Avatar

Blavatsky

Original sense

An avatar is a descent of a divine principle into a human form for a cyclic purpose — Rama, Krishna, and, in her comparative scheme, other world-teachers. It is not a career and not a past-life identity one casually claims. She treated the idea as rare, cyclic, and belonging to the logos of a race or age.

An Avatâra is a descent of a god into an inferior form; not the reincarnation of an ordinary Ego.

She distinguished avataric descent from the reincarnation of a human monad. Mixing the two, she thought, was a category error that fed spiritual vanity.

New Age

Later sense

A title available to charismatic teachers, or a past-life memory (‘I was an avatar in Atlantis’). Internet culture then emptied it further into a digital mask — the other, accidental, complete inversion of ‘descent of a god.’

Typical use. Guru marketing, starseed origin stories, and, separately, profile pictures.