“Cyberspace is a technological doorway to the astral plane… Once we enter Cyberspace, we are no longer in the physical plane; we literally stand in a place between the worlds, one with heightened potential to be as sacred as any circle cast upon the ground”
McSherry, 2002, p. 5
Is practising on the Internet reshaping your religious or spiritual identity? How does cyberspace affect Paganism and Witchcraft? Stay tuned to find out.
Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, Paganism, Western Esotericism and all things Occult.
This video’s content is drawn from a paper I delivered at the conference of Current Pagan Studies hosted by Claremont Graduate University in California. A special thanks to Jeffrey Albaugh. Thank you for your kindness and for organising such an amazing conference!
Now, let’s move on to the topic, shall we?
“In the real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold between the real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along.”
Turkle, 1995, p. 10
With these words, Turkle presents her theory that we have moved from an age of calculation – that of modernism – to an age of simulation – that of post-modernism. Yet, this simulation, as both Turkle and Klassen (Klassen, 2002, p. 54) highlight, doesn’t imply inauthenticity but simply opens the gates to new avenues whereby our identities can unravel and be constructed.
Moreover – as Herman and Swiss note – the relationship between the digital and physical world can be understood by employing the Heideggerian categories of Technē and Poiēsis. Technology appears, in fact, to be ‘simultaneously an instrument and an activity through which self and the world are cast into sense, thereby transforming” being” in the world.’ As Heidegger argues, technology is not a mere instrument conveying or representing the existing world as it carries a transformative nature, for it mythically reveals and re-frames our being-in-the-world through poiēsis, which Heidegger defines as ‘every occasion for whatever passes over and forward into ‘presencing’ from that which was not present before. (Anna and Gosetti-Ferencei, 2004, p. 146; Herman and Swiss, 2000, pp. 1–2) This is a creative process of bringing forth, bringing to life something that was not in existence before and this is precisely what we’ve seen occurring in our progressively more populated cyberspace.
As a result, our physical world is being re-arranged to suit life experiences occurring online, to the point where physical actions and interactions begin to resemble those happening on digital domains. As Chesher argues;
“Computer peripherals extend the voice and ears of invocation into the spatial world. Bar code scanners require that all products be tagged with machine-readable labels.”
Chesher, 1997, p. 89
So, can there really be a stark demarcation between online and offline experiences or are the two becoming more and more two sides of the same coin?
The daily inhabitancy of cyberspace creates new patterns of interaction with one’s self and one’s community, which is now not defined any longer by geographical proximity. This inevitably affects our sense of identity and the creation of communities or traditions. With most social sciences leaning towards a post-modern paradigm, identity is not seen, anymore, as one single fixed character attached to a person, which delineates their being into the world from adulthood until death. Identity is more fluid, shaped by context and time, continually negotiated and re-invented as life goes by and experiences are lived. This also applies to religious identity, being it a person or a group, just as much as it does to personal identity.
The online space fosters and highlights this fluidity as now we are exposed to a wider range of knowledge, cultures and human interactions than ever before. All these inputs and outputs enter the ongoing negotiation of what we are as the boundaries of what constitutes ‘I’ are defined by what constitutes you. And that ‘you’ is… well, virtually, limitless! This lack of limits translates into a wider extent of choices.
Not limited by our location, we can now pick and choose the people with whom we interact from all over the world, selecting them based on our interests and inclinations. This may lead to getting stuck into the famous ‘echo chambers’ which make us believe that everyone thinks like us; in some cases, radicalising certain beliefs and worldviews.
A similar pattern also occurs when it comes to creating, re-creating and living certain traditions. With the enormous amount of information available – and just a couple of clicks away – it’s easier than ever to tailor a practice to individual inclinations, perhaps mixing elements from different cultures and working with deities from different pantheons.
As a result, thanks to the internet we have now more and more eclecticism in religious and spiritual traditions, individually-tailored practices and the emergence of the difference between online traditions – born and bred of the web – versus traditions online – those rooted in the physical space that utilises the web as an additional way to connect. Moreover, As Cowan highlights in his fascinating ‘Cyberhenge’, we find now two models of traditions emerging from cyberspace, which he defines as ‘Closed source’ vs ‘open source’.
Although syncretism and eclecticism are present across religious traditions, what happens with Pagan forms of witchcraft in the contemporary world is that these syncretic implementations happen at a much faster rate, due to the quicker and wider circulation of information on the internet combined with the inclusivist nature of Paganism.
Interestingly, the – sometimes wild eclecticism – doesn’t imply that everything is allowed. There are, in fact, certain rules which may and do vary from person to person or from group to group. And here we see one essential element of Pagan forms of witchcraft… it’s decentralised, yet still existent, a sense of legitimation and validation. In the absence of a centralised authority or dogma, in contemporary witchcraft, it is the individual practitioner or a given group or a certain tradition that negotiates internally what is acceptable and what is not, to the exclusion of those who choose otherwise. Thus, you can find a person or a group that calls upon the Holy Mary and Jesus as their Goddess and God while many others will find this association utterly unacceptable.
Likewise, there are groups or individuals endorsing the irrelevance of magical tools and those who reject this view, favouring a more ceremonial approach. There are those who maintain that you can only practice traditions upon initiation or that are linked to your bloodline or heritage and those who’d strongly disagree with this view.
As a consequence, the chosen group or tradition – sometimes comprised of a single individual – establishes its own rules and beliefs. And this appears to be the case for both closed-source traditions and open-source traditions. In conclusion, I’d like to mention that the research on this topic is still ongoing and findings do vary depending on time, place and specific traditions studied.
Before wrapping up, allow me to welcome you to the Inner Symposium…thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon. You and those who stay pledged to my Inner Symposium allow me to keep going with this project. So thank you very much.
This is it for today’s video. If you liked it, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, let me know in the comments what you thought about this video, whether our religious, spiritual identity is reshaped by the online community and what you think about everything, really, that I have said in this video. Also, let me know what kinds of videos you’d like to see next. Also, activate the notification bell because sometimes YouTube won’t notify you when I upload a new video otherwise.
And as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
REFERENCES
Anna, J. and Gosetti-Ferencei (2004) Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein, Fordham University Press.
Augé, M. (2008) Génie du paganisme, Paris, Folio.
Chesher, C. (1997) ‘The Ontology of Digital Domains’, in David Holmes (ed), Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace, SAGE, pp. 79–93.
Cowan, D. E. (2004) Cyberhenge : Modern Pagans on the Internet, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Herman, A. and Swiss, T. (eds.) (2000) The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory: Magic, Metaphor, Power, New York, Routledge.
Klassen, C. (2002) ‘Cybercoven: Being a witch online’, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, SAGE Publications Ltd, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 51–62 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/000842980203100104.
McSherry, L. (2002) The Virtual Pagan: Exploring Wicca and Paganism Through the Internet, Red Wheel Weiser.
Seargeant, P. and Tagg, C. (eds.) (2014) The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, Palgrave Macmillan UK [Online]. DOI: 10.1057/9781137029317 (Accessed 17 January 2021).
Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster.
(First uploaded 25 Jan 2021)