Goethe once met himself on the road, wearing clothes he didn't own
Riding away from a lover in Alsace, Goethe saw in his mind's eye a rider coming towards him: himself, dressed in grey trimmed with gold. Eight years later he found himself on that same road, by chance wearing exactly that outfit. For him the double was comforting. Most doppelgänger stories end far darker.
The word is German, literally a double-walker, and the novelist Jean Paul coined it in 1796 in Siebenkäs, explaining the invention in a footnote. English was slow to borrow it. A glossary of 1787 used 'fetch' for the apparition of a living person, and Catherine Crowe's 1848 book on the paranormal, The Night-Side of Nature, helped popularise the German term. In English it usually loses its capital letter and often its umlaut.
The idea itself is ancient and widespread. Egyptians spoke of the ka, a spirit double sharing a person's memories and feelings, and one version of the Trojan War has Paris misled by a ka of Helen rather than the woman herself. Norse tradition has the vardøger, a ghostly twin seen performing someone's actions before they do them, and Finnish lore a 'firstcomer'. In many Muslim-majority countries the qareen is a spirit companion that can nudge a person towards bad impulses.
Famous sightings cluster around bad news. Izaak Walton reported that John Donne, in Paris in 1612, saw his wife pass through a room holding a dead child on the night their daughter was stillborn, though later scholars doubted the tale. Percy Shelley told Mary Shelley he had met his own figure on a terrace shortly before he drowned in 1822, and a friend claimed to have seen him pass a window when he was elsewhere. In 1893 guests in a London drawing room reportedly saw Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon walk past on the very night he went down with HMS Victoria off Syria.
Fiction turned the double into a psychological weapon. Poe's William Wilson is hounded by a mirror self he finally kills; Dostoyevsky's The Double has an opposite personality steal the hero's life. Borges later imagined sitting on a bench chatting with his own older self.
Source: Doppelgänger
