Pilgrimage

Throughout recorded history, the pilgrimage has been an important practice in most of the world's religions. It consists of an individual or a group leaving home and traveling to a sacred site that has a spiritual magnetism within their belief system. Pilgrims encounter both the core of the religion and their fellow believers in a new and enhanced way, before returning home somehow transformed by their journey. Such a site can be a unique center of divine presence (e.g., the Ka‘bah in Mecca [Makkah]), a place that is the group's “most precious possession” (e.g., the Western Wall, in Jerusalem, of the temple destroyed in AD 70, for Jews), a place linked with primordial history (e.g., Varanasi [Benares] on the Ganges, in Uttar Pradesh, India), the tomb of a saint (e.g., the tombs of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Rome for Christians or that of Husayn ibn ‘Ali in Karbala, Iraq, for Shia Muslims), a place linked to a religion's founder (e.g., the holy places in Jerusalem for Christians), or a miraculous place of revelation or healings (e.g., Lourdes, France, for Catholics). To arrive at such a center, to engage in the rituals prescribed there, and to be in the “very place” and see, touch, and taste its sacred relics is experienced as desire fulfilled and as joy both in the object of the pilgrimage and in being part of the blessed group who have been so blessed to get there.

A few pilgrimage places have world renown (e.g., Varanasi, Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome), but the sacred sites that attract devotees are almost without number. In every region, there are sites drawing pilgrims: a holy well, a tomb, or some place where local tradition holds that there was an apparition. This site often provides a focal point for the region, and its annual ritual cycle establishes the fixed points in the locality's calendar (e.g., the apparition site of Tirano on the Swiss-Italian border). There are sites whose renown has spread farther afield and that have become national shrines (e.g., Thomas Becket's tomb in Canterbury, the destination of Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales). Last, there are international sites where pilgrimage activities have been responsible for the building of an infrastructure of roads, hostels, and support industries (e.g., the routes from all over Western Europe terminating in Santiago de Compostella).

While a pilgrimage is undertaken as a response to a sacred demand (a command to travel to the place, the need to seek divine favor or make amends for sins, or the desire to be in proximity with the holy), it has all the effects on the societies involved that are associated with tourism, and it has often been an important factor in cultural and political developments. The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca has been a key factor in creating a sense of Islam as a single transnational identity and community, with the pilgrims meeting one another as brothers and sisters. In the 11th century, Western Christians’ desire for easier access to their holy places in Syria triggered the Crusades.

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