Doppelgänger

The doppelgänger does not come from a grimoire or from a treatise on the occult: it comes from a footnote. The word was coined by the novelist Jean Paul in 1796, inside «Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke», the novel known by the name of its protagonist, Siebenkäs. He wrote it Doppeltgänger, «the one who walks double», to name a person who sees himself. The phenomenon existed before that note; the name did not.

What existed was a family of European beliefs about the double: the Norse fylgja, which accompanies its owner; the Scandinavian vardøger, whose steps are heard before the one who takes them arrives; the Irish fetch and the Scottish wraith, whose appearance foretells a death. Catherine Crowe, who in 1848 gave the matter the eighth chapter of «The Night Side of Nature», sums it up bluntly: the apparition is held to foretell the death of the one it copies, and the Germans, she writes, express the same thing by the word doppelganger.

The date should not be pushed back. That the concept is old does not make the term old, and pages attributing the word to authors earlier than the eighteenth century are misdating a footnote of 1796.

The double appears as an exact replica of a living person, and tradition insists on the point that separates it from an ordinary ghost: the original is still alive while the double walks. It is seen at a distance, crossing a street, entering a room or sitting where it cannot be, and the one who sees it is usually a third party, not the duplicated person. The testimonies Crowe collects come almost always from servants, neighbours or workmates.

When it is the original who sees himself, tradition holds it the gravest case. There the encounter precedes death by weeks or by days, and that is the function folklore assigns it: not to replace, but to warn. The Germanic doppelgänger takes nobody's place and steals no identity, which is what the impostor of modern fiction does; it merely appears where it should not, and leaves.

The signs attributed to it are of absence rather than of horror: it casts no shadow, does not reflect properly, does not speak or speaks little, repeats gestures with a slight delay. It fades at dawn, or as soon as someone looks at it straight on and holds its gaze.

German Romanticism took over Jean Paul's find almost at once. E. T. A. Hoffmann built much of his repertoire on it, and from there it passed to Dostoevsky, who in 1846 gave a whole novel the title «The Double». The word travelled into English untranslated, which is the sign that the language had no other that would serve.

The cases that circulate through nineteenth-century literature are told as having happened. The most repeated is that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who weeks before drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia in July 1822 said he had met himself on the terrace of his house; the account comes from his circle, not from him. That is exactly the sort of testimony Crowe compiles and orders in 1848.

The late nineteenth century took it elsewhere. Medicine described the phenomenon as autoscopy, the experience of seeing oneself outside one's own body, and associated it with temporal-lobe seizures and with lesions of the temporoparietal junction. That explanation neither cancels the folklore nor replaces it: it explains why a belief about the double could hold up for centuries on the testimony of people who were not lying.