ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 begins the case study of Ku Witaya, who took his life believing that he could be reincarnated as a digital spirit in a popular online game. On 23 August 2008, 16-year-old Ku Witaya, a “home-trained, self-professed Taoist medium … convince[d] six teenagers … to enter into a suicide pact.” During weekly rituals, Witaya would reportedly be possessed by gods and speak in fluent Hokkien. Witaya, influenced by the online game Slayers, told his friends that they had to die together to become ‘slayers’ to kill demons threatening the world. He and his close friend, Sia Chan Hong, leaped out of Witaya’s ninth-floor bedroom window while the rest backed out. This chapter attempts to make sense of Ku Witaya’s synthesis of online video game avatars and Taoist deities: How do the two connect to each other? How can Witaya’s theory be understood beyond a mere desire to ‘prove’ his beliefs but as a result of a complex fusion of media forms? What happens when humans desire to be spirits and envisage their supposed divine realm as virtual spaces (the World Wide Web)? Does this reveal more about the digital media involved or the nature of spirit possession; or both?
This chapter examines online gaming and spirit mediumship individually while finding the possible interactions and intersections of the two. Witaya’s case may be the most extreme in that it resulted in his tragic suicide, but the example reveals the power that the digital media and virtual spaces contain in the conception of spiritual and celestial spaces. In that respect, Michael Taussig asks a pertinent question: “Could it be that the symbols of the emphatically non-sacred are themselves profoundly sacred?” A fixated demarcation of symbols as non-sacred or sacred is limiting. Such an endeavour insufficiently accounts for the rich fusion of forms, formats and media in popular religious practices.
