Contemporary Pagan Ritual and Cyberspace: Virtuality, Embodiment, and Mythopoesis

The paper attempts a theoretical re-appraisal of contemporary Pagan ritual by posing the following question: do Pagan rituals online contradict this new religion’s stress on embodiment or, rather, do such rituals compel us to reconsider and re-evaluate the category of ritual itself? The author examines first the main features of contemporary Pagan ritual offline and online, as they emerge from ethnographic work and from scholarly interpretations, then, based also on a re-evaluation of the relationship between actuality and virtuality in certain works on computer mediated communication, highlights the existence of a close relationship between the creation of symbolic meaning and ritual in contemporary Paganism.