Tom Boellstorff also mentions the Hindu origin of avatar in Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton UP, 2008).  He cites Neal Stephenson’s use of it in Snow Crash (1993) and its use in the virtual worlds Ultima IV and Habitat (128).  He sees it as a reverse  incarnation, a movement from actual to virtual, and so a mirror of the original term.

I think it might be more complicated than that.  Avatar in the religious sense designates an emissary as well as an embodiment of the creator.  The higher order creates the lower order or avatar, which carries out the wishes or will of the higher order being.  Is the higher order “virtual” and the avatar the “actual” in that sense?  Only if embodiment is comensurate with actuality; then only what is embodied can be actual. To the originators of the term avatar, the higher order being was not less actual than the avatar.

Doesn’t it all just depend on how embodiment is constructed in our thinking?  If we think of biology, we think in terms of cells, blood, flesh, but bodies are also constructed of information–just like the virtual bodies we construct for our avatars, although on a much more complicated scale.  What if we think of avatar in terms of its function as bearer of the creator’s information rather than its materiality or lack thereof?

I think eventually the term virtual is going to be replaced with something else–but what is up for grabs. How about auxilliary reality?  Or to recall Doctor Who, how about E-Space?  Get rid of “reality” altogether and drop the connotation of inferior or secondary.