For a variety of reasons both technological and cultural, we don't hear a lot about virtual reality these days. But the issue of avatars - the graphic "bodies" used to navigate virtual spaces - has not gone away. Driven principally by the increasing realism, bandwidth, and interactivity of games, especially massive online multiplayer games like Everquest, the social, psychological and even metaphysical problems posed by avatars continue to persist. Millions of people express themselves through avatars on a daily basis. How do we conceive and integrate these new, subjectified experiences of the moving image? Are they tools, representations, masks, markers, parallel bodies, dream figures?

Characterizing the twentieth century as the century of the moving image, the psychedelic writer and explorer Terence McKenna highlighted three domains: cinema, dreams, and psychedelic drugs. In all thee zones, time unfolds, phantasms are produced, and matter loses its gravitational hold on the image. All three zones also anticipate, in different ways, the puzzle of the avatar, whose cultural lineage, I would like to suggest, includes a distinctly occult dimension that touches on all three realms noted by McKenna.

The lineage in question concerns the human doppelganger known as the astral, etheric, or "energy" body. The overlap with this body with dreams and psychedelics is fairly obvious, but I would like to argue that it also possesses an intimate relation with the evolution of media, not simply in cinema but in a variety of electromagnetic communication arenas. In this sense, we must look at the occult, not as a throwback to the past, but as a vital if marginalized mode of modernity. That is why the late nineteenth century, with its explosion of new technologies and scientific advancements, witnessed an intensified interest in the occult, rather than the diminishment a strict rationalism might assume. One reason for this is that the occult can address issues of subjectivity, space, and experience with a freedom and imaginative force not found in more "official" organs of culture and philosophy. In particular, the occult functions as an unregulated zone of the social imaginary which attempts to resolve problems introduced by new media, which by their very nature challenge and undermine existing concepts, perceptions, and experiences of subjectivity, both its existential boundaries and its possible perceptions.

Nineteenth century occultists were also obsessed with electricity and electromagnetism - the natural forces which come to the fore in that century and which form the elemental substance of so many media. To speak for a moment as a McLuhanesque natural philosopher, one might say that when we transformed electricity and electromagnetism into media of communication, we opened up a new space of subjectivity, not simply a new regime of signs but a new incorporeal zone of sensation and perception. The occult expression of this transformation can be seen in the intertwined history of Spiritualism and telegraphy. Though mediumship is millennia old, the first modern Spiritualist interchange with a dead spirit occurred in upstate New York only a few years after the first telegraph signal passed between Baltimore and Washington DC in the 1840s. Spiritualism, with its pragmatism, its pretensions towards science, and its debt to mesmerism and "magnetism", must be seen in the light of electrical communication. Mediums, after all, passed information between the realms of the living and the dead. One of the principal Spiritualist journals was known as the "Celestial Telegraph," and Spiritualists tended to characterize their communications as technological facts, not as mystic rituals.

The dominant occult image of the human subject in the mid nineteenth century is the ghost or departed spirit, who made vocal appearances not only in seances but visual appearances in the popular genre of spirit photography. But what happened to this occult spectre and the "space" it occupied as we passed from the relatively static era of Morse code and photography into the late-nineteenth century world of proto-cinema, wireless radio, the telephone, and the phonograph? The answer is that we moved from the passive mediumistic framework of Spiritualism to the more interactive and exploratory world of etheric bodies and astral travel.

The notion of the astral body was principally developed by the Theosophists in the 1880s and 90s, as the society moved from the occult world of western, neoplatonic magic towards their version of Eastern mysticism. Translating Hindu ideas into a Western mindframe already excited about the emerging world of "invisible vibrations" introduced by Maxwell and Faraday, the Theosophists concocted an anthropology that still influences the New Age and beyond. The Theosophical body is a hierarchical multiplicity of bodies composed of matter vibrating at progressively higher vibrations.

Above the gross body lies the etheric body, a body composed of what one can only call "energy." Though the Theosophists were drawing from the Hindu description of prana - roughly equivalent to the ancient Greek concept of pneuma - they significantly named the body after the still scientific notion of the ether - an invisible vibrating substance pervading all space. In other ways as well, the Theosophists exploited the "invisible" cosmological space opened up by the electromagnetic science of vibration, which also lay behind the explanations of photography, in order to smuggle in occult notions of the mystic body.

Its important to note that the idea of an invisible but coherent energy body which can be both experienced and mapped is by no means restricted to the Theosophists. In Hindu tantra we have the famous chakra system, along with the less well-known system of nadis and channels which envelope and support the physical body. Even better known are the meridian lines treated in Chinese acupuncture, which similarly follow energetic lines only barely registered by Western instruments. In both cases, the energy body acts as a mediating domain between matter and the soul, which in some Taoist arts is conceived of as a body, or set of bodies, capable of motility on their own.

Following the etheric body, the next layer in the Theosophical body is the famous astral body, the body which is composed of feelings and, most importantly, desires. While the astral body is often represented as a simulacrum of the human form, there is an important element of abstraction in its depiction as well. In a crucial 1905 book called Thought-Forms, the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater include images of various thought-forms and feelings available to the clairavoyant or astral seer. These images clearly gesture towards the pivotal movement of abstraction in art, and indeed, Kandinsky was heavily influenced by Theosophy and particularly the theories of Steiner. This is important because it indicates that the human form is not the ultimate container of astral subjectivity.

As important as the existence of the astral body, though, is the realm that it inhabits - the so-called astral plane. Conceived as the domain of dreams and desires, it is also characterized as the realm of thought-forms, both the congealed manifestations of affect and the neo-platonic blueprints of material and artistic reality. Under the right circumstances, the astral body is capable of detaching itself from the physical body and traveling through this realm, as well as exploring the material space. Clearly we have a foreshadowing here of the incorporeal interaction with the virtual field.

Though spirit journeys can be found throughout the world's mystical traditions, and I suspect most of us have had or known people who have had similar experiences, "astral travel" was a new formulation of the phenomenon, one that I would argue emerged as a response to the possibilities and anxieties opened up by the new media. In his book Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce describes the crucial shift from the bound world of telgraphy's wires to the open-ended and rather uncanny "ocean" of signals that characterized the radio spectrum. I suspect that the shift from mediumship - wherein one would passively channel the informational voice of the dead spirit -- to the willful and occult action of astral travel represented a more aggressive attempt to colonize a space that had become the spiritual analog to the world of moving images and electromagnetic entities that were being unleashed upon the world - and that continue to produce today's virtual realities.

Nonetheless, astral travel is not simply a cultural narrative, but narratized experience rooted partly in neurochemistry and cultural programming. Today parapsychologists would call this phenomenon "out of body experiences", or link it with the evident phenomenon of lucid dreaming, which occurs when one "wakes up" inside a dream and is able to consciously control your dream body and, to some extent, its surrounding environs. The period of hypnogogia that immediately follows the sleep shut-down process is a particularly potent realm of "astral" experience. I believe that with the convergence of neuropharmacology and virtual technologies, not to mention the increasingly surreal penetration of mediated and material existence, that these sorts of liminal experiences will become more pervasive and available. This can be seen very much in the new Richard Linkletter film Waking Life, While I do not accept the occult account of the phenomenon, I think these accounts are vital to the cultural history of the imaginary that shapes subjectivity. What is important is that, in astral travel, we become a moving image - a sentient phantasm in a virtual realm of forms and information.