of his boss. A disheartened Michio goes back to his apartment and encounters his doppelganger. Although their looks are the same, the doppelganger's personality and attitude are drastically different from Michio's.