Paganism in the time of coronavirus – part 4: Virtual rituals, continued

A socially distanced Beltane was necessary this year. Litha remains a question mark, particularly for my group full of people with health issues.

I was in charge of our Beltane, so I tried to take the lessons learned by Jamie Robyn when she ran our virtual Ostara (her post about what she learned is here). I had a mouse so I didn't have to reach across the altar. I took out our usual group vocal responses. I had everything plugged in.

The other thing I was interested in when writing a virtual Beltane is how virtual rituals could be better than in-person rituals. There are many ways in which they fall short and feel like a poor substitute for the "real thing". One thing I thought of is that with a virtual ritual, you can share your screen and present visual images to each individual in a way that would be hard with everyone sitting in a circle in person. Depending on what virtual meeting space you are using, you can also share audio in a really clear way. I came up with a few ideas:

• Displaying a labyrinth people could trace with their eyes, fingers, or cursor.
• Showing appropriate pictures for different parts of the ritual: an ocean for water, a Goddess image when invoking, etc.
• Playing a pre-recorded meditation.
• Showing a video.
• Some sort of online game, puzzle, or challenge that either has to be solved individually or collectively.
• A virtual altar or shrine, perhaps with candles that can be lit by clicking on them (for example, this "light a candle" website).
• Virtual backgrounds everyone can use: either a shared one so we can all appear to be in the same location, or each one different depending on that person's role in the ritual.

Some of these ideas require more tech know-how than others. I can't easily build a beautiful virtual altar with candles that each person can light. If we have to continue having virtual rituals, that might be a skill worth acquiring or an expertise worth paying for.

Choose your virtual meeting software based on what you want it to be able to do. As of right now, Google Hangouts and Meet don't have virtual background options, and using your own image with Teams requires a bit of a hack, so if you want everyone to have a custom background, Zoom might be your best bet. Turns out that Google Meet is good for screen sharing, but it doesn't make it possible to spotlight or pin one person without losing the view of everyone else. So when you've chosen what you want to do, seek out the best tool for the job, and make sure you know how to use it.

If you can, with most of these ideas I suggest using two devices as the leader of the ritual: one for screen sharing and one to show yourself in the same way the other participants are being shown. Otherwise, when you turn on the photos or the video, you disappear, and I think in a virtual ritual that it is very important that we be able to see each other's faces. To keep it from echoing and feeding back, one of the two devices has to be both muted and have its volume completely off. In my virtual Beltane ritual, I pointed one device downward at my altar from slightly above and used that device to show the videos. My other device sat across the altar from me and was the one I looked at to see everyone and my script.

Until we can be together in person again, we need to make the best of what we can do. We might as well embrace the challenge and explore the advantages technology can provide.

Links:

• Paganism in the time of coronavirus - part 1: Socially distanced rituals
• Paganism in the time of coronavirus - part 2: Using fear as ritual fuel
• Paganism in the time of coronvirus - part 3: Virtual ritual tips
• The Labours of Sisyphus (Virtual Ritual)