Walpurgisnacht: The Other Halloween

You don't likely know this, but there were traditionally two nights of the year when evil powers held sway and rose up to torment the living. One is still observed, though it is now basically a Capitalist holiday for buying candy and wearing sexy wizard costumes. People of all ages use that night to have fancy dress parties and behave in an uncouth manner. Children go about their neighborhoods or to special candy dispersal events and fill bags and pillowcases with tooth-rotting goodies that will last until the man in the red suit comes down the chimney. 

We’re used to this, now, because in late August or in early September, Halloween decorations begin to pop up all over the retail-verse and huge displays with 350-piece bags of candy are made available to buy for the low low price of 25% more than what they cost last year. The kids have to have candy and they enjoy dressing up like their favorite pop culture creatures and the adults need an excuse to start the darker half of the year with too-tight outfits and bad decisions.

The other monster holiday is St. Walpurgis Night, or as it is called in Germany Walpurgisnacht, which falls on April 30th. On this night, too, all the powers of dread are out in their fullest potency, and similar rituals of self-preservation and banishing dark spirits are observed, especially in the older parts of the country. New England, especially, had an awareness of this bleak and spooky night in Spring, but we have all but forgotten it now. 

The Spring version of an evil night has its roots in the depths of European tradition sweeping back in huge arcs of history to a time when the world was still a terrifying place to live. Well before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm terrorized children with tales of candy houses and grandma-devouring wolves, dark things wandered in the forests. Great swaths of unexplored woodlands and mountains hunkered like black fog across the land. Within those halls of primordial forests, bears, wolves and other large fauna dwelled that could (and sometimes did) prey on humans. There were other things in the shadows, too and it was a time when no one was educated and everyone was susceptible to the frayed ends of half-mad superstitions that still exist in such places today—out on the fringes of society—where myths grew in the minds of our ancestors and preyed on them in their dreams.

Enter St. Walpurga. She was a missionary to Frankia (now France) in the 9th Century, and whose feast day is in February, but whose canonization occurred to coincide with May Day (May 1st). Her history is fairly straightforward for that period, though not a great deal is known about her. However, just like November first is All Saints Day, and Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) is the celebration of the evening before, Walpurgisnacht—St. Walpurga’s holiday—is the evening celebration prior to, and the day. Because of its coincidence with older pagan rites and holidays (a habit that has left no original Christian holiday celebration in its right season) the pagan and the religious holidays blended and became solidified in time. The same has happened with many such holidays. Walpurgisnacht was likely still observed, at least in tradition, by the original European settlers that came to the New World in the early 17th Century and so lived on in the hearts and minds of the New Englanders until early in the last century, but has now gone almost fully silent. 

During her feast, ancient celebrants would playact moving the reliquaries containing her sacred remains from Frankia to their final resting place in Eichstatt as had been done in the 800s. In later years, pilgrims hiked to her tomb which was said to produce an oil that repelled or defeated witches, thus lending depth and credence to the eve of her celebration being a time when evil was in full tilt.

In fact, in England and Ireland, the halfway point between the Spring equinox and Midsummer (The June solstice) was known as Beltane in pre-Christian celebrations. Pagans would burn fires and lay sheaves of grain on the blaze to thank the goddesses of growth for their help in providing a harvest the year previous and as a propitiation for the coming growing season. St. Walpurga’s iconography is almost always shown with a bishop’s crook and a sheaf of wheat, symbolizing (perhaps unconsciously) the pagan influences her canonization date may have sought to repress or absorb. Nevertheless, the Christian influence of St. Walpurga was that of an anti-evil power; those powers were often the scapegoat for bad harvests and poor growing seasons, blights, famine and pestilence. The celebration of her holy days, once melded to the older traditions, became an apotropaic, especially during the medieval period and later, of an increasingly hysterical fear of witches, evil spirits, sprites, demons, wights, banshees, haunted features of the land (evil standing rocks or cursed bridges) and anything else the religious powers could conjure to frighten the superstitious and credulous population’s children and scare the yokels into piety.

However, unlike its Autumn cousin, Walpugisnacht did not hold the (also) pagan origins of dressing up as the scary monsters in order to frighten them away, at least not initially. Rather, some traditions involved bonfires and draping one’s hovel with Spring-sprouting wheat, berries and other warding magic. The fresh smell of some of these herbal protections scared off the evil spirits and other demonic influences that sometimes prowled around seeking to devour the unwary. All across Europe, people will have bonfires, make loud noises, dress in funny costumes (less common, now) and play gentle pranks on their friends and family in celebration. 

In his less well known short story, “Dracula’s Guest”, Bran Stoker writes about an Englishman caught in a Spring snowstorm on Walpurgisnacht in the forested hills of the Carpathian mountains. The unwitting traveler insists on touring the landscape despite warnings from his innkeeper about the date and once free of his carriage, hastens for cover as hail pelts him and drives him into the cemetery of an “unholy village” and then into a tomb for shelter. Inside, a beautiful woman with rosy cheeks and full lips is spiked to the marble slab within by a huge iron rod piercing the entire building. The woman is apparently asleep. Lightning hits the rod and blows the tomb to marble shreds and the Englishman is flung among the surrounding gravestones. While unconscious, he is attended by a huge black wolf until soldiers dispatched by the man’s innkeeper rescue him. He is informed later that the maitre d received a wire from none other than Count Dracula to inform him of his guest’s travails.  

In Finland, where the holiday (called Vappu) is one of the four big religious celebrations (along with Christmas, New Years and Midsummer Night) many different odd traditions are observed, specifically by engineering students. Among them is drinking a lot of low-alcohol sparkling wine overnight from April 30th to May 1 and consuming a sweet deep fried batter sprinkled with sugar (we call this funnel cake). 

Like all things that reside still in our modern traditions, though we have lost the main thrust of their original value either by the comingling of religious feast days with pagan rites, there are some things that it is better not to forget. Next week on Tuesday, after the sun goes down and while you set out tomorrow’s clothes and drink a restoring cup of herbal tea, under the eaves of the small knot of trees by your house or in the shadow of the huddling thicket of magnolia or juniper trees in the midst of your neighborhood, something will stir. The birds will stop singing. The crickets will cease to stridulate. No sound will emanate from nature. The unspeakable things that dwell in the shadows and thrive on this night will have free reign for just a few hours between sunset and dawn. Will we see the signs?

Your friend who believes her neighbor is part of a coven of witches will see strange red lights in the second floor window of that woman’s house. You may hear the howling of wolves though there are no wolves near where you live. Did you see a shape scurry quickly through the Spring mists of the local cemetery? Do you feel that sensation of being watched that makes your blood run cold and turns your skin into gooseflesh? Is the air suddenly filled with sweet scents and the gentle murmuring of a song that mesmerizes you? That one coworker who always wears black will appear even more furtive and shifty as the sun nears the horizon that day. If you read the newspapers for April 30th, the law log may have some interesting details that you’ve never before noticed. A young woman who shows up at the local emergency department with a strange neck wound and a bad case of mysterious anemia.

 

High up in the hollers between the wooded arms of the mountains where such nights are darker and quieter than in our small, well-lit Southern burg, even stranger things may happen. Perhaps some sheep have been “stolen” from a barn. Bizarre prints appear in the ground as if from some huge invisible alien foot tread near a highland farm; ancient and mysterious books once sought for burning by the church go missing from the small library’s special collections. Tomes like The Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Eltdown Shards, all gone and no one knows where. 

This is the season to listen to the oldtimers and follow their doings. It’s not safe in the woods on Walpurgisnacht. The unseen barriers between parallel worlds are thinnest. It is then, as Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith tell us, when those who seek to summon the dark powers rub their clawed hands in glee and dance around a red fire with glinting knives and nefarious intent.

We don’t celebrate Walpurgisnacht anymore or even know much about it, but just like at Halloween when, all pageantry aside, we hurry home as the shadows lengthen in quiet fear of some eldritch nightmare that may be following us, the night of April 30th is no less perilous to those who walk unheeding after dark. Perhaps we ought to remember that, of all times of the year except its Autumnal cousin, May Eve, Walpurgisnacht, is when it is deadly in the wilds to stray.

Answers in the Time Before

 Answers In the Time Before

The big stone house that I grew up in in rural Pennsylvania was built sometime around 1755. Because it took so long to construct such a house in those days, we only know that it was either begun then or finished around then but no details remain in my memory about how long the construction took. What I remember is that it was very old and its age fueled images of the German family that dwelt there, living on what was then very nearly the westernmost frontier of the colonies.

As they eked out a homesteading existence against the cold and unforgiving backdrop of primordial oaks, pines and chestnuts in not quite yet the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, that family no doubt felt very small and vulnerable and were grateful for the bareboned comfort afforded them by the limestone ramparts that they built up around them for defense and shelter. The house they built became an artifact; evidence that they had been there. Well before they arrived, though, people lived where that house would be built and I wonder now if the newcomers ever thought about those they displaced. That family couldn’t have known that, roughly 220 years later, a young boy’s imagination would be fired by the rugged lives that this lone group endured, any more than that lad could have fathomed the truly difficult and trying agony of their lives in the New World.

Ever since then–and no doubt because of how much being raised in that house influenced me–I have thought and reflected on what some places must have been like for previous generations; how they have changed and what they must have looked like before our people lived here. This fascination with historical views of the world was further inflamed when I started working with librarians who have done a great deal of reconstructive work to provide significant portraitures of the early history of the part of the world where we live now. 

During a walking tour with two of these engaging and learned colleagues, we passed across streets and sidewalks that I have rambled over for nearly fifteen years and yet they drew us back in time filling my mind with tales and characters from generations ago. It made me a little more reflective and meditative on my walks to and from work after that.

It takes a truly gifted eye to see the artifacts of history in the modern world. Many of us aren’t looking. We’re deceived and distracted by traffic lights and the abysmal architecture of modernity. We don’t stop to look at houses or streets or other landmarks that are the red pins in a map of years and decades and centuries. 

On another of these walks I learned that a few feet from the entrance of one of the places where my wife used to get her hair cut in the early years of our residence here, was the site of the original town square and courthouse. Here a gallows platform was set where criminals were hanged. It’s an intersection, now, as boring and unappealing as any in our town and yet, just below its surface was a crossroad at which many poor blighters met their fate. All evidence of that period is sagging under the weight of years and life stories, hidden in plain sight.

It’s like this in every town, on every street, in every square inch of this land. Just behind the facades of modern life and shops and ball fields and schools and fire stations and train tracks and highways and farms is a land filled to bursting with history that occurred well before any of those modern accouterments were there. Each of these places has a touchstone or totem to those eras that can only be discovered by the wizards that can draw back the scrim of mystery and plumb the depths of the lore in that place. Sometimes that lore is in spells of official language: deeds, obituaries, census lists. Other times it is in a far more primitive oral sorcery woven by family traditions and shared down the dark alleys of family stories from parent to child and grandchild. Navigating between these many labyrinthian tales, a historian can place on a piece of ground or building or other artifact of our heritage a tiny jewel of knowledge that will, if the light of modernity hits it just right, catch the eye of the rest of us and can tell us those stories.

We have one such touchstone in our front yard. Huge and leaning to the southeast, a great pin oak raises its massive thews over our house and much of our part of the street like an ancient sentinel. Indeed it is an ancient sentinel, because it has stood there for an incredibly long time. Several years ago, when I called a well-known and well-established tree man out to ask about the health and safety of this great oak, I learned a bit of its history.

The tree man inherited his business from his father who spent much of his life saving or taking down the old trees in our town. He said that his father was up in our tree (well before it was “ours”) and trimming it back a bit from the house on the day when Kennedy was shot. Even in those days, he said, it was a big tree and that it had probably been there seventy-five to eighty years at that point. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Eighty years before that is 1883. Our house was built in 1937, so this tree was there and growing tall fifty-four years before the property was marked out and sold as a plot.

Ever since learning this, I’ve cast my eye up to our great, massive tree and wondered what it looked like before our house was built, before there was any hint of our street (or more than an old rutted lane). Now, like the nimble child I used to be, I scale up into that massive oak (in my imagination) which surges over the roofs of the houses around us and I look out and down, watching as the years peel away as we go backward into that history, seeing all of this in reverse like a hyperlapse film. Gone are the lawns and paths and cabins and stables. Gone too are the fields and farms. Soon enough, our oak is but a sapling and I have to leap down as it shrinks in this backward plunge. Trees as great or greater than the one in our yard rise up and fall in storms that flash before the sun like the shadows of great birds sailing on stiff winds. Forests grow and fall and grow again. Dense smokes rise, hailing fires set by lightning that cleanse and bring bright green growth rising again. I see ships departing back across the sea in the east and people filling back into these very lands. The time wheel continues to spin back.

What families lived here before our ancestors came across the ocean? What traditions and histories were shared by each of those generations? How many of the children who walked on the land where our house now dwells, once lay in a sun-dappled clearing gazing up at this sky and wondered what would come next for them? They could not know what the future held for them as a people anymore than we can. They were no more able to divine the vicissitudes of the world than we are. Despite the depths of time between us, though, far more time stretches back from then into the fogs and mists of prehistory. At one point so far back that it makes me dizzy to consider, this area–our piedmont–was under water and the hills and small mountains in and around Asheboro were volcanic islands in those shallow, warm seas, very much like Hawaii is today. What people lived and fished on those shores or used carefully hewn boats to row between those islands to hunt and plant new homes?

We cannot know. 

In my library there is a collection of stone tools and arrowheads and knapped spear points that date back into the tens of thousands of years. We have almost no idea who used these ancient tools or what they believed or feared or cared about, unless we assume that they, like us, had families they loved and homes they wished to protect and fierce loyalties to deities and battles between one another. I wonder about those people often. 

As I climb back down into the modern era, I feel that same slight disappointment that all historians feel as they close their books, shut off their research computers and close the library doors for the evening. Stepping back into the real, current world, there is sadness that we don’t know more despite the unworthy hubris we have that makes us think we’re masters of our own age. We’re newcomers here and the artifacts of those ancient ones aren’t as clearly marked as they are in other places, but we know that they were here. That is enough for me to feel as if it is worth spending a little time to nod back at them and acknowledge them and hope they left us something to learn that we have yet to discover. 

We could use their lessons and their wisdom. We could apply their mythologies and legends to our modern era; our own being nothing more than fairy tales to argue about or for excuses to kill and steal land—the heirloom behaviors of those sandy scrolls and tablets dug up in other lands, the title deeds for other peoples. Perhaps the one who dwelled here before us understood better their place in the web of nature and had no such illusions that they were in charge of anything. They likely had no ultimate or final solutions, no haughty belief that one way of seeing the world was the only right way. 

There is nothing wrong with modernity–not really–but it does feel slightly paltry sometimes, as if we’ve lost the plot as a species. It sometimes seems that we are doubling down on ideas of our own construction, falsely attributing to these faiths and ideologies power and gravity that they do not possess of themselves in order to keep us from facing the stark truth of our ineptitude. Some cultures revere their ancestors. My ancestors are worth remembering and learning more about. Their stories, hopes, dreams, frailties, failures and successes led to my generation. Much is true of the ancestors of our species; the peoples that walked here well before our ancestors left their homelands have something to teach us. The desire for that knowledge may lead us back into mysterious times but perhaps it is worth the mental effort to find something we have in common. Perhaps within their worldview is the secret for our own modern-day concerns.

History may reveal the key to these mysteries yet and while I do not support a “golden age fallacy” worldview (this fallacy is the mistaken belief that a past era was problem-free and idyllic, where we tend to romanticize the past, forgetting its challenges and inequalities) I nevertheless feel strongly that the ancients knew things that we have forgotten, both about how to live peacefully with our brethren and how to understand our own place in the web of nature. We walk the same ground they did, we see much the same world that they did. It seems a shame to me that we haven’t listened more carefully to the wisdom they left for us hidden right under our feet.

A Year In (Almost)

On the first day of April, last year, I began writing a weekly essay. A year later, I can honestly say I am pretty happy with the output. I missed a few weeks for holidays or family events, but I wrote 46 total blogs or posts or articles or essays during that time. 

When I picked this work back up, I set out to write about things that interested me: observations, opinions, concerns and a few hopefully upbeat holiday histories. I have accomplished that. I have also written about family, values, philosophy, history, culture, books, walking, music, politics and religion. I have no doubt that I have sometimes been pedantic, preachy, even pushy about some topics. Others I could have sourced more clearly or been less editorial or at least found a better way to convey my thoughts.

When I wrote a regular piece in our local paper on all things library, I was held to high standards both by the paper's editor and the library director who had the final say on content. In all that time he only ever told me to “can” an article twice. I have no such controls now. The only standards I have to meet are those that govern my own feelings about style or appropriate tone. I have no word limit, no overarching theme or genre and there is no one tapping their foot with folded arms scowling at me for rude or inconsiderate opinions. 

I wrote that short library column every two weeks for almost five years; to date it is the only experience I have as a “professional” writer or columnist. In that time, I racked up a large catalog of articles, too, far more columns than this blog and yet I am prouder of this work, perhaps because it feels less work-related. I gained some experience during that period of writing for work and developed whatever the equivalent of muscle memory is for a writer. I think it was enough practical application to feel comfortable getting back into the process again without having to relearn the skill completely.

For all that, as a “blogger” it feels weird for me to have churned out 46 essays and it is surreal to know that some of my readers are actually engaged in what I write even though it isn't printed in a newspaper. At least one of my current readers also read my library column, so I can quietly boast that I brought a reader along to this more open format. 

As far as quality, though, I will admit that each of these essays could be better. I am my own worst critic, of course, but there is room to improve. Genetic aspects of my writing are continually obvious and they push me to work harder to rectify them. I am setting more pronounced goals since regular writing doesn't resolve the pesky bad habits. One of the areas where I need to improve is difficulty choosing topics. This is a problem that happens before the essay is ever read and is mainly a compositional challenge. Another issue I have is being somewhat redundant when attempting to be emphatic.

With regard to subject matter, surprisingly, I don't always know what I'm going to write about until it clicks while I am freeform drafting. I start a handful of lines on something and I can usually tell early on if it is a topic that won't make the cut. In other cases I have drafted entire essays that simply get displaced by another topic that arises in the meantime. There's no science behind it. I am always on the lookout for a subject that I want to write and that you hopefully will wish to read.

For every essay I write and share, there are five or so false starts or partially completed drafts that are, for whatever reason, not what I choose to write about that week. Sometimes I go back to them for a future post but mostly I don't. I'm afraid that means that there are reams of ‘proto’ thesis statements in my documents folder that may never be seen.

I also have pet topics that are too in-depth or that I cannot find a good approach for within my current essay format. Some are too long for an essay, others maybe ought to be multi-part essays with a few “to be continueds” between them. I haven't yet invested the mental energy to decide if this is a once-a-year series or if I want to write them somewhere else  and in some other format. Among these is an essay about my great-grandfather's sad tale and another about the disproportionality between miscarriages of justice like wrongful convictions when compared to how often wealthy (and obviously criminal) celebrities or politicians get off free or are able to afford to appeal and delay or defer their legal consequences.

I desperately want to write a scathing critique of homeopathy and of other businesses that prey on the credulous and desperate. I have a drafted essay about baseball, one about Stephen King's most important novel and another that is an exploration of crime and abuse within old order Amish settlements. All of these or some of these and more will be forthcoming at some point once I have hammered them into shape a bit more.

Whatever my topics, there are some technical things in my format that I wish to address in the coming year. It's time to pare down my average essay length; they do drag on a bit. One might say they ramble. It would be helpful, too, if I could clear up the cliched phrases. These things take time and I appreciate you hanging in there with me while I keep adjusting.

When I have written and posted an essay, I am very nearly already working on the next. As I told my father recently, whatever I wrote about previously has long since vacated my brain when I post and email the current one. By then, I had read it many times both hoping to mold it into some kind of readable shape and combed through it tirelessly looking for typos and other errors. Ironically, no matter how many times I scan one of my pieces, I never can seem to find all the mess ups and so each essay likely has technical idiosyncrasies. I am working on that too.

For this particular essay, writing about writing is actually a bit of a cheat, especially as it tends to inadvertently vent the steam I have built up in other posts by showing the proverbial man behind the curtain. It also has the great misfortune of making my writing feel egotistical, as in, “let's talk about me, my writing and my squalid attempts to get more attention”. Nothing of the sort. I write because I need the outlet and because I enjoy the process immensely. I write about my writing to share where I am in the process with my readers. If that's egotistical, then I cannot avoid the title. 

However it comes across—wordy, repetitive, opinionated or hamfisted—I am writing hoping that I become a better writer. The regular exercise of the writer's mental muscles makes me think and write better in much the same way that the regular and sustained practice of a musical instrument can build skill and proficiency onto raw talent.

I intend to keep on working and churning out content. It may not always be very good and maybe not always what you want to read and I might not get one out every week, though that is the structure that I feel most comfortable within, it will, I hope, continue to challenge both of us.

If I had one guiding code for why I write perhaps it is because I want to challenge myself and also my readers. My hope is, together, we begin to think of the world in new ways by breaking down the barriers to our closed minds whether it is about religion, politics, superstition or any other kind of ideology that prevents us from enjoying the freedom to think for ourselves. It won't be every essay, but I would say that this idea of freeing ourselves from the poisonous ideas and affiliations in our modern life is the most central topic I want to address. My own insatiable curiosity about the world does come through in my work and I want to ask those questions with you. The fetters to free thinking can only be taken down by sharing stories from the past or explaining ideas that are complex or forgotten or by digging more deeply into the crust of why we think and believe the way we do. Challenging the stories we hold strongly but without thinking about them is the only way we can be truly free.

For now, though, I really want to  thank you sincerely for reading. Even if you don't read every week, thanks for subscribing. Your eyes and brains are the canvas on which I paint my topics, so you are an essential part of this conversation. 

If there's a topic you want me to try to tackle, shoot me an email and I will work on it. More in the coming weeks for sure! Thank you again!

Double Cousins

The first time I ever remember experiencing a doppelganger was my Freshman year of high school. Like most public school children, I had grown up with a group of peers from primary school on and like all such kids from a small town, you get to know them pretty well by their unique appearances. This familiarity isn't as strong as family, but when you spend every day in a classroom with the same batch of children for a decade, you get to know them. One girl among this group happened to live only a few blocks away from me and we had played at the playground together many times as well as sharing the same class and teacher. We weren't best friends but I knew her well enough.

As I walked down the hallway of our high school, going to my locker that first fraught week of my new secondary school career, I saw this same girl from the side and I waved and spoke to her, happy to see a familiar person. She turned and looked at me with the blank expression that only a complete stranger can give. As my brain scanned this girl's features I began to see that something wasn't right. Her hair, her skin tone, her height and even her stature all closely resembled the person I knew. The features were slightly different, but the part of my brain that recognizes people was hung up on a few startling differences. Had I maybe remembered her wrong? After all, we weren't little kids anymore and people change between age five and age 15. One of the smaller kids from my childhood grew to six feet and one-hundred seventy pounds the day after his thirteenth birthday. 

Her reaction wasn't that of someone I had known since kindergarten. This person was wearing glasses and unusual clothes and her voice was most certainly not that of my school friend. This disrupted my thoughts enough to prevent me from realizing that I was supposed to be embarrassed and so I quickly blushed and mumbled “wrong person” and went to my locker.

Under other circumstances, especially as an adult, I might have taken time and waited to be sure. However, this unfamiliar girl had such a pronounced similarity to my childhood classmate that for much of my high school career I had to be careful so I didn't embarrass myself again. My brain kept seeing the girl I knew in a girl I didn't really know at all. 

I felt a bit better when, after a particularly spirited performance (my former school chum was a gifted singer and actor) the local newspaper used the other girl's school photo in a writeup about a musical my elementary friend had been in. This proved that I wasn't the only one who found the similarities uncanny.

Years later, as I scooted my chair into position in a chemistry class at the local community college, I looked up to see my maternal uncle rifling through his papers by the front desk. My uncle was in his late seventies at the time, fully grey-headed (with what hair remained to him) and living in Pennsylvania. The professor was my uncle as he had been when I was a boy; mid-forties, greying at the temples and bespectacled. It was uncanny. So much so that I actually considered dropping the class. This was my mother's brother as he had been. His name, his clothing preferences were not the same, but it was so like him that it made me uncomfortable. It seemed to fill my mind with memories of my youth and cast me as a young boy rather than the young husband, father and homeowner I actually was.

This wasn't just seeing someone who looked familiar, either. This person's features, gestures, mannerisms set off all the facial recognition functions in my brain which are incredibly powerful. It was intensely unsettling. I needed the class so I kept attending and eventually became inured to the similarities but I had to eventually tell this man how much he reminded me of my uncle. To which, of course, he replied with the same reaction everyone who is told they are a doppelganger has; a blank stare.

We've all been there. Someone approaches us, asks us if we went to this or that high school or if we know “so-and-so” and then we are told that we look just like someone they know. Invariably they say the resemblance is astounding. It's uncomfortable. Especially because regardless of how similar we appear to this person, we know very well that we are not the person to whom they refer. It can be flustering, even frustrating. It seems to take away our agency. We know who we are and aren't, so why does this happen?

Human facial recognition is an incredible trick. We are visual primates and we use our eyes for many things we don't stop to think about regularly. We are given to memorizing the facial features, hands and physical shapes of the people we are related to or know well. We begin this almost as soon as we are able to see clearly as babies. When a baby stares at you and frowns a bit, she is memorizing your face. Those memories go into a very deep part of her brain that allows her to know fundamentally—in this case, with as much certainty as our senses can muster—her mommy, daddy, grandparents, pets, older siblings, babysitter, everyone close and of importance in her tiny life. And it isn't just facial features. She will memorize our voices, our scents, our tendencies and mannerisms. Her little mind catalogs all of these differences and quantifies them as evidence for a conceptual “person” that they then associate with a name. This is how a small child can so master her family's members and why we melt when she first says “Mama”. She will go on to create a kind of mental Rolodex, keeping a list of hundreds of people based on their physical appearances and names. When she has an experience with that person, she will associate that memory as part of the information already gathered.

We internalize those memories and they become part of how our relationships with family and friends develop, weaving a web of facial memories and stories and events into a massive skein of interconnected experiences. Part of her identity will form by the things she learns and the emotions she feels as she grows; the rest will be formed by facial impressions and memories of the people most important to her in her little life. They will eventually bind together to define who she is as a person.

To explain just how important these mental functions are, we have to look at the story of a man who could no longer remember faces. Injured in a terrible work accident, this man's brain was damaged so that no one was familiar to him anymore—even himself. Called acquired prosopagnosia, the man retained no ability to remember the specifics about the faces of his family, friends or coworkers. Horrifying as that sounds, some people have developmental prosopagnosia, which just happens and grows worse with very little explanation. Either variant is crippling and, like the man mentioned above, sufferers have to learn to depend on a host of aids to help them. 

Imagine not recognizing the person in the mirror or your spouse or children. That's fodder for a good horror story. Sometimes called face blindness, prosopagnosia is fairly rare. Nevertheless, it can shatter a person's sense of security, and people with the disability often feel as though they are being followed or that their families have been replaced by strangers.

The possible inability to recognize the faces of loved ones puts into stark relief just how important our senses are for helping us to see and know people who matter to us. Because they are such sensitive mechanisms, those same senses may contribute to us seeing doppelgangers, especially when we connect enough facial or physical markers to make our brains believe that we are seeing someone we know in someone we don't.

In my very public-facing job, I see countless people every day. I know many of them because they use the library every day. Unfamiliar people are people I have never seen before or do not remember seeing. After a week of work, I may see a thousand or more people and my cognitive mechanisms can become overburdened with all the different faces. We separate faces into categories based on importance and create a backlog of people we may remember and some who look familiar to us, but that may be only because they resemble someone and not because they actually are that person.

When I am approached and told I look exactly like someone's cousin, it can help to remember that there are thousands of people in my community, hundreds of thousands in my county. This mistake is expected. Our brains can get overwhelmed with all the many people around us. 

In one awkward situation in which I was the mistaken person, a man told me I looked just like his ex-wife's dead brother. He showed me a church directory photo on his phone. The man in that picture had no beard, was bald, obese, apparently had an affinity for pastel shirts and had blue eyes. But otherwise he bore not even a slight resemblance. Photos don't represent the full person, of course but as I gazed at the long lost Cecil “Bubba” Maness or whomever, I did not see me. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock or Winston Churchill or Henry VIII, but not me. It was very uncomfortable, especially as the man tried unsuccessfully to convince me that I was the “spitting image” of this person.

There are a few likely reasons for seeing doppelgangers. First, despite how many people there are in the world, there are a limited number of genetic variations and some family features are strong. Ultimately, if we go back far enough, we're all related. That means that there are strange and wonderful genetic permutations across all the possible variables wherein a long lost ancestor of mine may have crossed a genetic path with another ancestor and strongish genes that passed to me also showed up in some other distant cousin.

Cousin is a keyword, too. In a study done in the mid-1980s, genealogists and anthropologists got together and examined family histories going back quite a ways and they discovered that just about everyone around you can be anything from a 15th cousin to a 50th cousin. Usually, but not always, people are on average our 16th or eighteenth cousins. That's everyone within our community. That means that even 500 miles from where I was born, there are people in my town, county and state who may share with me a common ancestor.

According to one blogger on the topic, “If you consider [that] a generation is

usually 30 years,10 generations

back will take you back 300

years and give you 2,046

ancestors. If you take it back to

20 generations—or 600 years—you'd have 2,097,150 ancestors.” The Bares have been in America for about 300 years (that we know) which is more than two-thousand possible ancestors, all or most of whom produced heirs. That's just my father's father's side of the family. When we factor in my mother's family and all the different branches, this is an almost incomprehensible conglomeration of genetic traits in a vast sea of offspring.

Under the burden of arresting figures like this, it is fairly easy to assume that the girl I thought was my childhood classmate was actually a closer cousin with real genetic similarities to my actual friend. What I experienced, minus the blush-inducing embarrassment, may have been a strain of DNA that produced features that my brain recognized as being essentially the same.

Another possibility is that our face-recognition is so tuned to see familiar traits, to keep us in close-knit units where we can see who is our kin and stay with them, our brains see these markers and we don't fully understand the significance. This powerful wetware in our skulls can see family likenesses even when it is far distant.

My wife recently met her second cousin on her mother's side and this man has all the facial features we associate with her mother and late uncle's family. We spend more than a few minutes discussing these traits.

The church directory photo of the  bald-headed, blue-eyed fat man that “looked like me” may have been a cousin—even quite a close cousin. My grandmother's younger sister's grandchildren are my second cousins. Although we are related, we bear no physical similarities. They are raven-headed and olive-skinned; their mother's Native American heritage shows forth in their features quite strongly. However, all of us share ancestry with my grandmother's grandfather, a man who, like me, was tall, thinner with long legs and a peculiar cowlick. With his handlebar mustache and squinted, almost beady eyes, I very much look like him as an old man in a sepia picture taken in the 1930s.

Even more astounding is a blown up picture of my grandfather's father, Milton, that my good aunt sent me. She says—and I certainly see it—this man with a broom mustache is me in a straw hat. It is so startling that I have caught myself staring at his photo wondering what else we had in common. These men are direct ancestors, much like my good aunt, with whom I share musical and cerebral similarities; even our sharp-tongues. 

Inside the family this is to be expected and not wondered at. Just a few generations ago, though, one of my great-grandfather's great grandfathers may have sired a family tree that gave birth, eventually, to a man who, despite outward dissimilarities, nevertheless caught the observant family-finding machinery’s notice. Perhaps that man and I are 16th cousins.

Whatever the actual connection, the lesson I take from this is two-fold. First, there is no accounting for blood. There are Bares out there stalking around that I have never met who have my heart condition or my affinity for puns. We may even have similar widow's peaks or scoliosis that makes our feet turn out or a penchant for being slightly pedantic when it comes to literature or philosophy. That fills me with some hope that our small branch of the tree is not the only one.

More importantly, though, I think of the case I have often made before: we're not only all in this together, but we are all family. I'm not thrilled about being related to some of the people out there, but it does give me pause when I reflect that they, like me, are actual people with feelings, dreams, thoughts and fears; people who love and are loved despite their flaws or foibles, just like me.

Humanity is one big family. And as a family, we are part of the overarching web of nature; not separate from it or superior to it. That's a very heartening thought. So the next time I see someone who is, as they say where I grew up, the spitting image of someone else, I'll try to remember that we may be distant cousins, meaning family and family is precious.