pilgrimage

pilgrimage, a journey undertaken for a religious motive. Although some pilgrims have wandered continuously with no fixed destination, pilgrims more commonly seek a specific place that has been sanctified by association with a divinity or other holy personage. The institution of pilgrimage is evident in all world religions and was also important in the religions of ancient Greece and Rome.

General considerations

Great centers of pilgrimage attract visitors from widely dispersed cultural backgrounds and geographic locations, often enabling them to commemorate the origins of their particular faith. Since the 2nd or 3rd century ce, Christians have traced the events of the Bible, including the life of Jesus Christ himself, through visits to the Holy Land. Mecca is revered by Muslims as the dwelling place of Adam after his expulsion from paradise and as the birthplace of Muhammad (570–632), the prophet of Islam. According to Hindu tradition, Varanasi (Benares) was founded at the dawn of creation and is the earthly home of Lord Shiva.

The Christian New Testament does not specifically enjoin believers to go on pilgrimage, but sacred texts in other religious faiths do. A hajj (formal pilgrimage) to Mecca is one of the five Pillars of Islam. According to the Bible, immediately after he was given the Ten Commandments, the Hebrew prophet Moses received instructions on Mount Sinai that required the Jewish people to appear before the Lord three times a year. The Mahabharata, an important Hindu epic dating from the 1st millennium bce, recommends visits to many holy places in India, mentioning shrines in an order corresponding to the Sun’s movement across the sky. The Buddha himself prescribed certain places of pilgrimage, choosing sites linked with key events in his life.

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Meaning and motivations of pilgrimage

Given its presence in so many different cultural and historical contexts, no single meaning can be attributed to the act of pilgrimage. Structural similarities are discernible, however, across disparate traditions of sacred travel. Pilgrimage usually entails some separation (alone or in a group) from the everyday world of home, and pilgrims may mark their new identity by wearing special clothes or abstaining from physical comforts. Frequently, pilgrimages link sacred place with sacred time. The hajj always occurs on the 8th, 9th, and 10th days of the last month of the Muslim year. Historically, Jews would visit the temple of Jerusalem during three annual festivals, as prescribed in Deuteronomy: Passover (in remembrance of the beginning of the Exodus from bondage in Egypt), Shavuot (marking the giving of the Law to Moses), and Sukkoth (recalling the temporary shelters used by the Israelites who fled from Egypt). Hindu pilgrimages mark particular phases of the life cycle of the individual and often occur at points in the year identified as auspicious by astrological calculations.

Apart from involving movement across physical and cultural landscapes toward a sacred goal, pilgrimages frequently involve ritual movements at the site itself. Performing the Stations of the Cross, which reenact the events of Jesus’ Passion, is a frequent activity at Roman Catholic shrines. Muslims walk seven times around the Kaʿbah, or central cube-shaped shrine, at Mecca. Buddhists circumambulate dome-shaped reliquaries called stupas. Among Hindus, perhaps the ideal pilgrimage would involve a journey around the four most sacred sites in India (the dhamas), covering the country in an auspicious clockwise direction.

A further common feature of pilgrimages is the availability of small souvenirs—relics, containers of holy water, icons, and so on—that allow the sacredness of a shrine to be transported back to the pilgrim’s home. Finally, pilgrimage sites tend to have a material focus, even though the nature of that focus varies according to the assumptions of the religion. Muslim and Jewish sites avoid iconic representations of divinity, but images are important in Catholic and Orthodox Christian sites. Statues of gods are central to Hindu worship and necessary for darshan, the beneficial gaze that passes between pilgrim and deity.

Numerous factors determine the location of sacred sites. Shrines memorialize some great miracle or divine appearance from the past but may also appropriate the places that are holy to an older or rival faith. Thus, as Buddhism was established as the dominant religion in Tibet, deities associated with indigenous traditions were subordinated to those of the new religion, just as sacred spots such as Mount Kailas (in the Kailas Range) were turned into Buddhist pilgrimage sites. Similarly, the missionary efforts of colonial powers in Africa and Latin America led to the creation of modified religious landscapes, often combining pagan and Christian imagery and myth, as is evident in the case of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. Pilgrimage centers are frequently situated in striking and remote geographical areas. In Hinduism ritual bathing often takes place at the confluences of rivers, which are imbued with sacred meaning. The Ganges is regarded as the holiest Hindu river because it is believed to issue from the very locks of Shiva’s hair.

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A factor that unites pilgrimage locations across different religions is the sense, variously expressed, that a given place can provide privileged access to a divine or transcendent sphere. This idea is well expressed in the Hindu concept of the tirtha, a Sanskrit term encompassing the notion of a ford or intersection between two realms. The same word is used by Jains for any site where a prophet was born or died.

In all religious traditions, hierarchies of sites are evident, as some places are regarded as more sacred than others. For Hindus, Varanasi, one of seven especially holy cities, has the power to bestow moksha, or freedom from the cycle of reincarnation. For the medieval Catholic, a visit to Jerusalem or Rome would have gained more remission of sin (through the granting of indulgences) than a journey to a lesser place. In North Africa, marabout shrines, consisting of the tomb of a holy man, lack the pan-Islamic status of Mecca or Medina but provide access to sacred figures, living or dead, who mediate God’s grace (baraka) to clients.

Motivations for pilgrimage vary, within as well as between traditions. Sacred travel is frequently linked to a pious search for ultimate salvation but can also be prompted by more earthly aims, such as gaining miraculous cures, fulfilling vows, or doing penance for wrongdoing. In medieval times the English shrine of Walsingham, associated with the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation, attracted women seeking solutions to problems of lactation and infertility and may have encouraged self-identification with the Holy Mother. More recently, the apparition of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in Portugal in 1917 has made the small village of Fátima into an international pilgrimage site, one tied to several supposed cures and miracles.

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In addition, pilgrimage has frequently been linked to, and sometimes explicitly combined with, travel for overtly secular purposes. From the earliest times, the hajj was an annual fair as well as a religious activity, and it had important commercial functions under the rulers of the Ottoman dynasty. A Muslim pilgrim might well have financed the journey to Mecca through trade, and over many centuries annual caravans to the city benefited from the relative security available to large groups of travelers. The cultures of ancient Greece and Rome did not establish boundaries between religious ritual and the secular world in ways evident in the modern West, and festivals easily combined celebration of the gods with urban commercial activities. The Crusades initiated by Pope Urban II in 1095 allied elements of pilgrimage with chivalry and the gaining of booty. Before the final armed assault on Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in July 1099, the crusaders fasted and walked barefoot around the city. Priests carried relics and preached to the military pilgrims on the Mount of Olives. The Camino de Santiago, a series of medieval pilgrimage routes to the purported tomb of St. James the Greater in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has seen in the 21st century a significant increase in pilgrims who undertake the journey for nonreligious reasons.