What Happens When Rituals Go Online?

Sangchi Liu is a PhD Candidate in Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures in the class of 2028. Sangchi is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. Read Sangchi's first blog post from earlier this summer, Fortune-Telling as Healing: Queer Divination in Taiwan.

I have never been more careful about how I text than since I began training and practicing as a diviner. As I learned more about the responsibilities of being a diviner, I began to understand the news reports I grew up reading in a different light. What initially seemed like isolated incidents began to reveal recurring patterns. These reports described people being deceived, harassed, and sexually assaulted in divination settings. Others reported being charged excessive fees or asked to provide biological materials, such as hair or blood, for rituals.

These accounts led me to ask why practitioners continue working in a field so often labeled outdated, a scam, dubious, or irrational. What motivates them to remain in a profession that is frequently dismissed in modern society? How do they respond to widespread skepticism about their work? 

My research examines queer fortune-telling practices in Taiwan and how they are changing through digital media and AI. During the past year, I have been researching several online divination settings through repeated participation and practice. I have come to understand these practices through three connected concerns: how practitioners reclaim traditional practices, how they communicate care through changing media, and how they create new boundaries to protect both people seeking readings and practitioners. 

One way practitioners reclaim divination is by changing the assumptions built into the practice. Gender is often central to traditional Chinese ritual practices, but some queer-friendly practices choose not to ask people seeking readings to identify their gender on intake forms. Practitioners use gender-neutral pronouns in their messages. They allow people to define their own hopes and intimate relationships instead of imposing assumptions about expectations in heterosexual and monogamous relationships. 

This does not mean that practitioners will help people carry out their every wish. Practitioners may set clear boundaries, guided by legal, ethical, and safety considerations. For example, although practitioners may not ethically judge intimacy outside of marriage, some may decline requests involving illegal activity. To establish mutual understanding, some clearly explain what they can and cannot do.  In this way, practitioners seek to create spaces that are affirming without ignoring ethical and legal responsibilities. 

Reclaiming divination also means seeking ways to establish trust virtually. In some practices,  practitioners perform rituals on behalf of people seeking readings. When rituals are no longer conducted in person, people may ask for photographs or videos to document that a ritual has taken place. These requests come partly from the idea that photographs can serve as evidence, but they also reflect people’s expectations about what a ritual should look like. Some practitioners choose to show parts of their process, while others do not. Regardless of their decision, they must find new ways to establish credibility when a ritual cannot be witnessed directly. 

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My research considers four common forms: physical meetings, phone calls, text-based communication, and fully automated services on websites or apps. Each medium creates different possibilities and risks. What interests me most is how the medium shapes the ways people experience care and the ways practitioners provide it. 

When in-person divination was the norm, trust could be built through physical presence. People seeking readings might make assumptions based on a diviner’s body, gender, voice, or appearance. Some people are surprised to encounter female diviners and may trust them less because they expect traditional diviners to be male. The decoration of a physical space can also make a practitioner seem more professional, as the space may include objects that are culturally recognized as part of ritual or divination. Such spaces might include symbolic objects associated with the I Ching and yin-yang cosmology. 

Phone-based divination requires practitioners to build trust through their voices. Tone, rhythm, and pauses become especially important. Texting creates a different kind of relationship. Some practitioners believe that written communication can prevent misunderstandings because conversations can be saved, reread, and reviewed. At the same time, texting is not automatically safer. People can send messages at any time and may begin to expect quick replies. The faster a practitioner responds, the stronger a client's expectations may become. This can help build trust, but it can also create emotional pressure for practitioners. The balance between trust-building, care, and labor is one of the central concerns I have encountered in this field. 

Through my training and practice, I have become particularly interested in how practitioners communicate feelings through text. In some ways, these are skills that many of us already possess as regular users of digital communication. We notice how quickly other people reply, how long their messages are, and what kinds of emojis they use. I had simply never paid such close attention to how particular texting habits can make another person feel cared for. I learned that professional diviners need to continually develop their skills to adapt to changing expectations around digital communication. 

A reading is not only a series of predictions. It also involves tone, timing, punctuation, word choice, and emojis. A small digital sticker can make a message feel warmer. A carefully chosen phrase can reassure someone and offer courage during uncertainty. A delayed response can communicate that a question requires careful attention, while a quick reply can make someone feel accompanied. These details are part of the care involved in divination, even though they may not appear in a formal description of the practice. 

I also began to notice that divination is often a recursive practice. Some people return to the same practitioner at regular intervals, while others repeatedly use the same tool to ask about a particular area of life. Over time, the readings, questions, relationships, and interpretations all evolve. This repetition can make divination less like a single act of prediction and more like an evolving relationship among people, tools, interpretations, and changing circumstances. 

AI is creating both challenges and exciting possibilities for this work. Some practitioners are already incorporating AI into their practice while trying to preserve what they consider essential to divination: an understanding of how questions and interpretations develop over time, the practitioner’s interpretive perspective, and ethical judgment about what should or should not be said. 

AI can generate language quickly and help organize information, but it does not automatically understand the ethical principles surrounding divination traditions. For example, traditional practice may discourage asking the same question repeatedly within a short period. Repeated questioning can be seen as disrespectful to the divination results and may encourage dependence or repeated reliance on the practice. I am interested in how a more ethical AI might be designed in response to cultural practices of care. 

My fieldwork has shown me that reclaiming divination requires more than making it available to queer people. It requires rethinking who can participate, how practitioners communicate, how trust is established, how boundaries are created, and what kinds of technology can support or threaten care. I will continue exploring these questions in my dissertation, paying close attention to how technology is reshaping, but not replacing, the traditions and relationships at the heart of divination. 

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