On Doppelgängers: Seventeen Historic Accounts of The Double From Realm Mysterious

Two days before her death, Catherine the Great walked into her own throne room and found herself already sitting on the throne. In a Livonian boarding school, forty-two girls watched their teacher stand at the blackboard beside an exact copy of herself. In Paris, a young man looked down at his own body breathing on the couch and could not turn out the lamp.On Doppelgängers gathers seventeen such accounts, collected from court memoirs, provincial newspapers, the records of the London Society forPsychical Research, and the Russian spiritualist journal Rebus. It appears here in English for the first time.Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko was not a sensationalist, and this is not a ghost book. He was a parish priest and a serious churchman, compiler of the standard Church Slavonic dictionary, and he assembled these accounts to argue a plain claim against the materialism of his age: that the person is not identical with the body, and that the testimony of ordinary people, taken carefully and in quantity, is worth attending to.This volume presents chapter ten of his 784-page From the Realm of the Mysterious, followed by his own appendices weighing the explanations available in 1900, and by notes tracing every source he cites. A translator's foreword sets Dyachenko in his moment and marks where his answers fall short.