Avatars and Rituals: Immersive Religious Practices in the Digital Space

This contribution aims at offering a semiotic analysis about the religious performance in the digital sphere experienced through the figure of avatars. The theoretical disquisition of Julia Kristeva of the translinguistic, and Eco’s reflection of the model reader, could together reflect how the practitioner, thought as a reader, interpret and contribute to the meaning construction in this intertextual phenomena of digital religiosity. Since the 1980s, and especially after the arrival of the web 2.0, there has been a significant rise of spiritual performances and practices within online environments, where a variety of traditional and nontraditional systems of believes begin to migrate and adapt to this new territory. Religions became, as many other social aspects, mediatized by this electric media, originating a culture strongly influenced by digital technologies and integrated by networks. In this scenario, computational media was becoming not only an instrument to carry out spiritual pursuits, but instead an environment, producing other ways of considering and understanding the religious context. That is to say, the digital environment seen as a producer of experience, affecting dialectic relations – as science and faith - and revolutioning hypothesis about how the net reflects part of our essence. Virtual environments started to be perceived as another type of reality, where space and time do not answer to the cartesian linearity and a diversity of forms of religious engagement began to emerge by reconstructing or simply reinventing themselves. With religion and digital technology converging one another, the production and reception of meaning has suffered a variety of changes. Some scenarios, early projected as a reality yet to be studied, are now inherent conditions of contemporaneity. One of the many results is the merging of complex identities as Avatars, which can be understood as the user’s self-representation in the online context. In the religious context, the performance and construction of rituals and the way of inhabiting virtual “sacred” spaces are all activities lived through avatars, allowing a sense of presence by deep levels of immersion, sometimes developed by extended reality software as it is the case of VR. There is, consequently, an even stronger process of embodiment occurring in virtual worlds. Two reflections are open in this research: On one hand, considering that all human praxis are languages - since languages demarcate, signify and communicate - then the digital practice of religion would enter into the translinguistic, because of its elements coming from different contexts and multimodal strategies. Here, intertextual unions determinate the dynamics, and our presence, experience through the avatar, is always mutating, moving and connecting. On the other hand, the religious practice thought as a text is then actualized within one of its multiple potentialities. When bringing to the “online” a ritual, the way in which is performed t would determinates