Avatar: From a God's Descent to Your Profile Picture

Today an avatar is the most ordinary thing in the digital world: the profile picture, the little figure that represents us in a video game, the face we put on in a video call when we don't want to show the real one. We use the word a thousand times without suspecting that, each time, we are invoking a Hindu god descending from heaven. Because «avatar» began as a deeply religious term, and its journey to your screen is one of the longest and strangest a word has ever made.

The descent of the gods

«Avatar» comes from the Sanskrit avatāra, which means literally «descent». It is formed from ava- («down») and a root meaning «to cross» or «to pass over»: the idea of something coming down, crossing from the divine into the earthly.

In Hinduism, an avatar is the incarnation of a deity who descends into the world to fulfil a mission. The most famous are the ten avatars of Vishnu, the god who, according to tradition, comes down to Earth in different forms whenever the cosmic order falters: a fish, a turtle, a boar, a lion, and also figures as celebrated as Rama, Krishna or, according to some schools, the Buddha himself. Each avatar is a body borrowed by a god to walk among mortals.

From India to the dictionaries of the West

The word reached English and other European languages towards the end of the 18th century, brought by the British Orientalists who studied and translated the sacred texts of colonial India. At first it was a religious technicality, but it soon loosened: it began to be used for any incarnation or manifestation of an idea or a quality. One could say that someone was «the avatar of elegance» or «the avatar of evil».

It is the same kind of semantic journey made by other words with a traceable biography, as when «nostalgia» went from a deadly disease to a feeling: the term survives, but its meaning is completely transformed.

The leap to the screen

The last great turn came with computing. In the 1980s, the first virtual worlds needed a word to name the digital body with which a user moved around inside the screen. Some pioneering video games borrowed it from Hinduism: if the player «descended» into a virtual world embodied in a character, what better name than avatar? The idea was popularized by the science fiction of the 1990s and, in time, became the universal term for our representation on the internet.

The metaphor, looked at closely, is beautiful and exact. When we create an avatar, we do something very much like what mythology attributed to Vishnu: we take on a body other than our own to descend into another world —the digital one— and act there. It swapped heaven for the cloud, and the god for a user, but the underlying idea is the same as three thousand years ago.

A word that keeps descending

Few words sum up the crossing of the old and the new so well. «Avatar» joins, in three syllables, the Vedic hymns of India with the screen of your phone. And like so many words that seem freshly invented, it had in fact been waiting for centuries for the moment to descend again. It is, without knowing it, one of those words whose true history sounds made up, just like «serendipity», born in a letter from 1754.

References

1. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Oxford, 1899, s. v. «avatāra».
2. Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, s. v. «avatar». dle.rae.es
3. Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, s. v. «avatar». etymonline.com

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Do you enjoy the stories behind words? Continue with the origin of «nostalgia» or explore the whole etymology series.