Paper short abstract:

The presentation looks at Estonian online rituals using word magic and incantations. The authors use also digital corpus of Estonian traditional incantations to wide possibilities for analysing contemporary incantations.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation compares Estonian online rituals using word magic and incantations with older fixations. The choice of Estonian-speaking environments is limited to the use of incantations, especially when a communication zone joins the ritual. Theoretical approaches to online religion in the 1990s provided a good basis for further analysis, and it is also clear that shamanism, like many other religious minority movements, took off in the early days of the Internet and introduced new technical possibilities, also social media outlets.

We used also the digital corpus and tool of Estonian religious texts (now contains an estimated 300,000 texts), which are divided into imaginary sub-corpora based on different areas, types of texts, characters, rituals, etc. Digital corpus offer wide possibilities for analysing texts and their representations – from complex character models to mythemes and other details. It is possible to construct models of the variability of the appearance, time, place and other conditions of mythical beings, to look at the diversity of axiology, and to predict the foundations of vernacular categorization.

Often, such rituals contain a wider range of religious information, which is why the method of close reading has been used for analysis of contemporary versions. There is an interesting equating and likening point of view with specific rituals, all activity is an extension of our social world.