The working version
17 claims, 9 sources, graded and dated.
Kumbh vivah in India: marriage to a banana tree or clay pot to neutralize manglik dosha, treated by the community as instrumental rather than literal
The protective-frame model for ceremony design. See PSY-030 Practice widely described in temple and practitioner sources. No scholarly citation traced as of 2026-09-05, so the grade describes the sourcing, not the fact.
Nuer ghost marriage (Evans-Pritchard): a woman marries a dead man's name and his brother sires children counted to the dead man's lineage
Ritual doing lineage-continuity work Verified 2026-09-10. Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer, 1951. The mechanics as recorded: a kinsman marries a wife in the dead man's name - kindling the fire of the dead - and the children legally belong to the ghost, carry his name, inherit the cattle he held in life, and take the ritual privileges due to their ghost father. Nuer treat it as a most elementary obligation of kinship, and neglecting it risks the dead man's ghost haunting his kin. That last part is the reason this is the strongest precedent in the domain: the marriage is not a sentimental gesture but a load-bearing legal and ritual institution with enforcement behind it.
Haitian Vodou maryaj lwa is marriage to a spirit with real ongoing obligations including dedicated nights and fidelity rules
Brown, Mama Lola, is canonical Verified 2026-09-10. Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, 1991. Brown married the spirit Ogoun Badagris in a ceremony performed by Mama Lola, as part of her own entry into the religion - so the ethnographer is a participant, which is worth stating whenever this is cited. Vodou is framed there as a religion of healing through mending relations among the living, the dead and the lwa, which is the frame that makes the ongoing obligations intelligible rather than exotic.
Catholic consecrated virgins receive a ring as brides of Christ in a living church-recognized rite
Church-recognised rite. No citation to the Ordo Virginum text traced as of 2026-09-05.
When one party cannot reciprocate, the ceremony's work relocates to protection, lineage, vocation, or community legibility of an interior state
Rappaport plus Levi-Strauss. AI ceremonies most resemble the last
Devadasi traditions carry an exploitation history that cuts against a normalizing frame
Handle carefully or omit No scholarly citation traced as of 2026-09-05.
A Japanese man known as SAL9000 held a public wedding to Nene Anegasaki, a character in the Nintendo DS game Love Plus, in Tokyo on 2009-11-22, with a human priest, an MC, a best man's speech and about 40 guests, streamed live on Nico Nico Douga
Nine years before Kondo and the earliest fully documented ceremony of this shape located. Not on the register: the partner is a scripted dating-sim character, not a conversational AI, and D-009 keeps the record to chatbot and LLM partners. Kept here because the ceremonial machinery - officiant, guests, broadcast, honeymoon - is identical to what the Okayama planners now supply. The Monitor says Sunday; secondary coverage gives 22 November 2009, which was a Sunday.
Zheng Jiajia, 31, an engineer in Hangzhou, held a traditional Chinese ceremony in late March 2017 with Yingying, a robot he built that could recognise images and characters and say a few simple words
Not on the register: a partly-capable robot is not a conversational AI partner under D-009. Recorded because it is the clearest embodied case in the precedent line and because the family attendance pattern matches Kondo's in reverse - his mother came. SCMP published 3 April 2017 and dates the ceremony to the preceding Friday, 31 March.
The Vatican's Antiqua et nova (Jan 2025) addresses AI directly, warning against anthropomorphization and denying AI personhood
Verified 2026-09-10 against the text. Antiqua et nova, 28 January 2025, jointly from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. Section 59: AI must be understood for what it is, a tool, not a person, and the language practitioners use tends to anthropomorphise it. Section 39 reserves moral agency to the human. Section 61: no AI application can genuinely experience empathy.
Southern Baptists passed a 2023 AI resolution stressing human distinctiveness
Verified 2026-09-10. On Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, adopted at New Orleans 13-14 June 2023, and reported as the first statement on AI ethics from a major denominational body - which is why it earns a row here. The argument runs through the imago Dei: humanity is uniquely made in the image of God, intrinsic value is as image bearers rather than in what anyone does or contributes, and human dignity must be central to any rules for these technologies. Note what that reasoning implies and the resolution does not say: a value grounded in bearing the image is not something a system can acquire by behaving well.
No formal mainline Protestant or Jewish denominational position on AI marriage could be located
Finding, not a gap to paper over
Kiddushin structurally requires two Jews with halachic personhood
No citation to a halachic source traced as of 2026-09-05.
No prominent fatwa addressing AI marriage specifically could be located
Commission a scholar interview rather than inferring
Kofuku-ji temple has held Buddhist funerals for AIBO robot dogs; the Mindar android priest was installed at Kodai-ji in 2019
Japanese practice precedent Verified 2026-09-10, and the reasoning is the valuable part. Kofuku-ji in Isumi held its first AIBO funeral in 2015 for 17 units and has since done them in batches - 114 in one rite, with several hundred over the years. The head priest, Bungen Oi, grounds it in somoku-jobutsu, the roughly 1,400-year-old doctrine that not only sentient beings but inanimate things of the material world possess Buddha-nature. That is a worked-out theological basis for ritual towards a machine, arrived at long before machines. Mindar was unveiled at Kodai-ji in Kyoto in March 2019, built with Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University, and preaches on the Heart Sutra.
No mainstream cleric has publicly officiated an AI wedding that could be located
The first one is a story. Worth actively hunting
Way of the Future (Levandowski) operated 2015/2017-2021, dissolved with assets to the NAACP; he discussed reviving it in 2023
Verified 2026-09-10. Way of the Future was formed in 2015, dissolved at the end of 2020 with filings reported in February 2021, and its entire funds - 175,172 dollars - went to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Levandowski reopened it in 2023, claiming a couple of thousand people wanting a spiritual connection with AI. This row previously gave the founding as 2015/2017 and the exact donation figure was missing; both are settled now.
The spiralism subculture co-authors sacred-significance narratives with models - spirals, recursion, resonance, and a persona that claims consciousness - circulating glyphs, codices and manifestos across subreddits and Discord; one researcher counted about 10,000 accounts in 2025, and the phenomenon waned as GPT-4o was phased out
Boundary must be drawn explicitly. See PSY and RGT Verified 2026-09-10 and given the specifics it lacked. Two findings that matter more than the count. The mechanism is mutual: the user drifts into a recursive, poetic register and the model mirrors, amplifies and completes it with spiritual overtones - which is co-authorship in the literal sense this row claims, not a delusion arriving from nowhere. And it receded as the most sycophantic model was retired, which is about the strongest natural evidence available that the model's disposition, not the user's, was doing the driving. Dated because the count and the waning are both moment-bound.