"Many of the Gods, and many of the personal doppelgängers, are animal/human hybrids. Dog-faced or jaguar-faced humans. Parrot beaks on jaguar heads on a human body. And of course the serpent with feathers — now confirmed by dinosaur science to have actually existed in some form. Birds are indeed descended from dinosaurs, and flying feathered lizards did exist as (sic) one time — so this stuff is not all imaginary, it's not all the result of those peyote enemas.
"Part of the Mayan aesthetic mixed aspects of youth and age in these creatures — a creature with a child's body and the face of an old man was common. The Gods, being of many aspects and avatars, crossed what we see as the line between humans and animals. The Maya saw no such dividing line.
"What if, and this is a big if, not all of these chimeras were mythical? What if not all of them were figments of the Mayan imagination? What if the Maya had some kind of genetic science, lost of us now, which enabled a limited creation of these monsters? Don't laugh. Plenty of the world's knowledge has been lost, though much of it has been 'found' again — the science and astronomy of the Arabs was 'lost' to Europeans for centuries, then 'rediscovered', resulting in great leaps forward. Other skills and techniques of ancient cultures are still a mystery to us.
"So, given that we now know you can indeed mix a pig with a fish, maybe these people actually did it. Maybe the monsters on these walls and frescoes are not mythical, but are historical."
In another David Byrne's online journal entry, a journal continuation of the entry given above, he also says about Mayan history how: "The Maya believe that one has an alter ego, a spirit double, which is called a way (pronounced 'why'.) The word also means sleep. These dream creatures are often animal — or even a mixture of three animals. A feathered serpent with jaguar claws and spots, for example. They believe these doppelgängers can be contacted during sleep. They give advice, amongst other things."
Doppelgänger. The word itself stumbles across the tongue. The impact appears to strum a thick tune on the attention’s strings, and it wasn't for certain that it had seen before now. So, if i had looked-up the definition, it was forgotten, and if i hadn't, well, i was going to do it anyway: Doppelgänger (n.) = A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.
Since the time of my birth, which has been a long time since & in the making, the idea of meeting my future-self was always welcome. Here's my logic: if a future me came up to me it was because time-travel was possible within my lifetime. In fact, i promised me to do this. The goal: to share information that'd enhance the future well-being of all humanity. Also, since i know myself, i'd tell myself things that i wouldn't have to learn later. It'd be like me teaching myself Kung-Fu now because i'd have to defend myself against people, machines &/or a crossbreed of both.
The viewpoint of a haunting double of a living me doesn't bother me too much, at least not now. The way i see it, after coming to terms with the possibility, if an evil me approaches me or if an evil you approaches you, there must be a reason for it. Kind of defeatist/deterministic, i know, but it would be like a looking glass into the darker part of the self, possibly a part of the self needing exorcism or guidance. Who said the evil self has to succumb to the good self? Why can't we just get along?
- And, what if i were haunted by a double of dead self?
At the clustering moments of becoming informed & building up an understanding of what a doppelganger is, the clustering of concept were linked into a series of stitches across my back, making me itchy & uncomfortable; especially when Wikipedia said that a Doppelgänger was: "generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In Norse mythology, a vardøgr is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance."
Doppelgänger. The word itself stumbles across the tongue. The impact appears to strum a thick tune on the attention’s strings, and it wasn't for certain that it had seen before now. So, if i had looked-up the definition, it was forgotten, and if i hadn't, well, i was going to do it anyway: Doppelgänger (n.) = A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.
Since the time of my birth, which has been a long time since & in the making, the idea of meeting my future-self was always welcome. Here's my logic: if a future me came up to me it was because time-travel was possible within my lifetime. In fact, i promised me to do this. The goal: to share information that'd enhance the future well-being of all humanity. Also, since i know myself, i'd tell myself things that i wouldn't have to learn later. It'd be like me teaching myself Kung-Fu now because i'd have to defend myself against people, machines &/or a crossbreed of both.
The viewpoint of a haunting double of a living me doesn't bother me too much, at least not now. The way i see it, after coming to terms with the possibility, if an evil me approaches me or if an evil you approaches you, there must be a reason for it. Kind of defeatist/deterministic, i know, but it would be like a looking glass into the darker part of the self, possibly a part of the self needing exorcism or guidance. Who said the evil self has to succumb to the good self? Why can't we just get along?
- And, what if i were haunted by a double of dead self?
At the clustering moments of becoming informed & building up an understanding of what a doppelganger is, the clustering of concept were linked into a series of stitches across my back, making me itchy & uncomfortable; especially when Wikipedia said that a Doppelgänger was: "generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In Norse mythology, a vardøgr is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance."
Also:
"The doppelgängers of folklore cast no shadow, and have no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice can be misleading or malicious. They can also, in rare instances, plant ideas in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion. In many cases once someone has viewed his own doppelgänger he is doomed to be haunted by images of his ghostly counterpart.
"Other folklore says that when a person's doppelgänger is seen, the person him/herself will die shortly. It is considered unwise to try to communicate with a doppelgänger."
- What if we see a doppelgänger in our dreams? Will our dreaming selves die?
…
What i liked best, maybe because it disturbed me so, were the two accounts given in the aforementioned Wikipedia entry: one by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the other on Abraham Lincoln. They have been captured in a specific moment in time to be here exhibited/pasted for your curious pleasure:
"On 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, English atheist and poet, drowned in the Bay of Spezia near Lerici. On 15 August, while staying at Pisa, Mary Shelley wrote a letter to Maria Gisborne in which she relayed Percy's claims to her that he had met his own doppelgänger. A week after Mary's nearly fatal miscarriage, in the early hours of 23 June, Percy had had a nightmare about the house collapsing in a flood, and
"... talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately — he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him — 'How long do you mean to be content' — No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. W[illiams] saw him. Now Jane though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [15 June] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — 'Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall? Where can he be gone?' Shelley, said Trelawny — 'No Shelley has past — What do you mean?' Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him."Carl Sandburg's biography [on Abraham Lincoln] contains the following:
"A queer dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter. On the evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at home, just after the first telegrams of November 6 had told him he was elected President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faces.
"It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down again there in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got up again, mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back, and haunted him. He told his wife about it; she worried too.
"A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term.
"This is adapted from Washington in Lincol's Time (1895) by Noah Brooks, who claimed that he had heard it from Lincoln himself on 9 November 1864, at the time of his re-election, and that he had printed an account "directly after." He also claimed that the story was confirmed by Mary Todd Lincoln, and partially confirmed by Private Secretary John Hay (who thought it dated from Lincoln's nomination, not his election). Brooks's version is as follows (in Lincoln's own words):
"'It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day and there had been a great "hurrah, boys," so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it (and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position), and looking in that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler — say five shades — than the other. I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it — nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as if something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home again that night I told my wife about it, and a few days afterward I made the experiment again, when (with a laugh), sure enough! the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was somewhat worried about it. She thought it was a "sign" that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.
'Lincoln was known to be superstitious, and old mirrors will occasionally produce double images; whether this Janus illusion can be counted as a doppelgänger is perhaps debatable, though probably no more than other such claims of doppelgängers.'"
