page_title: Brocken spectre
section_title: References in popular culture and the arts
hierarchical_section_title: Brocken spectre / References in popular culture and the arts
caption_attribution_description: English: Pilot's Glory phenomenon, as seen from a Boeing 737 window after takeoff from Bonaire International Airport, please credit and link to www.reeftraveler.com
context_page_description: A Brocken spectre, also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre, is the magnified shadow of an observer cast upon clouds opposite the Sun's direction. The figure's head is often surrounded by the halo-like rings of coloured light forming a glory, which appears opposite the Sun's direction when uniformly-sized water droplets in clouds refract and backscatter sunlight.
  The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside or cloud bank, even when seen from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has since been recorded often in literature about the region.
context_section_description: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Constancy to an Ideal Object" concludes with an image of the Brocken spectre:
  And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
  
  The woodman winding westward up the glen
  
  At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
  
  The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
  
  Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
  
  An image with a glory round its head;
  
  The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
  
  Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
  Lewis Carroll's "Phantasmagoria" includes a line about a Spectre who "...tried the Brocken business first/but caught a sort of chill/so came to England to be nursed/and here it took the form of thirst/which he complains of still."
  Stanisław Lem's Fiasco (1986) has a reference to the "Brocken Specter" (sic): "He was alone. He had been chasing himself. Not a common phenomenon, but known even on Earth. The Brocken Specter in the Alps, for example." The situation, of pursuing one's self, via a natural illusion is a repeated theme in Lem. A scene of significance in his book The Investigation (1975) depicts a detective who, within the confines of a snowy, dead-end alley, confronts a man who turns out to be the detective's own reflection, "The stranger... was himself. He was standing in front of a huge mirrored wall marking the end of the arcade."
  In The Radiant Warrior (1989), part of Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series, the protagonist uses the Brocken Spectre to instill confidence in his recruits.
  The Brocken spectre is a key trope in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996), in which a character, Nicholas Scoby, declares that his dream (he specifically calls it a "Dream and a half, really") is to see his glory through a Brocken spectre (69).
  In James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) the Brocken spectre is used to suggest psychological horror.
  Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections wrote:
  
  ... I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment... Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me... When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the Brocken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying.
  In Gravity's Rainbow, Geli Tripping and Slothrop make "god-shadows" from a Harz precipice, as Walpurgisnacht wanes to dawn. Additionally, the French–Canadian quadruple agent Rémy Marathe muses episodically about the possibility of witnessing the fabled spectre on the mountains of Tucson in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest.
  The explorer Eric Shipton saw a Brocken Spectre during his first ascent of Nelion on Mount Kenya with Percy Wyn-Harris and Gustav Sommerfelt in 1929. He wrote:
  Then the towering buttresses of Batian and Nelion appeared; the rays of the setting sun broke through and, in the east, sharply defined, a great circle of rainbow colours framed our own silhouettes. It was the only perfect Brocken Spectre I have ever seen.
  The progressive metal band Fates Warning makes numerous references to the Brocken Spectre in both their debut album title Night on Bröcken and in lyrics on a subsequent song called "The Sorceress" from the album Awaken the Guardian that read "Through the Brocken Spectre rose a luring Angel."
  The design of Kriemhild Gretchen, a Witch in the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, may have been inspired by the Brocken spectre.
  In Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Book II Chapter 23, Flora Finching, in the course of one of her typically free-associative babbles to Mr Clennam, says " ... ere yet Mr F appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well-known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B ... "
  "Brocken Spectre" is the title of a track on David Tipper's 2010 album Broken Soul 
caption: Shadow of an airplane cast by the sun on nearby clouds
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