My Avatar, My Soul: When Mystics Log On

Last month I headed to Las Vegas for a conference, this month it's Los Angeles, California (USA). Ah, the cosmopolitan life of a medievalist, eh? This dizzying international pinball is obviously what life is mostly like as a medieval scholar, just popping over the pond every few weeks to another academic shindig. Yeah, no. This is highly irregular - but utterly lovely, darling - scheduling for me. I'm looking forward to the sun (if not the wildfires) in LA, and the chance to share some material from my book. I'm presenting excerpts from Chapter 4 of Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, which considers medieval visions in terms of twenty-first-century experiences online. The blurb below covers the Chapter's main contours, which I'm abbreviating for the LA conference. In this paper, I'm focusing more squarely on the way in which the figure of the avatar - understood simultaneously as the online embodiment of the user's offline personhood and a manifestation of the divine  - works as a means to think through key issues in the material from both eras. Scroll to the bottom of this post to leaf through the slide deck I'll be using for the paper.  

Chapter overview:

The medieval saint interacts with God in her mind, in mystical vision space – yet these mental experiences are figured as having meaningful corporeal consequences and tangible outcomes in the earthly realm. The online environment of Second Life (SL) offers parallels of modern Christian worship to meditative medieval piety. SL is a three-dimensional online virtual environment designed to allow users to live out a simulated version of life via their avatar. The avatar is a visible version of the self that is wholly controlled by the offline user. SL Christians participate in recognisable religious rites in the intangible (‘meditative’) space of the internet, and these rites significantly affect the user’s offline body. I argue that SL Christians’ modern worship experiences shed light on the experiences of medieval mystics, and vice versa.