Doppelgänger (German Doppelgänger) is a German word that means "double". This is usually called a ghost or ghost that does not cast a shadow and at the same time seems to be an exact copy or double of a living person.
As a rule, they are associated with failure or even considered harbingers of imminent death - if relatives or friends saw a double, this meant that soon the person would be in danger of illness or danger; if a person himself saw his double, then this was considered an omen of death.
Sometimes a double (they are sometimes also called "evil twins") can try to become a person, whose shadow they are, an advisor. But these advice can often be misleading or lead to something evil. Also, doubles can give sinister ideas to their victims or confuse them. For this reason, people try to avoid contact with their doppelgangers at all costs.
Perhaps the most famous images of the twins are a sketch from 1851 and a watercolor from 1864 entitled How They Met Themselves by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. According to the interpretation, the figure shows two lovers walking through the forest at dusk. While walking, they encounter their counterparts, shining with an otherworldly light. The man in amazement draws out his sword, and his beloved falls dead. Rossetti's doppelgangers inspired Elizabeth Browning to write "The Novel of Margaret" and Edgar Poe to create "Silence."
Of course, doubles are often found in fiction. But people talk about real cases when they allegedly met their "evil twins". One of the most remarkable cases of this kind is the experience of Abraham Lincoln, described by Noah Brooks in Washington in the Time of Lincoln (1895). Shortly after being elected president in 1860, Lincoln came home one day and looked in the mirror, where he saw his reflection. More precisely, two of their reflections. As Lincoln said, "… almost full height, and my face was reflected twice, and the reflections did not touch each other in the mirror." Lincoln noticed that the reflections were almost the same, but one was "a little paler, say five shades." According to testimonies, his wife was very worried about this and told Lincoln,I'm sure the pale reflection was a bad omen and meant that Lincoln would live out his first presidential term, but would not live to see the end of his second term.
Doubles have a long history, especially in literature. In Greek mythology, Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in a stream, and in Gothic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe and the works of William Wilson (1839), Personal Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824), Poor Claire by Elizabeth Gaskell (1856) and even the not-so-well-known fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Shadow, the characters are pursued by their counterparts, often with ill intentions. However, myths about spiritual counterparts appeared much earlier.
One of the earliest mentions of them can be found in Zervanism, a branch of Zoroastrianism. This religious trend has transformed the general abstract duality of Zoroastrianism into a clear concept of twins, "born" by the monistic "Time". In this cosmological model, the twins Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd) and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) were eternal representatives of good and evil, unable to exist without each other.
The wedding to the kingdom of the Sassanid emperor Shapur II (center) with Mithra (left) and Ahura Mazda (right), rock reliefs of Tag-e-Bostan, Iran
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The wedding to the kingdom of the Sassanid emperor Shapur II (center) with Mithra (left) and Ahura Mazda (right), rock reliefs of Tag-e-Bostan, Iran
In ancient Egyptian mythology, there are legends about "ka" - a material spiritual double with the same memories and feelings as the "original". In one of the Egyptian myths called "The Greek Princess" (Egyptian version of the "Trojan War"), Helena was used to deceive Paris of Trojan, which helped to end the war.
In Scandinavian folklore, some vardogers (vardøger) are mentioned - ghostly creatures who were ahead of their living counterparts, for example, came to various celebrations and performed some actions in advance. The spirit moved like the “original”, spoke in its voice, smelled the same, looked and behaved in the same way, so the witnesses were sure that they saw or heard the person himself, and only then this person came to the place. Wardogers are thus somewhat different from their counterparts - they are much less sinister.
The inhabitants of the Orkney Isles in Scotland feared little fairy-tale creatures called the trowe. According to legends, sick children were often born to Trow. Pregnant women were wary of Trow, who often stole healthy human babies, and instead put their own babies in cradles, so-called "changelings" capable of transforming into exact replicas of stolen babies.
Dualistic twins are also mentioned in many Native American Indian myths. Hopi legends speak of twins named Child of the Sun and Child of Water. The Hopi also believe in the duality of the world - the Upper World and the Lower World. Whatever happens here, in the Upper World, the opposite happens in the underworld.
So where did the belief in doppelgangers come from, and can you find the truth about them? Although many today still believe in the existence of their counterpart, some scientists attribute its appearance to injury or stimulation of certain parts of the brain, leading to errors in spatial thinking. Others believe that doubles are visions, hallucinations. Or that we are in contact with a parallel universe, and everything that happens in this world is projected into another dimension. Whatever the true nature of doppelgangers, belief in spiritual counterparts has been causing fear and wonder in people for thousands of years.