The Sigla Blog

143 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln was watching a performance of Our American Cousin, when John Wilkes Booth shot him in the head. Lincoln’s prophetic dream about his own assassination is well documented (he dreamt he saw a funeral, and when he asked a soldier who was dead, was told that it was the president “assassinated”). Lincoln had also seen his own doppelganger earlier in his life, when gazing into a mirror.

The doppelganger, a ghostly double or evil lookalike of a living person, has long existed in myth. In his latest poetry collection, For All We Know, Ciaran Carson constantly returns to the idea of doubling. The book is laid out in two sections, with poem titles the same in Part 1 as Part 2. Initially this feels filmic, like watching the same scene from a different angle. In fact, it is two people telling their version of the same relationship. In his poem, ‘The Fetch’, Carson mentions the doppelganger encounters of Lincoln and the poet Percy Shelley.

“To see one’s own doppelganger is an omen of death
The doppelganger casts no reflection in a mirror

Shelley saw himself swimming towards himself before he drowned
Lincoln met his fetch at the stage door before he was shot”

Carson obviously takes a little bit of poetic licence. Lincoln’s encounter was actually just after he’d won his election. Gazing in the mirror, he saw himself with two faces, one that looked paler and sickly. He told his wife that he thought this was an omen that he wouldn’t see out a second term. Shelley’s encounter was far more sinister. It did not take place in the sea, as Carson suggests, and Shelley claimes his doppelganger appeared several times. Some were in vision form in his dreams, but in one encounter - outside the house where he lived in Italy - the being spoke to him (”How long do you mean to be content?”). Another encounter was actually witnessed by another person - at a time when Shelley wasn’t close to the scene of the sighting.

French Canadian photographer François Brunelle worked on a collection earlier this decade entitled I’m Not a Lookalike! where he photographed European and American people who had found their doppelgangers.

Links:
Doppelgänger Effect: Doppelgängers in old fairy lore, modern science fiction and ufology
Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know is published by The Gallery Press