As an interesting aside, this tale of the Golem was firmly in the 18 year old Mary Shelley's mind as she tossed and turned in a nightmare that the next day became the framework for the 1818 novel Frankenstein. Today, the recurrence of the theme of science and technology as potentially malevolent brings with it a healthy interrogation and analysis of the hype and hypercorporate viruses infesting the field.

As such, Shelley's Frankenstein shares much with Wiener's God and Golem. It is this more sophisticated and cynical analysis of technology that Shelly re-invented in the 1800's, and is today fruitfully carried on by many artists and theorists, that may offer a way out of the many dangers that could befall the creators and users of that most contemporary Prometheus: the avatar.

This mortally-constructed imperfection is to be contrasted with the original and theologically-inspired gestation of the Golem's counterpart, the capital "A" Avatar, symbol of the projection of a superior and heavenly or holy perfection from on high into the lesser domain below on earth.

The idea of the avatar - the telepresence, or local presence of a remote agency - has for millennia been associated with magic and religion. The word is one of the most ancient words in use today and first appeared in Hindu religious texts written in Sanskrit around 3,500 years ago as a term for the appearance of divine Hindu "gods" who "crossed over" and "projected themselves" into the earthly plane of physical existence.

However the use of the concept of a distant, unknown or unimaginable god taking possession or "wearing" or "inhabiting" a human, animal or other projection to represent themselves in terms that mortals can understand - through shamanism, priesthoods, Oracles, prophets, statues, automata, landscape and natural forces - suggests that the idea stretches back most likely still further into the origins of language and culture in prehistoric times.

The ancient Vedic scriptures also embody some of the earliest ideas of a potential polyphony of being of the enlightened ones and the gods, the multiform mirrored "reflections" of the one god replicated in an almost endless array of Bodhisattvas, incomplete "versions” or appearances of aspects of the original or central deity. It could be said therefore, that this ancient genealogy of manifestation of one in an other, and of one in many, leaves us prepared for the multiple, multiform and telepresent identities of the digital age.

Strictly speaking, the banal or secular use of the term - the uncapitalised avatar - could arguably be offensive to the followers of Buddhism. That in itself raises many questions outside the scope of this paper. It is certainly of note that the modern avatar, if it can be so called, has a lot to do with the idea of selfhood, in sharp contrast again to the idea of selflessness that a willing possession of a thinking entity by a god implies, this selflessness being an essential part of Buddhism.

Sufficed to say that we must try to acknowledge these sensitivities as best and where we can in re-defining the term through theory and practice, hopefully properly and diplomatically distancing our newer avatar from its older forebears.

It is important to stress however, that the secular nature of the avatar today brings it, just like us, closer to golem than to god. Its unfinished nature, still in a state of perpetual development and necessary imperfection, will always be closer and hence more open to the problems, discontinuities and inequities of the physical world and real people, than to similitude with the imagined heavenly host implied or lying behind the omniscient and telepresent mask of religion, or of god. In a way we flesh and blood hosts anchor the avatar to the "real", acting as hosts or representatives of the real; of a physical world we seek to amplify, extrude, extend, project or augment within or into other worlds "beyond" or at least as an alternative to, this one.

Sometimes in the rush to engage with the idea of the avatar, we forget our selves - the secular and imperfect hosts - and we do this at a risk to our new selves as much as to our older ones. We are perhaps not sufficiently ready to be introduced to our new selves yet, because lacking proper organisation and conceptualisation of multiple ways of being we may encounter difficulties in realising the benefits of these newer perspectives. Felix Guattari is spot on the mark when he says "contemporary social transformations... call... for a departure from structuralist reductionism and a refoundation of the problematic of subjectivity - prepersonal, polyphonic, collective and enunciative." (Guattari, 1992/95, p 22)

History is peppered with references to inanimate objects taking on some form of life to represent and provide a portal into contact with unknown and powerful forces and worlds hidden or distant from the physical world. Oracular heads, talking statues, wond'rous automata, homunculi, ghosts and those possessed by spirits - all take on powerful attributes, such as the ability to foretell the future, that affect the lives of those they visit or commune with.

Ancestor worship in ancient Egyptian, Chinese and other societies provided another portal - the burial urns holding the ashes of past relatives, or the embalmed remains of the dead - kept at least a faint trace of the original person alive and available for ongoing consultation. For example the teraphim cited in the bible - and realised in images from a manuscript from the Middle Ages - look disconcertingly like ancient avatars, and indeed that is what they were.

It was said these teraphim could take the form of specially fashioned dolls made from bone, or the first born of ancient Hebrew tribes, killed and then embalmed, so that their heads or whole bodies may be indefinitely kept in order to be spoken with and to give their keepers counsel. A variation on this theme is wonderfully portrayed in Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Since its re-entry into usage under a new set of meanings – invoked by computer engineer and designer Chip Morningstar as a descriptor for the virtual actors controlled by remote human hosts in the first VisMOO (Visual, as opposed to textual, Multiple user, Object Oriented domain), LucasFilm's 1985 Habitat - the re-vitalised avatar has become the most successfully fictionalised, visualised and virtualised remote presence afforded us by the new telematic or tele-cybernetic technologies of “command, control and feedback” at a distance.

However it was most probably the, at first uncredited, reuse of the term in SF writer Neal Stephenson's book, Snow Crash, ten years later, that popularised the term (Stephenson later retracted his claim to originality, and cited Morningstar in all further editions of the book).