Doppelgänger
The Reflex Man and Other Reflexions
THE EARTH
...Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live,
Till death unite them and they part no more;
Dreams and the light imaginings of men.
—Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
The modern world is a desert that exists by a marginalization of the sacred. We stand not at the end of history, but removed from it. Without the middle pillar, the golden chain of being, Man should have collapsed into sodomic solipsism in the first generation. The unnatural distance traveled under this void regime is due to the piloted rotting of the modern mind, which does not consist of thoughts, but engages a tactic of delayed schizophrenia, it follows a circle of hallucinoglyphs, spiraling into Nothing. That psyche which rejects the symbolic tradition can only become necrotic, yet we organize ourselves here in the sterile chambers of our imagery.
We create a false Double World, assemble an android daemon, and pass our days under the strong delusion of coherent reality, a dissacoiative fugue afforded through the logistics of vision. Thus, we externalize our state of psychosis by the instancing of a spectacular Flood—shallow at first with the World’s Fairs, then deeper with Cinema, now abyssal with the Internet. This tide initiates a parasitic form of psychic life, and we become Circe’s pigs, obese on sea foam. Though the world has ended, and Man has gone mad, we are circumscribed by a hallucination of civilization. There it sprawls, a vast, tessellating phantom, constantly confessing its illusions.
It appears the purpose of the modern world is to annihilate the sacred. It fictionalizes the paranormal, then uses parafiction to supernormal effect. It expels Mystery to the four corners, there to rule as archons, and thus squares the circle. The current World-Image is a headless tyrant on a throne of burning gold, ruling a grid of desecration, empowered by the dissolution of Fate and Order. A self-contained, self-consuming Demogorgon. Those with Second Mind intact, or even a fragment repaired, are able to see it instantly, all around them. The half-perception of this situation is often called 'paranoid schizophrenia.'
The engineering of the modern psyche was achieved by first razing the Second Mind. Its organs stolen and buried, “underneath the grave,” in a great phylactery called Progress. All its emanations are hijacked, concretized, and used to substantiate the clown-lichocracy. “This thing, born of alchemy and dream visitations, this we call Technology. We made this.” Anything can be claimed, anything justified. What man can discern copy from original with half a mind?
And with this foul act, our second sight was robbed, our sacred twinning of vision, the Other-gaze which implies a Doubleman, indeed, an entire lost Double-earth. There is, in truth, a world superimposed over this one, but of a matter less dense than corporeal matter, yet having all its shape and features. Man was once possessed with, alongside his two hands and two eyes, two minds with which to behold this dual world, but now is lop-sided, a cripple grasping at flat images. When the double world does come through, it is shadowy, volatile, and airy, eluding his half-vison. Man stands at the bottom of a well, and seeing the dim aperture above, calls it cosmos.
The original terra duplex cosmography is evident in all things, in all ancient traditions, from Egypt to Babylon. In the dualisms of Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism we find its resonance. Man himself is curiously wrought of flesh and phantom, ego and daemon; his brain hemispheric, his bodies divided into male and female. In truth, all is a confluence of dualities, a flux between dyads. This earth is yet a divine double-construct, but appears to us collapsed in a pit of fell geometries, in our vice and forgetfulness we perceive a world halved. What man can behold the spheres of heaven with his perception bisected?
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, psychohistorian Julian Jaynes concluded that ancient people did not think introspectively or “logically” as modern individuals do. Instead, they experienced so-called “auditory hallucinations,” like modern schizophrenia, which is a regression to an earlier mentality. Such hallucinations often seemed to come from idols or statues, representing gods, and were thought to originate in the brain's right hemisphere—associated with art and creativity. Now the voices come from the Screen.
This condition, known as the “bicameral mind”, involved a division between a 'god side' and a 'man side,' shaping early civilizations from around 9000 B.C. to just after Tutankhamun's era. Each person had a private theophany—the lamassu/etemmu in Mesopotamia, KA in Egypt, and eidolon in Greece—which guided their actions. The Egyptians in particular would physically hear the Pharaoh’s KA as a divine voice commanding obedience, echoed in inscriptions like “I did what his KA loved.” Of course, Jaynes has his own modern hallucinations to contend with. To an ancient, our “introspection” would simply look like solipsism and madness, a spiritual desolation. An ancient Egyptian would see our system of mass media as a cargo-cultish effort to duplicate the voice of Pharaoh’s KA.
The Double Truth of the world leaves its fractals scattered through time, in Carl Jung’s "Conjuctio Oppositorum"—the mystical union of opposites deep within the human psyche, mirrored in deities like Artemis and Apollo or Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, and in the supreme god Ahura Mazda’s divine twins, Mainyu (Holy Spirit), the other Angra Mainyu (the god of lies and darkness). . In folkloric traditions, fraternal twins are almost universally seen as uncanny or supernatural and often considered as divided parts of a single whole. According to Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) “twin-killing is a widely diffused custom among the negro tribes.” Then there is the recurrence of the Founding Murder, —Agamenes and Trophonios, Cabiri and Corybantes, Romulus and Remus, Cain (Tubal) and Abel (Habal)— the sacrifice of a pure twin which lays down the bloody foundation of the first cities. Lastly, there is the cult of Dioscuri, or the Heavenly Twins, which is perhaps one of the most ancient and widely diffused in the world (Rendel 1906).
In the antient metaphysics of the Egyptians, each person had a real, para-physical or “subtil” double, known as the KA, which mirrored their figure, clothing, gestures, and movements exactly. This double accompanies a person throughout their life and even after death, residing near the grave and sometimes appearing as a luminous presence called the KHU. We find this Double in its recurrences everywhere in folklore, sometimes called doppelgänger, named by the Gaelic folklorist Robert Kirk as “Reflex Man,” “Co-Walker” and “living Picture”—
Some Men of that exalted Sight (whether by Art or Nature) have told me they have seen at these Meetings a Doubleman, or the Shape of some Man in two places; that is, a superterranean and a subterranean Inhabitant, perfectly resembling one another in all Points, whom he notwithstanding could easily distinguish one from another, by some secret Tokens and Operations, and so go speak to the Man his Neighbour and Familiar, passing by the Apparition or Resemblance of him. They avouch that every Element and different State of Being have Animals resembling those of another Element; …They call this Reflex-man a Co-walker, every way like the Man, as a Twin-brother and Companion, haunting him as his Shadow, as is oft seen and known among Men (resembling the Original,) both before and after the Original is dead; and was also often seen of old to enter a House, by which the People knew that the Person of that Likeness was to Visit them within a few days. This Copy, Echo, or living Picture, goes at last to his own Herd. It accompanied that Person so long and frequently for Ends best known to itself, whether to guard him from the secret Assaults of some of its own Folks, or only as an sportful Ape to counterfeit all his Actions.
—The Secret Commonwealth, Robert Kirk
The Secret Commonwealth was compiled in the late 17th century. Modern Egyptology would not even begin until a century later, with the first translation of hieroglyphs by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion in 1822. How peasant shaman in the Scottish Highlands would have a reckoning of the Double Man exactly matching that of an Egyptian thekhereb-priest is a complete and unacknowledged mystery. Of course, the most effective explanation is that they could see it.