Shadow (mythology)
In the mythological ideas of many cultures, shadow is a term for the mirror image of the soul , for the "second self" of the human being, for its doppelganger or likeness, which is usually located in an otherworldly "realm of shadows" and is associated with darkness, night and death becomes. According to popular belief, the visible shadow is often a vital component that belongs to the essence of a person and follows him due to his mobility and is physically attached to him in a manner comparable to the outflowing breath. In ethnology, the terms free soul and shadow soul are established. The distinction between a shadow soul outside the body and a life soul in the body is an image of man that goes back well into pre-Christian times. The loss of personal shadow associated with a life crisis is a basic psychological motif in 19th century European romantic literature.
In compositions like “shadow work” or “shadow cabinet” the word “shadow” has a negative connotation; long shadows can be frightening and are a typical stylistic device of tension-charged films. Longer shadows herald the end of the day and the approaching cold winter months. In the most general sense, the shadow symbolizes the threatening unconscious .
Shadows in mythology
The term “ soul ” is based on an occidental religious understanding and is defined with different emphases depending on the worldview. For the interpretation of non-European cultures, this “western” soul concept, which shapes a human individual, is difficult to apply because there is hardly any linguistic equivalent. With this objection, there are some ideas of soul and afterlife in almost all cultures, although death is generally feared, but does not necessarily mean a separation from life, but can mean, for example, a continued life with the ancestors. The Swedish religious scholar Ernst Arbmann in the 1920s and others developed various models of ideas of the soul, which the Austrian ethnologist Josef Haekel (1971) summarized into a system that is generally used today in religious studies. A distinction is made between five types, which can occur individually or in different forms together:
- The vital soul therefore stands for the life principle. It can be connected with the breath ( breath soul ) or with certain body organs ( body soul ).
- The ego soul represents the personality of the person.
- According to Hermann Baumann (1955), the bisexual soul is less common and only widespread in Africa and Southeast Asia. Every woman has a male and every man a female part of the soul, which is seen more as a life force.
- The child's soul , also known as the growth soul (Ivar Paulsen, 1954), ensures that children grow up .
- The free soul (also excursion soul ) corresponds to the shadow, mirror image or the “second self”.
Fateful shadow
The free soul adheres loosely to the body and can also exist elsewhere. As a reflection of the human being it is called the picture soul, if it belongs to the shadow it is called the shadow soul. It can also appear in animals, plants and in flames. The free soul usually develops its activities in dreams or in visions, where occasionally the ego soul or vital soul can also share its experiences in its place. In special cases, these souls stay permanently outside the body in a place as far away as possible (in the bush). The mental development of this free soul leads to the dualistic idea of a doppelganger who confronts the person as an almost independent being. The doppelganger also makes itself noticeable when awake, acts as a helpful guardian spirit by warning of dangers or appears in its demonic form as a harbinger of death. For the shaman , the free soul means a companion when he is looking for unsteady souls of the dead in a trance. It can also be used to track down other helping spirits.
In Central American popular belief, nagual is a concept related to the doppelganger. The word, derived from the Aztec naualli (something “hidden” or “veiled”) originally referred to a magician (shaman) in his state of transformation or a deity. Today nagual is understood to mean an animal or an object in nature that is connected to a certain person in a doppelganger-like relationship. Both meet the same fate in a parallel situation, which is why the nagual must not be harmed. In the countryside in Mexico, a magician or a witch is said to be able to transform into an animal that causes nightly damage. Related to this is the transformation of a human into a werewolf , which has been widespread in European mythology since ancient times .
Where the visible shadow was seen as part of the soul of the human being, this appeared to represent a potential danger for its owner through an attack from outside on his shadow and, on the other hand, others sometimes considered it dangerous to approach this shadow. A magician on the East Indonesian island of Wetar allegedly made a person sick by stabbing his shadow with a sword. A similar indirect attack was carried out by a lama against the Hindu philosopher Shankara , who, due to his aggressive missionary work, is seen as primarily responsible for the decline of Buddhism in India at the end of the 8th century. Once in Nepal, Shankara quarreled with the Lama and rose in front of him to demonstrate his supernatural abilities. The lama, meanwhile, saw his shadow slide across the floor and stabbed it with a knife, whereupon Shankara fell down and broke his neck. In Arabia it was previously believed that a man would become dumb and his bones stiff when a hyena steps on his shadow. In the other case, the Canadian Secwepemc Indians avoided the shadow of a wailing woman in order not to get sick. With the Yuin in the Australian state of New South Wales , a man's contact with his mother-in-law was so strictly regulated that he could not dare to let his shadow fall on her.
According to old reports, some residents of islands near the equator saved themselves from the risk of permanently losing their own shadow by not leaving their house at lunchtime, because then the sun is vertical in the sky and does not cast any shadows. A man's strength is therefore directly related to the length of his shadow. This is the crux of the Polynesian story of the mighty warrior Tukaitawa, who was strongest in the morning, whose strength decreased as the shade dwindled until noon, and who regained his strength towards the afternoon. When a hero found out, he killed him around noon.
The free soul was already associated with breath in ancient Greece , as well as in many Indo-European cultures. In Egyptian mythology , the free soul was called Ba and was presented in the form of a bird. Since there was a further life in the afterlife for the Egyptians and this would have been impossible with a final separation of body and soul, the Ba-bird, which is actually free in the sky, had to return regularly to the grave, where it breathed life into the deceased in a certain way should. In ancient Egypt , gods also had a shadow. In contrast, the Indian gods, who are presented and depicted in beautiful human form, remain hidden from the view of normal mortals because they do not cast a shadow.
Old Iranian theory of the soul
The Gathas , the oldest hymns of the ancient Iranian text collection Avesta , contain various names for soul, the description of which is of fundamental importance for understanding the religious system adopted and shaped by Zarathustra . Behind this is the even earlier idea, from the Aryan prehistory, of a separate image and life soul. There is no comprehensive term for “soul” in the Gathas. For environment of the soul model contained therein include the interpreted as free souls Avestic name manah for the thinking ego, the Indian equivalent manas of the Vedas , and primarily urvan, the always free wandering soul. Manah is the soul separated from the body in dreams, in trance and in a state of unconsciousness. In the Avesta, Urvan stands for immortal life force and the free soul in a broader sense.
Transferred from the human to the cosmic plane, urvan corresponds to the deity Vohu Manah. The root word man- in Vohu Manah means an effective principle within the human being. The Indian ancestor ( Sanskrit ) Manu and ( Germanic ) "Mann" and "Mensch" are derived from this. Vohu Manah can be presented as a personified appearance that is related to the creator deity and is related to the supreme god Ahura Mazda in the same way as the free soul is related to humans. In addition, manah stands in an abstract way for the effect of this free soul and in the plural for a group of partial souls that are named together with urvan and daēnā .
The microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship is based on the idea that all earthly life has a double in heaven; the physical aspect on earth is opposed to the soul aspect ( manah ) in heaven. The noun for this comparison is maēθa , which should probably be translated as “pair”; as an adjective it probably means “connected in pairs”. Maēθa describes the doppelganger relationship between the earthly tribe Ârmaiti and its heavenly counterpart in the person of Vohu Manah. In the mythical tale, the two are considered children of the same father. Comparable couple relationships were called syzygy in Christian Gnosis . In the later text Sad-dar , written in Pahlavi , it says on the relationship between the physical and the spiritual world that man and all things on earth are the shadow of Ormuzd (as Ahura Mazda, the “highest light” is now called) and his heavenly environment.
In contrast to urvan, Daēnā means roughly the thinking, etymologically (derived from the ancient Indian dáy , “nourishing”) also the “nourishing” principle of the individual human being, his self and the sum of all his behavior in a wide range of possible interpretations . A stanza in the Gathas can be read in such a way that the earthly souls ( manah ) are connected with the personified divine sight Čisti as their heavenly doppelganger ( maēθa ). Čisti or Čistā, the goddess of sight, in turn, is related to the deified Schausele Daēnā. Behind the maēθa concept is the old animistic idea that everything in nature has a “soul” in the manner of a doppelganger, which cannot be seen by mere mortals.
According to the younger Avesta, the free soul urvan remains near the corpse for three days after death until it meets her own daēnā , who appears in the form of a beautiful young girl, if the person has lived religiously enough. When asked who she is, the figure replies: “I am not a girl, but am your virtuous deeds.” If the person adhered to a bad religion, the daēnā appears as an ugly witch. The separation of the self with the other part of the free soul that exists in life is thus abolished after death. Man achieves the wholeness longed for in his life when the separate souls come together.
Already in the early Gathas it is said that the free soul sets out into the otherworldly world and reaches the river without a guide or protector, where at the Činvat Bridge people are judged according to their good or bad deeds. The righteous are distinguished from liars here. The prerequisite for being allowed over is that the person has accepted Zarathustra's faith. If the soul has passed the test, it needs help from here on in order to be able to ascend and to be able to reach its destination in the world beyond.
The eschatology of later Zoroastrianism , which was coined in western Iran, contains the widespread idea that people do not cast a shadow once they have arrived in the hereafter. This is ensured by Ârmaiti, one of the six highest beings (“immortals”, “salvation- bringing ”, avestian Aməša Spənta ) in the vicinity of Ahura Mazda. When Ârmaiti is in the "sun-seeing realm" ( Yasna 43:16 ), she rewards people for their deeds with eternal peace and serenity. The horses harnessed to the chariot ( raθa ) of the sun are shadowless ( asaya ).
Shadow soul in Central and North Asia
With the Siberian Samoyed , people and things have shadows that behave as beings opposite them. Samoyed know the old Iranian idea that the subterranean have no shadow. A giant who appears in human form can be identified by its missing shadow. In addition, there is the image of an underworld, in which everything takes place in the opposite direction according to the conditions on earth. Shamans have auxiliary shadows that appear in the form of reindeer or bears.
In the Altaic languages of the peoples of Central Asia, the words with which "soul" is roughly meant today ( Tatar tyn, Mongolian amin, ämin ) belong to the context of the meaning of "breath", "life" and "life force". With death the last breath escapes. Originally, it was more a vague fate, the idea of an independent soul seems to be due to external cultural influences. In the context of a shaman who speak Teleuts of its "soul animals" ( Tyn-bura ).
Some Siberian peoples have a model of a three-part soul, which is composed of a body soul, a breath soul and a shadow soul. Mansi and Chanting distinguish two aspects of the soul: The breath soul lives in the human body and leaves it after death. The shadow soul leads an independent life, it is the personification of the human spirit and usually resides in people during the day. In sleep, in ecstasy and in the event of a serious illness, it leaves its owner and becomes a second self. Wizards can consciously send them on their travels. In the shape of various animals and other beings, mostly as a bird, the shadow soul explores the world without taking the body with it and sees and hears what is hidden from normal people.
The shadow soul or shadow figure is called is ( isxor ) in most Finno-Ugric languages ; the Finnish word itse is translated as “self”. Originally it probably meant "shadow (image)". Another name for shadow soul in the mans and chants is urt . A magician can see urt . When a person dies, his urt is noticeable by screaming.
In the old Central and North Asian folk beliefs, the soul can generally leave the human body during sleep, where it is normally at home, and roam freely as his conscious self. In the waking state, an illness indicates that the soul is outside the body. If the sick person turns pale in the face, as pale as a dead man, then this is considered to be the cause of his illness, not its effect, because appearance is essential to man. “Appearance”, “shadow”, “image” and “mirror image” are words used to describe the wandering soul. These manifestations of the soul should have an effect on the person concerned. In some ideas, the sight of the reflection in the water could be dangerous and possibly rob the soul or cause the face to turn pale and cause illness. Occasionally a wizard succeeded in bringing the shadow soul (is) back.
Likewise, the Yakuts consider their shadow dangerous and take appropriate precautions not to lose it because that means bad luck. According to descriptions from the turn of the 20th century, the Yakuts children were not allowed to play with their shadows. Tungus avoided stepping on someone else's shadow. The use of human-like figures for magical purposes is explained by the idea that shadows and people or, in general, image and what is depicted are in a direct relationship . The Yakuts used to catch a cattle thief by making a wooden figure and telling it the names of the perpetrators in question. If the name is correct, the figure should nod its head. In the sense of a magic spell , the figure was then hit and stabbed with the knife so that the perpetrator might feel pain in the appropriate places.
In the traditional cult of Siberian peoples, animals were also assigned a shadow soul. In order to ensure a successful hunt, the Tungus hunters made portraits of the hunting animals before they set off into the forest. Wooden fish figurines that were set up on the banks of the Yenisei in spring at the beginning of the fishing season were also intended to serve such a purpose . It was very likely not a question of offerings, which were unknown in this form, but rather an attempt to get possession of the picture souls of the fish in order to be able to catch the fish more easily in the traps afterwards . After all, even natural things and manufactured objects of daily use had an image soul. Reports about the Buryats from the end of the 19th century emphasize that the objects placed in the grave had to be broken because the dead in the afterlife would use the shadow of these objects.
With the Tatars of the Altai and the Yakuts, the soul escaping from the body and returning again is called kut . The word also stands for “good looks”, “vitality”, “fertility” and “happiness” and has also taken on the meaning of “image” and “shadow soul”. Especially for "shadow soul" but are among the Tatars, the terms jula ( tschula ) Suer or sünä more common among Mongols come suene and sünesun addition, on Golden among other örgöni . The shadow soul has a certain material life of its own, even if this materiality hardly leaves any traces. The sünesun is invisible to a Buryat when he is in human company. It doesn't leave footprints on the path, bend grass, or cause rustling when walking over leaves. Elsewhere, on the other hand, the shadow soul should be seen and heard under certain circumstances. Perhaps the shadow soul, when it has just left the body, makes itself noticeable through clumsy behavior; later it has learned to move unobtrusively. The shadow soul can injure itself, feel pain or feel hungry. According to descriptions from the 1890s, the “poor soul” should complain audibly when ghosts tie them up or put them in a sack. She exposes herself to this danger if she strays to the whereabouts of the spirits. In such situations, she can defend herself better or worse, depending on the abilities and dispositions of her person. Completely awkward souls can fall into the water and drown, so they are safer in the protective yurt . The wandering soul could also receive the protection of good spirits among the teleuts. The daughters of the highest god ulgän were considered caring .
Buryats said earlier that sometimes in the middle of the night they heard soft plaintive noises from the neighborhood and then steps away from them, and concluded that someone was going to get sick soon. One of the tasks of the shaman is to find the lost soul and to lure it back into the body of the sick person. Some people do not immediately notice that their soul has disappeared, only when they have become pale, powerless and thin does the loss of the soul become apparent to the sick person and his surroundings. According to the Buryat imagination, a sick person should be able to live for a maximum of nine years without his soul, with the Tatars in the Altai the patient inevitably dies after seven or ten years. Another question is in what condition the spirit-battered soul returns. If the shadow soul had broken its foot earlier on the Yenisei, then its owner limped afterwards, if it had become hypothermic on the way, he was also cold. Further examples of such influences are known from the Golden, the Tatars, the Teleuts and other peoples. Teleuts attributed broken ribs to evil spirits who had hugged wandering souls ( jula ) too tightly. Sleepwalking Mongols are said to have got up at night in order to trace their runaway soul ( sünesun ).
The soul of a child runs away at the slightest shock. Therefore, when the child falls and begins to cry, the mother rushes to him and calls his name so that the soul can hear. According to the Buryats, the soul stays for a while where it has disappeared from the body of the frightened. The soul usually escapes through the mouth or nose, sometimes through the ears. Teleuts covered their ears when they got into a cyclone so as not to lose their soul ( kut ).
The soul removed from a person does not necessarily have to appear in his form. In the Mongolian national epic Gesar there is the story of how a lama tries to kill the good ruler Gesar by sending his soul to Gesar in the form of a wasp and Gesar passes out every time he tries to catch the insect by hand becomes. The belief in a wandering bird-shaped soul is widespread in Siberia. When a Golden child died in the first year of life, its soul flew as a small bird to the sky tree omija-muoni ("child's soul tree ").
The deceased lives in the realm of the dead in a similar way to the world of this world. The funeral ceremonies are organized accordingly, with the bereaved laying food, clothing and everyday items in the grave. The ideas about the location of the realm of the dead and the routes to get there are different in Central and North Asia. It's somewhere below, to the north, or behind the water. It is not an underground, but an “other world” ( Yakutian atgu doidu ) or a “different country” (Tatar ol jär or paschka jär ). Here shadow beings live in a world of shadows in principle in the same way as in this world: There are mountains, rivers, animals, plants, sun and moon. The dead also live in tents and hunt animals. The difference is that in the realm of shadows everything behaves the other way around in time and space than on earth. If day is here, then there is night, summer on earth corresponds to winter there, a rich harvest here is meager at the same time in the other world. The dead orient themselves to the west, the living to the east. The entire world beyond, including the cosmogonic structure, is a mirror image of the one here. This inverse relationship is observed in funerals. Kazakhs , when they buried the horse of the deceased, put the saddle upside down. Of Siberian Tatars was reported that they have a liquor bottle or the deceased bridles if there was a horse-sacrifice, in the left hand, placed so that it held the grave goods in the shadows in his right hand. Excavation finds confirm this arrangement. Accordingly, the dead walking around on earth are nocturnal.
Twins in Africa
The free soul, thought of as a shadow, occurs in many black African beliefs. During the day the shadow is the visible companion of all people, at night it disappears into the darkness. At death the shadow disappears from the person and goes forever into the dark underworld. Thus a dead person does not cast a shadow, but he can himself be identified as a shadow. The dead person probably has no shadow because he is lying flat. To hurt the shadow also means in Africa an attack on the soul and thus on people. A crocodile could attack the shadow of a person who walks too close to the water and use the shadow (optionally a mirror image) to pull its body into the water, as Julius von Negelein wrote in 1902 of the South African Sotho . A freely movable shadow is human and can take possession of a living person out of vengeance.
With the West African Malinke and Bambara , a person has his body ( fari-kolo, "skeleton"), the life principle (breath soul) ni and his shadow, double or twin dya ( dia ). The shadow leaves the body in the dream and if something bad happens to it on the way, it transfers to the person. The breath soul ni comes with the Bambara from the god Faro, the "Lord of the water". Through his mediation, it passes from a family member who has recently died to the newborn child. The shadow soul dya goes to Faro in the water after death and reappears as ni . The breath soul ni wanders to the ancestral altar and returns as dya in the new human being. Dya is of the opposite sex to its owner. Every human being is male and female at the same time through his shadow, only hermaphrodites who have male and female sexual characteristics are twins themselves and therefore have no dya .
Incarnate twins are not "ordinary" people in Africa, their double dya always remains in a pure state in the water at Faro, which is why twins are considered doubles with each other and both are related to Faro at the same time. Such twins are a blessing to their parents. The special meaning of twins is also related to the creator couples of African cosmogony . With the Ewe and Fon the sun god Mawu and the moon goddess Lisa united to Mawu-Lisa and created the first humans. This task was done by the Yoruba twins Obatala (god of heaven) and Ododua (earth goddess), son and daughter of the supreme god Olorun.
In addition, there is a fearful conception of twins, especially homosexual twins are said to cause disaster. Because they are supposed to be associated with evil spirits - because bush spirits, like twins, appear in pairs, twins used to be killed immediately after their birth. Twins are often more susceptible to illness and are therefore only carried out later than other children. If both have survived the first few years, the mother takes them to the market because she assumes that the souls of the children are now firmly attached to their bodies. Among the Yoruba, twins are considered to be beneficial and are particularly well cared for. They are united by a common soul that lives on after death. If one of the twins dies, the soul gets out of balance and the other twin threatens to follow him. Children now need intensive care to save the survivor. If a child dies before the age of seven, the Yoruba have a small wooden figure ( ere ibeji , "image of the twin") made as a replacement, into which the twin soul enters the ibeji with the help of an oracle priest and lives on here. The mother takes care of this "child" as she does her own.
Plato's shadow
In a cavernous underground room, people crouch on the floor and never see anything other than shadows flitting past on the wall. In the allegory of the cave , Plato designed the allegory of a world in which people take what they see as real. In truth, they only see the images of a higher, spiritual ( intelligible ) world. In this sense, the painted or photographed picture is just a copy of the appearance. According to Plato, anyone who creates something like this is committing a deception because he is only imitating the shadow image and is not concerned with the absolute idea that opposes the shadow . He just creates the same thing as a copy.
Plato uses the terms "shadow" ( skias, phantasmata ) and "mirror image" ( eidola ) ambiguously and sometimes synonymously. There is a difference, however. After having mirror stage called theory of child development of the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan , the identified I with its mirror image, as is the Narcissus of Greek mythology in love with his reflection, he sees in the water. In contrast to this, the idea of the doppelganger (shadow) is about identification with the other. Narcissus, the ego in love, will therefore not take care of his shadow.
Plato's doctrine of ideas of a world that gradually constitutes itself from the perfect idea (true being) through subordinate ideas downwards was further developed by Plotinus , the most famous representative of Neoplatonism . It also gives reasons from above and describes the hypothesis of a perfect ( good ), which gradually weakens downwards until only shadows remain in the physical area. These are the "shadow images of beings", the shadows of the perfect.
Literary processing
In Friedrich Nietzsche's poem The Wanderer and His Shadow, there is a dialogue between the two of the shadow for the passive side and the aimlessly wandering who never gets anywhere, the nocturnal opponent Zarathustra , who is ultimately the wise thinker himself.
In his search for “what holds the world together in its innermost core”, the scholar Faust, who initially strived for pure knowledge and later more and more striving for power, got out of his social role in Goethe's tragedy Faust , published in 1808 , individualized himself and finally surrendered to the role Magic. He becomes more and more dependent on Mephisto , the devil who becomes his shadow. Faust stands for the modern man, who not only gets the desire for sexual satisfaction (the eternal feminine) fulfilled through the alliance with evil, but also experiences the heathen horror of his personal unconscious on Walpurgis Night. The union with the shadow (in Faust it is the Christian devil) prepares the way down to the secrets of nature.
The motif of the doppelganger has a high priority in Jean Paul's work, with the story ending tragically for the hero in many cases. Occasionally, a narrator emerges from the main character who tells himself. In his first novel, The Invisible Lodge , published in 1793, Gustav feels dreadful when he sees wax figures like the life-size ones made by the dead. The fear that the wax figure could be brought to life is expressed. The eerie appearance of the “double” is anticipated here, as happened in a similar way in Hesperus or 45 Hundposttage (1795) to the hero Viktor von Horion, when he watched the wax modeler who made his image and that of the chaplain: “Because he shuddered in front of these flesh-colored shadows of his ego. ”For the first time in the novel Siebenkäs from 1796/77, Jean Paul named the psychological double phenomenon with this word. The poor lawyer Siebenkäs and his friend Leibgeber appear with reversed roles, so that the motif of the doppelganger and the mix-up mix. Split personalities are also the focus of the later works. He calls the novel Flegeljahre (1804/05) about the two twin brothers and Gegenpole Walt and Vult a "biography". In Levana or Erziehlehre (1807) he explains that men are by their nature “modern” and “philosophical”, that is, as capable of self-reflection, while he denies women the ability to “self-duplicate”, which is associated with self-knowledge. Women are also lacking in creativity, they are more receptive to the outside than they are to form.
In romantic literature, the shadow is the ominous or prophetic double that brings out a person's hidden side. ETA Hoffmann uses the doppelganger motif in numerous variations and, compared to Jean Paul, emphasizes above all the sinister side. Hoffmann develops the figure of the conductor Kreisler in several works to his literary alter ego. This also appears (“by mistake”) in the life views of the cat Murr (two volumes, 1819 and 1821), where he flees from his doppelganger who pursues him. Even if the doppelganger turns out to be a rare optical illusion, it still refers to the longing and self-doubt of the protagonist. In the story Der Magnetiseur , which is part of the Fantasy Pieces collection from 1814, it is the major's unstable personality from which a doppelganger initially splits unnoticed by himself, against whom he is later defeated in a fatal battle.
The American writer Edgar Allan Poe shaped the style of the technique of awakening horror by ascribing human attributes to inanimate things and thus bringing them to life. In the short story The Fall of the House of Usher from 1839, the poem The Haunted Palace ("The Enchanted Palace") is included. In fiction, it was penned by the main character in the story, homeowner Roderick Usher. In the verses the spirit house is assigned human qualities, which makes it a double for its owner. The first-person narrator named Oinos in Shadows obviously wrote his story down for those who were born afterwards, during whose time he is supposedly already in the "realm of shadows". In it he reports on a table party in whose room a dead person is laid out and where a shadow of indefinable form and affiliation gradually becomes independent. When the shadow rises its voice, the assembled hear a thousandfold voices in which they all hear their long-dead friends.
In Eduard Mörike's poem Der Schatten (1838) , the shadow of a wife announces her intention to kill her husband with poison. The murdered person later returns as a ghost and kills the woman, whereupon the shadow frees itself from the woman and observes the event from a supernatural position. The opera Die Frau ohne Schatten , for which Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote the text until 1915, is about an empress who is desperate because she does not cast a shadow and is faced with the ultimatum that the emperor will soon die if she does you fail to remedy this deficiency. She tries to do this with abysmal means until the action is heading towards a final redemption. In the plot, laden with mythical symbols, the possession of a shadow is linked to the human ability to bear children.
Peter Schlemihl's wondrous story from 1813 is also based on an immoral exchange of shadow for money . In the fairy tale, Schlemihl gives Adelbert von Chamissos his shadow in a pact with the devil and soon realizes that without a shadow he is excluded from human society. As a lost part of his self, his shadow has passed into the possession of a nameless “gray stranger” who can willingly direct the movements of his doppelganger. Schlemihl realizes that he is being controlled by others and demands his shadow back.
In Oscar Wilde's novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray , the painting of the beautiful, young Dorian Gray becomes the shadow of the model. When Dorian saw his portrait for the first time, he was overcome by fear of his crumbling beauty and youth, and he wished to keep it forever while the portrait may age in its place. These thoughts were inspired by Lord Henry Wotton's remarks on the meaning of life, which lies in unbridled self-development. Lord Henry takes on the role of Mephistus in relation to Dorian in the age of hedonism , until Dorian has become a self-loving and indifferent-cruel criminal who wants to live out all his desires and ultimately commits a murder.
Hans Christian Andersen refers directly to Schlemihl in his fairy tale Der Schatten , published in 1847 . Here, too, the shadow belonging to a scholar develops a life of its own. At first it separates at the request of its owner, only to later - now physical - face him as a doppelganger. The scholar becomes the companion of his shadow, who appears as a distinguished gentleman, who gains more and more respect and, in order to complete the reversal of the true circumstances, calls on the scholar to serve as his shadow from now on. The shadow became the active, living part of the unworldly withdrawn scholar and finally his death-bringer.
Psychoanalytic interpretation
The lost shadow as a doppelganger was processed literarily in multiple repetitions throughout the 19th century. The motif also appears in Wilhelm von Scholz's drama Der Wettlauf mit dem Schatten from 1920, where the fictional character is modeled on the author's wife's former lover and wants to determine the fate of her role model. Around 1900, psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud took on the phenomenon of the literary doppelganger motif, which was not due to a relevant psychological predisposition, precisely to a multiple personality disorder of individual writers, but was seen as a common topos of romantic literature. According to Emil Lucka, the starting point is the concept of the self , which guides an indivisible individual. The personality is therefore based on an indivisible I acting in a "complete continuity" , from which the "moral responsibility of man" in society results, as Lucka wrote in his article Doubling the I , which was published in 1904 in the Prussian Yearbooks . In Lucka's view, animals, “Negroes and the Chinese” cannot imagine doubles, and: “Nobody has ever heard of doubles.” This is understandable in so far as “women are not fully ethical” and therefore “the horrors of doubling can not see ". In fact, the literarily negotiated doppelganger in the 19th century appears exclusively in the male form, while a multiple personality under the terms “indefinability” or “egotism” is also diagnosed in women and Jews. The loss of the self is thus ascribed to the alien individual who stands outside the male society conceived as a collective unity in which the indivisible moral self has gathered. The difference between the literary doppelganger of the collective and the marginal clinical picture lies in the relationship to the body. With the doppelganger, the ego splits into two bodies, while with the multiple personality several egos come together in one body.
Lucka expands the subject of doppelgangers as shadow beings and intensifies himself into larger allegories , according to which “the devil is the double of humanity” and “Judaism is the double of Christianity”. From 1923 onwards Sigmund Freud developed its freely acting, moral ego (the “fully conscious, responsible ego-consciousness”) in his model of the human psyche to become the superego .
In the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung is shadow both a personality trait and an archetype . According to Lucka, this is outside of society. In the structural elements of the psyche, which Jung calls archetypes, there is a universal primordial ground (the collective unconscious ). According to Anthony Storr, his shadow is a figure of dreams, who appears as dark-skinned or diabolical, in any case always as evil, and in the inner-soul polarity faces the part of the self that is oriented towards society, which he calls " persona ". Jung sees the individual shadow as part of a collective shadow figure, the description of which remains vague.
Goethe's Faust was important material for both Jung and Freud in their psychoanalytic theories. Jung described Mephisto as Faust's shadowy area. Jung took over the figure of the devil from Goethe as the light-bringing, man-driving Lucifer from Christian mythology, whom he - according to his archetype of the image of God - added as the fourth element of the divine Trinity . In the idea of God, good and bad should be united. Besides Mephisto, Gretchen is another aspect of Faust's alter ego . In Jung's terminology, she embodies the anima , the female emotional principle that opposes the male spirit. Gretchen is an aspect of the feminine that is present in men and another shadow of Faust, who has stood for the fertility of nature since the biblical Eve. Following CG Jung, psychological interpretations of Faust's shadow, especially Mephisto, were put forward by Edward Edinger and Irene Gerber-Münch.
In his theoretical model of archetypes, Jung developed three dimensions of shadow: The personal shadow comprises all the individual's inadequate abilities and characteristics that are incompatible with a person's self-image and which he prefers not to see or show. The collective shadow forms its equivalent on a social level. In the area of religion there is still the archetypal shadow with which Jung describes the concept of evil.
According to Freud, the negatively recognized properties, i.e. the originally repressed parts of the personality, are blamed on a doppelganger through the authority of conscience. The function of the conscience, as a morally evaluating authority that stands independently above the ego, is to evaluate actions and thoughts in a self-criticism and to ascribe what appears to be a burdensome and overcome residue to the idea of a doppelganger, which is thus given a new task. Otto Rank analyzed the loss of the doppelganger (shadow or mirror image) in the literary figures and came to the conclusion that there was no actual loss at all, but, conversely, the ego experienced a reinforcement and became independent. If the ego feels persecuted by the doppelganger, Rank noted, this often leads to a narcissistic personality disorder and, in many cases, suicide.
The term gnosis refers to secret sects in the first centuries after Christianity, whose followers saw themselves as chosen ones through their revelation knowledge about the divine origin of the human soul. According to their belief, salvation consisted in the final separation of body and soul. The human being has a light soul created from a divine spark, which is tied to the body - the dark prison - and can only be freed in death by a savior sent by God, who comes along as a divine messenger.
There are people who feel separate from their body in particular stressful situations. This feeling of personality becomes pathological if it persists and is then called depersonalization . Ronald D. Laing describes a person whose self has never fully found his or her body as more or less "unincarnated". Here stand the person who is considered healthy, who sees himself in harmony with his body and in every moment as an acting subject, and the schizoid individual with a detached self, whose body has become an object, together with that after the spiritual separation from (Gnostic) people striving towards his body as two poles of existence.
literature
- Gerald Bär: The motif of the doppelganger as a split fantasy in literature and in German silent films. Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2005, ISBN 978-9042018747
- Uno Harva : The religious ideas of the Altaic peoples . FF Communications N: o 125.Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki 1938
Individual evidence
- ^ Walter Hirschberg (Ed.): Dictionary of Ethnology (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 205). Kröner, Stuttgart 1965, DNB 455735204 , pp. 204, 399.
- ↑ Josef Franz Thiel: Death and belief in the afterlife in Bantu Africa. In: Hans-Joachim Klimkeit (Hrsg.): Death and beyond in the faith of the peoples. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1993, p. 40
- ↑ History of the concept of the soul and ideas of the soul. Bibliography 1830–1999. muellerscience.com
- ^ Karl R. Wernhart: Ethnic Religions. In: Johann Figl (Hrsg.): Handbuch Religionswissenschaft. Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, Innsbruck 2003, p. 268f
- ^ Eduard Seler : Codex Borgia. An old Mexican script from the library of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. (PDF; 22.1 MB) Volume 2, Berlin 1904
- ↑ Karl R. Wernhart: Ethnic soul concepts. In: Johann Figl, Hanns-Dieter Klein (Ed.): The concept of the soul in religious studies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, pp. 54–56
- ↑ James George Frazer : The Golden Branch. A Study of Magic and Religion. 1st volume. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main 1977, pp. 277–280 (translation of the abridged version from 1922)
- ↑ Geo Widengren : The Religions of Iran. (The Religions of Mankind, Volume 14) Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1965, p. 84
- ↑ Henrik Samuel Nyberg : The religions of ancient Iran . (1938) New edition: Otto Zeller, Osnabrück 1966, pp. 120f, 127f
- ^ Henrik Samuel Nyberg, pp. 143f
- ↑ Herman Lommel : The religion of Zarathustra depicted according to the Awesta. Mohr, Tübingen 1930, p. 107 ( at Internet Archive )
- ↑ Geo Widengren, p. 85; Otto Günther von Wesendonk : The Iranians' worldview. Ernst Reinhardt, Munich 1933, p. 91
- ^ Henrik Samuel Nyberg, pp. 144f
- ^ Wilhelm Brandt: The fate of the soul after death according to Mandaean and Parsonian ideas. (Yearbooks for Protestant Theology, 18, 1892) Reprint: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1967, p. 20
- ↑ Carsten Colpe : Old Iranian and Zoroastrian mythology . In: Hans Wilhelm Haussig , Carsten Colpe (ed.): Gods and myths of the Caucasian and Iranian peoples (= dictionary of mythology . Department 1: The ancient civilized peoples. Volume 4). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-12-909840-2 , p. 319 f.
- ^ Carsten Colpe, p. 315, Wilhelm Brandt, p. 32
- ↑ Mary Boyce: Ârmaiti. In: Encyclopædia Iranica , (1986) August 12, 2011
- ^ Henrik Samuel Nyberg, pp. 214, 394
- ↑ Edith Vértes: The mythology of the Urals of Siberia. In: Egidius Schmalzriedt, Hans Wilhelm Haussig (Ed.): Gods and Myths in Central Asia and Northern Europe . ( Dictionary of Mythology. First section: Die alten Kulturvölker, Volume VII) Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1989, keyword: Schatten, p. 641
- ↑ Uno Harva, p. 250f
- ↑ Edith Vertés, keyword: Seele , p. 517f
- ↑ Uno Harva, pp. 253-256, 261-268, 274f
- ↑ Uno Harva, pp. 347-349
- ↑ James George Frazer, p. 281
- ↑ Julius von Negelein: Image, mirror and shadow in popular belief . In: Archive for Religious Studies. 5/1902, p. 18; after: Thomas Theye: The robbed shadow - introduction . (PDF; 684 kB) In: Ders. (Ed.): The stolen shadow. A trip around the world in the mirror of ethnographic photography. CJ Bucher, Munich / Luzern 1989, pp. 1–81, here p. 56
- ↑ Hans-Peter Hasenfratz: Religious studies for the soul conception. Using the example of ancient Egypt. In: Johann Figl, Hanns-Dieter Klein (Ed.): The concept of the soul in religious studies . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, p. 126
- ^ Hermann Baumann , Richard Thurnwald , Diedrich Westermann : Völkerkunde von Afrika: with special consideration of the colonial task . Essen Publishing House, Essen 1940, p. 341
- ↑ Claudia Lang: Intersexuality. People between the sexes. Campus, Frankfurt 2006, p. 40
- ^ Peri Klemm: Ere Ibeji Figures (Yoruba peoples). In: Arts and humanities Art of Africa West Africa Nigeria , Khan Academy (accessed May 31, 2020)
- ↑ Klaus E. Müller , Ute Ritz-Müller: Soul of Africa. Magic of a continent. Könemann, Cologne 1999, pp. 198-201
- ↑ Gerald Bär, p. 457
- ↑ Johannes Hirschberger : History of Philosophy. Volume 1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Herder, Freiburg 1991, pp. 105, 305
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche : The wanderer and his shadow. Gutenberg project
- ↑ Toyomi Iwawaki-Riebel: Nietzsche's philosophy of the wanderer: intercultural understanding with the interpretation of the body. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, pp. 143–147
- ↑ Erich Neumann : Man and Culture in Transition: Crisis and Renewal; Depth Psychology and New Ethics. Johanna Nordländer, Rütte 2009, p. 80, ISBN 978-3937845227
- ^ Jean Paul : Hesperus or 45 Hundposttage. In: Historically Critical Edition. Volume I / 1. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2009, p. 423
- ↑ Gerald Bär, pp. 233-239
- ↑ Gerald Bär, pp. 258f
- ↑ Gerald Bär, p. 192
- ↑ Edgar Allan Poe : Shadows . In: Tales in two volumes . Volume 1. Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1965, pp. 9-13
- ↑ Gerald Bär, p. 201
- ↑ Gerald Bär, pp. 251f
- ↑ Gerald Bär, pp. 294-297
- ^ Emil Lucka in: Hans Delbrück (Ed.): Prussian year books. Volume 115, Verlag Georg Sitte, Berlin 1904, pp. 55f, 59, 70, based on: Gerald Bär, p. 37f
- ↑ Christina von Braun: Women's body and medial body. ( Memento of February 2, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) (PDF; 194 kB) In: Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Hans Ulrich Reck (Ed.) Staged Imagination. Contributions to a historical anthropology of the media. Springer, Vienna / New York 1996, p. 13f
- ↑ Gerald Bär, p. 39
- ↑ CG Jung: Aion. Contributions to the symbolism of the self. 1950, Collected Works, Volume 9/2, § 13f.
- ^ CG Jung: Aion: Contributions to the symbolism of the self. 1950, GW 9/2, § 19
- ↑ Cf. CG Jung: Answer to Job. 1952, GW 11, § 553-758.
- ^ Anthony Storr: CG Jung. Modern theorists. DTV, Munich 1977, pp. 66-69
- ↑ Cf. CG Jung in GW 6, § 315: “How Faust and Mephisto are one and the same person”, cf. ibid. § 345 and 815.
- ↑ CG Jung depicts Gretchen, Helena, Maria and Sophia, who appears in the “Eternal Feminine”, as anima aspects - not as dark sides - of Faust. Cf. CG Jung: The Psychology of Transmission. 1946, GW 16, § 361.
- ↑ See Hiromi Yoshida: Joyce and Jung: The 'Four Stages of Eroticism' in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Peter Lang, New York 2006, p. 31
- ^ Edward F. Edinger: Goethe's Faust. Notes for a Jungian Commentary. ( Studies in Jungian psychology by Jungian analysts, Vol. 43) Inner City Books, Toronto 1990, ISBN 0-919123-44-9 .
- ↑ Irene Gerber-Münch: Goethe's Faust. A depth psychological study of the myth of modern man. (Jungiana, Series B, Volume 6) Verlag Stiftung für Jung'sche Psychologie, Küsnacht 1997, ISBN 3-908116-07-4 .
- ↑ A. Gabriela Luschei: Two Souls Dwell within my breast: The Encounter with Shadow and the Problem of the Missing Fourth, A Jungian interpretation of Goethe's Faust . (Dissertation; PDF; 6.9 MB) Pacific Graduate Institute, 2009, p. 47f, 230
- ↑ Otto Rank : The double. A psychoanalytic study. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig 1925 ( at Internet Archive ); Gerald Bär, p. 42f
- ↑ Eleonore Bock: My eyes saw you. Mysticism in the religions of the world . Benziger, Zurich 1991, p. 329
- ↑ Ronald D. Laing : The Divided Self. An existential study of mental health and insanity. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1976, pp. 56-59