Doppelgänger

From the German *Doppelgänger*, the double-walker. The figure is the visible double of a living person, encountered by a third party, at a place the living person is not. To see one's own doppelgänger is, in the older sources, to be near death. The figure is recorded across northern Europe under several names: the Irish *fetch*, the Norwegian *vardøger*, the English *wraith*. The term *Doppelgänger* itself is comparatively recent, coined by the novelist Jean Paul in seventeen-ninety-six. The category it names is older. The older Northern European tradition reads the encounter as an omen of death: to meet one's own form on the road is to meet the place that will become the grave.

The doppelgänger sits between apparition and omen. The figure is not, strictly, the dead. The figure is the form of the living, dispatched ahead of the body, arriving at a place the body has not yet been. Where the body fails to arrive after, the figure stands as record of what was nearly so.