Pilgrimage

Ascending the pilgrim's way up Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, Ireland

To make a pilgrimage means to undertake a journey—typically in the context of religious practice—of personal or ritual significance. The journey can be external and physical (as in the case of the pilgrims journeying to Thomas Becket's tomb in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), internal and spiritual (as in the case of Christian, who narrates his own allegorical vision in The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan), or both. The tradition is ancient: Scholars have found relics and records of various forms of it that date back into preclassical times. Most major world religions have sanctioned, or still sanction, some form of sacred travel in their practices and rituals, but pilgrimage is not purely a formal religious phenomenon. Many "pilgrimages" in modern times—arguably including such secular activities as tourism, symbolic political action, and journeys of personal self-discovery—testify to the lasting power of ritual travel as a manifestation of human yearning and the search for meaning, even in an era ostensibly dominated by a culture of scientific rationalism. Pilgrimage would seem to be as compelling a human phenomenon as ever—both as ritual and as metaphor.

Ritual and place

Primal religions tended to locate the divine in particular places—the river[1], the sun, the volcano, the forest, and so forth. Practically speaking, if you wanted to talk to a god, goddess, or spirit, you had to go for a visit. The practice of pilgrimage, including those pilgrimages associated with modern monotheistic religions whose basic tenets asset that God is everywhere, harks back to that primal religious impulse to identify particular places as sacred.

Even faiths such as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, whose doctrines center on the idea of a universal God, manage to square that universality with particular sacred places. The Israelites of the book of Exodus, for example, spurned the polytheism of Egypt and fled into the wilderness; eventually, though, despite believing that their God was "everywhere," they came to carry with them a portable temple, in the form of the Ark of the Covenant and its tabernacle, which ultimately became a permanent "place" of worship and pilgrimage when the first Temple of Jerusalem was built around it. In Islam, the holy city of Mecca and the black stone of the Kaa'ba serve to give focus to the worship of Allah, and are places of mandatory pilgrimage for those able to do so. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian pilgrims often venerate the tombs of saints and martyrs, as well as images and icons of such personages, as places of special holiness.

The pilgrimage itself often becomes as important as the sacred place sought, and in that sense its ritual aspect serves to broaden the definition. Psychologists have identified repetitive ritual as one of the ways in which children give structure to a vast, frightening world (a tendency that goes out of control, for example, in some children with autism); as adults, people justify rituals for many reasons, but they remain ways of structuring a human experience that might otherwise seem impossibly complex. Just as the rituals of worship provide structure to the sometimes frightening business of talking to God, pilgrimage offers a way to surrender to a sense of continuity and connection—it becomes a ritual journey that symbolizes both the search for connection and the progression of life itself.

Classical and preclassical precursors

Perhaps the earliest recorded destination of what we would now call pilgrimage is the Egyptian necropolis at Abydos, north of ancient Thebes along the Nile. Originally a burial center for early Egyptian dynasties, by the middle dynasties its tombs had become associated with that of the river fertility god, Osiris. As dynastic history was forgotten and the cult of Osiris grew in the era two millennia BCE, prosperous Egyptians traveled there to pay respect and to arrange for their own burials in the vicinity. The archaeological record of Abydos is full of their tributes, graffiti, and burial material.

Many pilgrimage sites show similar "layers" of culture, as religious practices change but traditions of travel and devotion linger. For example, archaeological evidence suggests that wells and springs were often a sacred destination for Bronze Age denizens of Europe. Such ancient wells dot the British and Irish landscapes (much to the delight of modern New Age neopaganists), and the wells seem to have been the focus of prehistoric religious ceremonies, perhaps even preceding the arrival of the Celts. The pagan Romans subsequently incorporated British wells into their own culture, as at the Roman city of Bath. Sacred wells in Ireland became associated with folk traditions about the faerie realm, even as Celtic Christianity overspread the island in the first millenium CE. Similarly, in Sardinia, certain wells of the non-Celtic Nuragic people seem to have been constructed with ceremonial functions in mind many centuries before the rise of Rome. Sometimes these pagan sites ultimately became places of Christian devotion and pilgrimage, and their pagan origins were conveniently overlooked. The Arabian city of Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the prophet Mohammed received divine revelations there; its zamzam springs and the black stone of the Kaa'bah both had ancient traditions as sacred destinations that were incorporated into the rituals of the Islamic hajj.

Some scholars have pointed to parallel practices in other ancient cultures that were handed down and recorded in classical literature. Hinduism, which still has a strong tradition of spiritual travel, links back to the ancient custom of darsan, as recorded in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata in the 6th century BCE. In ancient Greece, the word that offers the closest classical equivalent to what we now call a pilgrim is θεωρός (theoros), which denoted a person journeying abroad to an oracle, holy place, sacred rite, or as an offical representative of the city-state. The concept later became what Plato and Aristotle taught us to think of as "theory," but it had a very different meaning in the centuries before. What's more, the theoros—whether sight-seeing or participating in sacred Mysteries—was obliged to contemplate and reflect on the sights he saw, then return home to his city-state and recount the experience.

Early Judeo-Christian traditions

Temple sacrifice

Holy Land

Rome

The Way of St. James

Eastern traditions

Sacred mountains

Temples

Rivers

Circular pilgrimage

Other premodern traditions

Islamic

Zorostrian

Mayan

native American

Literary and historical pilgrimage

The Crusades

Chaucer's pilgrims

Perhaps among the best-known literary pilgrimages is that which gave Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) its frame narrative. The route along Watling Street and the Old Kent Road, eventually connecting with the ancient "Pilgrim's way" from Rochester to Canterbury was well-known and well-traveled, and its proximity to London attracted a diverse crowd of pilgrims, giving Chaucer an ideal setting for bringing together people of widely varying classes and professions. Chaucer never completed his cycle, though this did not prevent others, such as the anonymous scribe of the Northumberland MS. of the Tales, from completing the story for him via "Tale of Beryn" which included a scene of the arrival in Canterbury at the shrine of Thomas à Becket. As would actual pilgrims of the day, the pilgrims in this scribe's tale purchased tin hat-badges and vials of "holy water," which were for sale just outside the cathedral close, and enjoyed a pint of ale at a local pub.

Some of Chaucer's readers may indeed have regarded his satirical portraits of pilgrims as apt epitomes of the sort of irreligious attitudes and characters that pilgrimages drew; among early proto-Protestants such as the Wycliffites the value of pilgrimage was frequently denounced. King Henry VIII, working with his minister Thomas Cromwell, had the shrine destroyed in 1538 as he severed ties to the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation brought the custom of pilgrimage in England to a close.

The Plymouth "Pilgrims"