ABSTRACT
When I initially planned this book, I expected the chapter devoted to online ritual to look quite different. I envisioned it as a detailed analysis of the interactive weaving of magick and power on the World Wide Web that would draw on dozens of examples and reveal significant differences that realized the imaginative potential of the online environment. Put bluntly, I expected to find much more online ritual than I did. In part at least, this expectation was due to
some of the early (in the sense of premature) claims for ritual presence and efficacy online that I and others had made. Though he winds up uncertain of the answer at the end, for example, Erik Davis’s famous Wired article on “Technopagans” contains the seeds of the problem in its subtitle-“May the Astral Plane Be Reborn in Cyberspace” (1995). And, with particular reference to the presence and use of ritual objects online, Stephen O’Leary’s now classic essay,“Cyberspace as Sacred Space,” proposes among other things that “the textual reality of a candle as described on the screen is sufficient to ensure ritual efficacy, while the cyber-flame raised in the electronic conference room has no embodiment except in text” (1996: 799). Here, though, the obvious questions raised by the assertions of both authors are: Is it? Is “the astral plane reborn in cyberspace?” Is the word “candle,” when typed on a screen in a particular Internet chat venue, “sufficient to ensure ritual efficacy?” And is such efficacy as there is sufficient to overcome the inherent difficulties of performing and participating in ritual practice through computer networks? Certainly, for some the answer to all these questions will be an unqualified “Yes.” Davis’s report on technopagans such as Mark Pesce and Tyagi Nagasiva makes that clear, at the very least. But will online ritual become anything more than the province of a very small group of technologically advantaged and, more important, technologically oriented modern Pagans?
