Today, seated on the floor of my kitchen, an invisible dog kept licking my face while I tried to get rid of the digital banjo stuck to my parrot wing. I was not successful. Is it disrespectful to visit virtual Muslim holy sites as a parrot avatar? I did not want to find out. I did not want to offend anyone, even by accident. Which is worse when looking for virtual sacred sites: my bright red parrot plumage or the banjo stuck to my wing?
We have been thinking about virtual space in my "Religion at Play" class this semester. We spent time this week using the Vive Pro headset to visit "The Holy City," an educational VR program designed to teach about the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as they are seated in Jerusalem today. We can go onto the virtual Temple Mount, enter Al-Aqsa mosque, and go through the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.
All sorts of questions arise when doing this virtually. For example, how is the experience of the person wearing the headset different from those watching a flat-screen depiction of the same scene? How does the virtual space relate to the real-life space, especially for special places like a mosque? Might virtual sacred spaces be more sacred to those who situate themselves within those spaces' traditions than, say, somebody who is agnostic? Is a virtual sacred space less sacred (but still somewhat sacred) when compared to a real-life sacred space, or does its virtuality render it profane (or at least mundane)? How should we act when "in" such virtual sacred spaces? Does our behavior matter? And given that the Vive Pro offers the most immersive mode of "entry" into virtual spaces that we tried out, what can we say about less spectacular apps that let us "visit" Mecca on our smart phones (with or without VR glasses)? What about sacred spaces that show up in video games, and are thus integrated into the game's interactive expectations?
Mircea Eliade's oversimplified notions of the "sacred" and the "profane" are a good place to start when thinking about these things, especially if tempered with Jonathan Z. Smith's revisiting of the terms in his introduction to the 2005 edition of Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return: "One might," Smith says, "reverse the polarities of the maxim 'as above, so below,' yielding the formula 'as below, so above,' thereby suggesting some theory of projection in the service of legitimating human institutions and practices." In other words, Eliade's quasi-Platonic presumption that heavenly entities manifest in the ordinary world can be replaced by the notion that religious people manufacture sacred objects and spaces to gesture toward a heavenly reality in which they believe.
It is out of respect for the possibility that people visiting the virtual mosque in the Metaverse might see it as sacred, or even somewhat sacred, that I wish I could replace my parrot avatar with something else less garish. It helps that the parrot is wearing a headscarf (Am I then also wearing a headscarf? And is an avatar itself a kind of covering, parrot or not?). Without having to decide just how sacred virtual spaces are in the Metaverse, I can act in ways that respect those who might see them as sacred themselves.
There's not much I can do about my real-life dog licking my face while I'm wearing a VR headset. The slobber is real, and so long as I am in virtual space, she has free access.