You stand in a throng of multifleshed being, mind avatared in all its matter, on a broad avenue winding through a city of blue trees with bright red foliage and living buildings growing from the soil in a multitude of forms.
norman spinrad, songs from the stars (1980).

in this book, an alien race shares its knowledge through “songs” that project their listener into alternate realities. 

digital technology being relatively new and constantly-changing at the time, spinrad imagined what such digital technologies could be capable of in the distant future: projecting others into foreign realities, allowing a user to walk through a dream created by another person. he described this experience as “being avatared.”

12 years later, neal stephenson would borrow this term again to describe connecting to a digital “metaverse” — not a world projected to us by advanced alien lifeforms, but a digital reality that we humans created for ourselves. 

the word comes from “avatara,” sanskrit for “descent,” originally referring to a deity descending from the heavens to walk on earth. the gods couldn’t come to earth in their spiritual bodies — those weren’t compatible — so they had to construct new, earthly bodies to descend from heaven.

and still today, people use the term “avatar” to describe digital representations of ourselves.