Transcending time and place in the context of Covid-19

During 2020, because of Covid-related restrictions, opportunities to travel to sacred heritage sites dramatically decreased and Pagans’ and shamans’ gatherings and rituals necessarily moved online. This article picks up from an earlier paper (Rountree, 2006) to reconsider relationships between time, place, imagination and ritual performance in the online context. It argues that whereas in the context of “real” heritage sites, the temporal boundary between past and present seems to blur or dissolve as a result of Pagans’ embodied, material connections with a sacred place, in the online ritual context boundaries of place blur or dissolve because of synchronous temporal connections with likeminded others in sacred space. Two case studies are explored: the responses of those who gathered online to witness English Heritage’s livestreaming of Summer Solstice 2020 at Stonehenge, and the experiences of a group of modern Western shamans, mostly living in Malta, whose regular meetings shifted from members’ homes, places in nature and sacred heritage sites to Zoom in early 2020.