Incarnations of the word avatar – from visiting deity to sci-fi hit and online personality

“Avatar” nowadays might immediately conjure up an image of the blue-skinned Na’vi from Pandora in the Avatar sci-fi film franchise, or the fantasy action series Avatar: The Last Airbender.\nThe word, in fact, is originally rooted in Hinduism, being the incarnation of a deity on earth in human or animal form to counteract some particular evil in the world.\nPronounced “uhv-TAAR”, avatārat derives from Sanskrit avatāra, verbal noun of avatarati, meaning “descends”, which is composed of ava meaning “off, down”, plus the base tarati meaning “[he] passes over, crosses”, deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root *tere- meaning “cross over, pass through, overcome”.\nAny deity can undergo a descent from the divine realm into the human world. However, the term usually refers to the 10 appearances of Vishnu, known as the dashavatara, comprising Matsya (fish), Kurma (tortoise), Varaha (boar), Narasimha (half man, half lion), Vamana (dwarf), Parashurama (Rama with an axe), Rama (hero of the Ramayana epic), Krishna (the divine cowherd of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana), the Buddha, and Kalki (the incarnation yet to come).\nThe Bhagavata Purana lists 24 avatars of Vishnu, also mentioning that his forms are innumerable. Several other male and female deities in Hinduism also have avatars, and many historical religious leaders in Hinduism have been considered avatars of deities.\nThe word “avatar” was first adopted in English in the late 1780s, in The Hindu Wife; or The Enchanted Fruit by British scholar Sir William Jones, in which he describes “Fish, Boar, Snake, Lion. The four first Avatárs, or Incarnations of the Divine Spirit [i.e. Vishnu]”.\nLater, the use and meaning of “avatar” extended to similar manifestations in other religions: in the early 20th century’s Myths of China and Japan, by Donald Mackenzie. Shinto deities figured as avatars of Buddha in Ryobu-Shinto.\n\n“Avatar” then came to refer to any incarnation in human form, and then, from the early 1800s, to any personification or embodiment, such as of a principle, attitude, concept or philosophy, which may be in the form of a person or not.\n“Elvis did not invent rock’n’roll. But he was its avatar, the embodiment of its spirit and might”, Nick Tosches wrote in his essay “Elvis in Death”.\nModern non-Hindu expansions of this originally theological concept burgeoned in the late 20th century in computing and science fiction.\nFrom the mid-1980s, an “avatar” has come to refer to a graphical representation of a person or character in a computer-generated environment, especially one which represents a user in an interactive game or other setting, and which can move about in its surroundings and interact with other characters. Even non-gamers love to assume an avatar – an image representing a participant on an online forum, website or social media.\nFrom 2009, the Avatar film franchise, set in the mid-22nd century, characterised an “avatar” as a Na’vi-human hybrid: a genetically engineered Na’vi body remotely operated by human colonists via brain-computer interface to interact with the indigenous Na’vi inhabitants of the lush habitable moon of Pandora so as to exploit their resources.\nHumans take on digital graphic or alien bodies – the Na’vi’s palette evoking Vishnu’s blue skin that is emblematic of the infinite cosmos – and maintain the original sense of a “crossing over” from one world into another.\n\nIn real-world medical science, the term “avatar mouse” or “mouse avatar” was coined in 2011 in the context of an experimental method employed in the study of the disease process and drug therapy testing: this personalised cancer therapy involves extracting cells or tissue of a cancer tumour from a patient and implanting it in a mouse to create an animal avatar – a patient-derived tumour xenograft, to aid in identifying the best chemotherapeutic choice for a particular cancer patient.\nHarking back to its origins, this is truly an incarnation to counteract a particular evil.\n