7
Thousands of animal species are migratory. They usually have two homes, moving from one to the other in an annual cycle. Swallows arrive in England in the spring, often returning to the very same place they nested the year before. In the autumn, they fly to South Africa. They make the reverse journey the next spring. Their homes are like two poles between which they move. The arctic tern, a small seabird, literally moves between two poles in its annual migration from the Arctic, where it breeds, to Antarctica and back again.
These migrations are purposeful. The animals migrate to places with favorable conditions for breeding, and then move to places where they can find food and warmth while it is winter in their breeding grounds.
However, some animals make migratory journeys without any obvious biological purpose. Marine kingfish make yearly journeys inland up the Mtentu River in South Africa to the head of the river, where they swim in clockwise circles for a week before returning to the sea. They neither breed nor hunt at their destination, and their annual migration has been compared to a pilgrimage.1 Some groups of chimpanzees carry rocks to particular trees in their territories, where they throw them down. The stones accumulate in heaps, rather like human-made cairns.2
For most of prehistory, the vast majority of humanity was migratory. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Hunting and gathering mean moving to find game and edible plants; they involve purposive cycles of movement. Traditional peoples follow customary migratory paths, as the reindeer herders of Siberia still do today.3 Australian Aborigines navigated these paths, or songlines, by singing the stories of places as they traveled, with the songs highlighting the locations of water holes and landmarks.
In North America, too, hunter-gatherer societies made circuits of their territories to the sources of natural resources, and also to places featured in creation songs and stories. Their rituals were linked to specific sacred sites. The Paiute-Shoshone people of California believed that a particular hot spring was the site of their creation, and that it was a healing place. The Chumash Indians helped the deceased on their journey by burying medicine bundles on the top of a peak in the Santa Lucia Mountains. One of the Sioux legends told how a woman refused to break camp and follow the tribe’s migration trail, owing to jealousy about her husband’s new wife. So she stayed behind and turned into a standing stone, at a place now called Standing Rock.4
From Migration to Modern Pilgrimage
About 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic Revolution began. People started cultivating crops. Since then, an increasing proportion of humanity has led settled lives in villages, towns, and cities. For all these people, and for all of us today who live in villages, towns, and cities, this immemorial pattern of continual movement has come to an end.
When agriculture and settled life began, the herders of goats, sheep, cattle, yaks, and camels continued a migratory existence, moving their herds and flocks in search of water and fresh pastures, going to higher ground in the summer and to lower ground in the winter. In the biblical account, when Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, one of their sons, Cain, became a farmer, and the other, Abel, a shepherd. Like Abel, the Old Testament patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were herders who moved among settled people. Humanity at this stage was depicted as half settled and half on a journey.
Before the development of agriculture and settled living, sacred sites were linked to seasonal festivals, as people moved from one place to another.
The sanctity of local shrines extended to the paths that led up to and between them. For settled people, the ancient habit of making journeys to holy places persisted, and in some cases, the migratory movement of the group was replaced by ritualized sacred journeys in the form of religious processions.5
With the growth of cities, pilgrimages focused increasingly on man-made temples. The cities of the ancient world were sacralized—and justified—by the presence of temples, as in ancient Egypt and Sumer. In Sumer, all the great city-states had temples at their centers. Less urban civilizations, as in England, built great ceremonial centers, such as the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge, which were constructed more than four thousand years ago, around the same time as the pyramids in Egypt. These great structures must have been places at which populations converged for seasonal festivals, making journeys that were prototypical pilgrimages.
In his Republic, Plato advised settlers in a new country first to discover the shrines and sacred places of the local deities, and then reconsecrate them to the corresponding principles in the settlers’ religion, with festivals on the appropriate days.6 By Plato’s time, many religions had already adopted this principle, and many did so subsequently, including the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
Moses and Joshua led the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, namely Canaan or Palestine. When they settled there, they originally paid homage at a range of holy places that had been venerated long before their arrival, like Shiloh, a Bronze Age shrine sacred to the Canaanites, where Joshua set up the holy tent. The Jewish people also worshipped in sacred groves on hilltops and venerated the sacred stone at Bethel, where Jacob had his vision of angels descending from and ascending to heaven. Many other megaliths in Palestine were sacred to the pre-Jewish inhabitants of the land. Bethel may well have been one of these ancient sacred stones when Jacob had his vision there.7
Jacob anointed this stone with oil and established an altar there. Later, his descendants became slaves in Egypt. When they returned to Canaan after many generations, they made Bethel a major place of pilgrimage.
After the construction of the temple in Jerusalem by King Solomon, around 950 BC,8 Jerusalem became a central place of pilgrimage, especially at the time of the great festivals. More than two hundred years later, King Hezekiah, who reigned from 715 to 687 BC, destroyed the hilltop shrines and other sacred places, and tried to channel all pilgrimage to the temple at Jerusalem. But he failed to suppress worship at Bethel, which continued to rival Jerusalem as a religious center until the reign of King Josiah (640–609 BC), who completed the centralization of Jewish worship by destroying the sanctuary at Bethel and cutting down the remaining sacred groves. The focus of Jewish pilgrimage was henceforth urban, at the temple in the city, rather than spread out over many groves, shrines, and other sacred places. But the principle of pilgrimage remained.
In classical Greece, each city-state had its central temple to which far-flung citizens returned for regular festivals. In Athens, the great Panathenaea festival, celebrated every four years, culminated in a procession on the Acropolis, which is represented on the friezes of the Parthenon, the temple of Athena, patron goddess of Athens.9 In addition to these local gatherings, there were all-Greek centers of pilgrimage, like the shrine of Delphi, where pilgrims consulted the oracle, and Olympia, where the Olympic Games took place every four years at the festival of Zeus. Here the people would see their champions perform feats of strength, speed, and endurance, embodying heroic myths in flesh and spectacle.
The classical Greek traditions also included another core purpose of pilgrimage: personal healing. Many pilgrims went to the great shrine at Epidaurus, hoping for miraculous healing by the gods Apollo and Asclepius. Pilgrims made offerings and slept inside the shrine, where many claimed to have been cured in visions.10
This tradition of dream incubation continued within Greek Orthodoxy, particularly in churches dedicated to the twin healing saints Cosmas and Damian, who were said to have performed the first successful full-leg transplant onto an amputated limb. This tradition continues in some Orthodox churches and monasteries, where pilgrims spend the night in the hopes of receiving divinely inspired dreams and cures.
Similarly, to this day, Muslim pilgrims sleep at the shrines of Sufi saints in the hopes of receiving healing dreams. When I was living in Hyderabad, India, some Muslim friends took me to the shrine of a local saint within an old caravanserai, a walled compound where travelers could rest. The shrine was in a courtyard, and family groups were scattered around preparing to stay the night, to support a troubled member of the family. They were praying for healing dreams, in which the saint would appear to them and help them. I was told that many people received healing dreams.
Within the Roman Empire there were many places of pilgrimage. Some were located by springs, rivers, and sacred groves that only local people would visit; others were more widely famous and involved many days’ journey on foot. Some pilgrims’ practices were similar to those of present-day Buddhist monks. For example, a treatise from the second century AD called De Dea Syria, On the Syrian Goddess, describes how pilgrims prepared themselves for their journey to the holy city of Hierapolis, in modern-day Turkey, by shaving their heads and eyebrows before setting off. On their way, they always slept on the ground, never on beds, and used only cold water for bathing.11
For early Christians, the primary place of pilgrimage was Jerusalem, because of its central importance in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Jesus himself traveled around the Holy Land on foot and went to Jerusalem for the major festivals.
One of the first and most important Christian pilgrims was the empress Saint Helena (AD ca. 250–320), who went to find the significant places in the life of Jesus and to look for relics, including the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Her son Constantine converted to Christianity, founded Constantinople as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site where Jesus was believed to have been buried and raised from the dead.
Jerusalem is still a primary place of pilgrimage for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In his visionary Night Journey, Muhammad flew on a steed called Buraq (lightning) to the temple mount in Jerusalem, where, according to Muslim tradition, he encountered Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. He led them in prayers. Gabriel then escorted Mohammed to the pinnacle of the rock, where a ladder of golden light appeared. On this glittering shaft, Mohammed ascended through the seven heavens into the presence of Allah, from whom he received instructions for himself and his followers. Over this place stands the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam.
In the Christian world, many additional places for pilgrimage grew up around the tombs of martyrs and other saints, whose relics were believed to connect the pilgrim to the heavenly realm to which the saints had ascended. Their tombs were seen as places where heaven and earth joined. Through their earthly relics, the saints in heaven could be present at their tombs on earth. These tombs were already places of pilgrimage by the third century AD, and by the sixth century the graves of the saints had become centers of ecclesiastical life. In the Western church, the power and authority of bishops was closely linked to the shrines of saints, which were often housed in cathedrals.12
The hometown of the prophet Mohammed, Mecca, was already an important place of pilgrimage at the time of his birth, with the pilgrimage centered on a black rock, which tradition held had fallen from heaven. This black stone is now embedded in one corner of the Kaaba, the cubic building at the center of Mecca and the focus of Islamic pilgrimage, around which pilgrims walk seven times counterclockwise. This is one of the few places in the world where circumambulation does not go clockwise.
India is still crisscrossed with numerous pilgrim routes leading to holy caves, from Amarnath high in the mountains of Kashmir to the sources of sacred rivers such as the Ganges, and from holy mountains like Mount Kailash in Tibet to many temples, sacred trees, rivers, rocks, and hilltop shrines. Buddhists go on pilgrimages to their own sacred places, including those linked to the Buddha’s life in India, like Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under a bodhi or pipal tree.13
Forms of pilgrimage are found all over the world. Pilgrimage seems to be a deeply ingrained part of human nature, with its roots in the seasonal migrations of hunter-gatherers and, more remotely, in many millions of years of animal migrations.
Precisely because of its ancient roots, pilgrimage was attacked and suppressed in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. The reformers based their faith on the authority of the Bible, rather than on the pre-Christian traditions that had over the centuries been syncretized and absorbed within the Catholic Church, together with newer customs and traditions related to Christian saints.
In England, there were great pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, commemorating his martyrdom and how it symbolized spiritual resistance to earthly, and especially royal, power. Thomas was also known as a great doctor, a healer without comparison in days without affordable doctors or medical science. Healing power was supposed to reside in water tinged with his blood, which pilgrims bought in lead ampullae from vendors near his shrine. The journey to Canterbury was immortalized in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in the 1380s–90s and consisting of stories told by pilgrims to each other on the journey.
Another great English center of pilgrimage was Walsingham in Norfolk, where there was a shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the form of a Black Madonna and her Holy House, a re-creation of the building in which the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel happened. Another was the great Glastonbury Abbey, where King Arthur was reputedly buried and where Joseph of Arimathea (who arranged the burial of Jesus after his crucifixion) was said to have planted his staff in a nearby hill, where it took root and grew into the holy thorn tree that flowered on Christmas Day. Regular hawthorns flower in May; trees grown from cuttings said to be descended from the original holy thorn still flower in Glastonbury at Christmas.
But there was nothing about Canterbury, Walsingham, or Glastonbury in the Bible, and therefore for the Protestant Reformers, these pilgrimages were invalid. They had no scriptural authority.
In 1538, all English pilgrimages were suppressed under King Henry VIII by his henchman Thomas Cromwell. The injunction against pilgrimage expressed an austere Protestant spirit:
[The people should] not repose their trust and affiance in any other works devised by men’s phantasies beside Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on.14
The shrines were destroyed, the abbeys and monasteries dissolved, and their riches confiscated by the king. The dissolution of the monasteries doubly destroyed the pilgrimage landscape by removing key destinations and by taking away the infrastructure that supported pilgrims as they traveled, providing them with food and accommodation.
Pilgrimages were also suppressed in other Protestant countries. In 1520, Martin Luther declared, “All pilgrimages should be stopped. There is no good in them: no commandment enjoins them, no obedience attaches to them. Rather do these pilgrimages give countless occasions to commit sin and to despise God’s commandments.”15
No such suppression occurred in the Roman Catholic countries of Europe or in the Orthodox East. In many Catholic and Orthodox countries, ancient pilgrimages continue to this day. In Ireland, despite attempts to suppress them by the Protestant English, pilgrimages have persisted, and many pilgrims still go to the island Sanctuary of Saint Patrick in Lough Derg, in County Donegal, and climb the holy mountain Croagh Patrick, in County Mayo.
The most famous European pilgrimage is to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain. It has not only persisted since the Middle Ages, but has undergone a huge revival in the last thirty years, as discussed below.
In Latin America, the European conquerors followed the traditional Roman Catholic policy of assimilating and Christianizing pre-Christian holy places. Near Mexico City, the temple of the Aztec mother goddess was demolished in 1519. Then, in 1531, a native Mexican had a series of visions of the Blessed Virgin on the same spot, where a shrine was built that is now the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Black Madonna standing on a crescent moon. This is the most visited Roman Catholic place of pilgrimage in the world.
By contrast, the Protestant settlers of North America were not interested in the holy places of the native peoples. English common law was taken to redefine the native peoples’ homeland as vacuum domicilium, an unpopulated expanse of wilderness over which no one held dominion and which cried out for farming and civilization.16
In some traditionally Roman Catholic and Orthodox countries, pilgrimages were suppressed not by Christian reformers but by anti-Christian revolutionaries. They wanted to stamp out pilgrimage precisely because it was religious. The French Revolution, starting in 1789, aimed to overthrow the power of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the power of the king. In 1793, the revolutionary government proclaimed the Cult of Reason as the state religion. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason; other churches and cathedrals were secularized. Pilgrimage was banned.
Under the atheist government of the Soviet Union, churches were closed, priests executed, monasteries destroyed, and religious activity suppressed. Shrines were deliberately desecrated, most recently in the campaign against “so-called holy places” launched in 1958, with the aim of the final elimination of pilgrimage.17
Yet the Communists did not dismiss the idea of pilgrimage to relics; they had their own version. Some Soviet visionaries were convinced that science would overcome physical death and confer immortality on humans, enabling them to live forever. When Lenin died in 1924, an official Immortalization Commission was set up to investigate how his body could be preserved until he could be brought back to life. He was embalmed in the hopes that he would be preserved long enough to be resurrected, just as some American millionaires have their whole bodies (or, cheaper, only their heads) cryogenically frozen in the hopes of resurrection.18
Lenin’s body was placed in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, which rapidly became a center of Communist pilgrimage. Millions of people visited Lenin’s tomb during the Soviet period, and it still attracts visitors today. They are officially required to show respect: Men have to remove their hats, and talking and photography are forbidden.19 Likewise, in Beijing, Mao Zedong’s mausoleum is in the middle of Tiananmen Square and also attracts a continual stream of pilgrims, who file past Mao’s embalmed body and make offerings of flowers.
Objections to Pilgrimage
Although Protestants and political revolutionaries tried to suppress religious pilgrimages, they were not the first to find fault with them. Over the centuries there were four main objections to pilgrimage by religious people themselves.
Some people opposed physical pilgrimage by internalizing it, so that the whole of a person’s life was seen as a pilgrimage. The most famous example of this approach in a Protestant context is The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, a seventeenth-century English Baptist preacher. However, the idea of life as a pilgrimage is a metaphor that depends on actual pilgrimage. For those who have never been on a pilgrimage, the metaphor is a mere idea, no longer grounded in lived experience.
Some people may have passed beyond the need for pilgrimage, because they have found a way of living in the presence of God wherever they are. But perhaps some of them reached this state through going on pilgrimages in the first place. This argument against pilgrimage is about passing beyond it, rather than not starting it.
What about icons? In the early church, icons were widely used as aids to prayer and meditation by connecting people with a visual image of Christ or of the saints. An important argument in defense of icons was that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God. God had taken a human form, and therefore the representation of the human form was not idolatry.
In AD 730, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III prohibited the use of icons. The empire was traumatized by the ensuing outburst of iconoclasm, which literally means the destruction of images (from the Greek eikon, “image,” and klastes, “breaker”). But in 787, the Empress Irene reestablished the use of icons. After another burst of iconoclasm from 815 to 843, the Empress Theodora reinstated them again. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates this final restoration of icons on the Feast of Orthodoxy, on the first Sunday of Lent.
Iconoclasm reemerged in the Protestant Reformation. In England, many images of saints and angels as well as stained-glass windows were destroyed during the reign of King Henry VIII, under the administration of Thomas Cromwell. There was a second wave of iconoclasm under the rule of his Puritan namesake (and relative) Oliver Cromwell, when England became a republic, rather than a monarchy (1649–60). But many paintings, crucifixes, statues, and stained-glass windows survived. And after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, religious images were reinstated in the Church of England.
Iconoclasm emerged yet again in the twenty-first century with the destruction of giant Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by Taliban militias and of ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State.
But the question of idolatry is irrelevant to many forms of pilgrimage, including those to sacred groves, holy wells and mountains, sacred stones, and relics of saints. Many of the foci of pilgrimage are not images made by human hands.
Superstition literally means “standing over,” or “survival.”21 From the point of view of the early Christians, the practices of other religions were superstitious. From the point of view of the Protestant Reformers, the practices of the Catholic Church were superstitious. From the point of view of Enlightenment intellectuals, all religious practices were superstitious, and were suppressed as part of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Similarly, the atheist governments of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cambodia under Pol Pot treated all religious practices as superstitious and suppressed them in favor of the Marxist philosophy of materialism.
The dismissal of pilgrimage as superstitious is a consequence of anti-traditional or anti-religious worldviews and says more about these worldviews than about pilgrimage itself.
This particular objection to pilgrimage seems irrelevant in the Western world today, though it may still have some validity elsewhere. In modern, secular societies, no one needs to go on a pilgrimage to engage in sexual adventures, and secular tourism leads to even more commercialization and hustling than pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage and Tourism
Although pilgrimage was suppressed in Protestant countries and by revolutionary governments, the urge to visit holy places was not extinguished. Within two hundred years of the banning of pilgrimage in England, the English had invented tourism, now a vast industry with a global economic value of 2.2 trillion dollars in 2013.22
Tourism is often a form of frustrated pilgrimage. Many tourists still go to the ancient sacred places: pyramids and temples in Egypt; Stonehenge; the great cathedrals of Europe; the temples, sacred rivers, and mountains of India; ancient sacred places like Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) in Australia; the Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu, Peru, and so on. But whereas pilgrims traditionally walk to their destinations, often enduring hardships on the way, tourists travel in cars, buses, and planes. They are not going to sacred sites to make offerings or pray. Many feel they have to behave as secular, modern people who are primarily interested in cultural history. Guides deluge them with historical details that go in one ear and out the other.
What are the key differences between traveling as a tourist and traveling as a pilgrim? Both go to the same kinds of places, but with different intentions. Pilgrims go to connect with a holy place; reaching that holy place is the purpose of their journey. They go with an intention to give thanks for some blessing they have received, to pray for some blessing they want to receive, as an act of penance to make amends for something they have done wrong, for healing, or for inspiration. The tourist goes to see a new place, to hear something of its history, and to take photographs. But they are still making purposive journeys, and the ancient holy places still pull them; indeed, these places are often called tourist attractions.
Often, when pilgrims return home, they bring back something to share with others, including those around them in the blessings they have received. In India, many pilgrims return from pilgrimages with prasad, holy food offered to a god or goddess and blessed in a temple, which they share with their families and friends. Medieval pilgrims in Europe also brought home objects from the sacred centers to which they journeyed, often in the form of badges. These would perform a double function, being focal points of the blessings received and visual markers of their wearers’ prestige in having made a difficult, sacred journey. Tourists likewise return with souvenirs and photographs, but they cannot pass on blessings they have not received themselves.
Although we live in an era of unprecedented mass tourism, in recent decades there has been a remarkable revival of pilgrimage.
The Revival of Pilgrimage
Even those early Christians who condemned local pilgrimages found it hard to condemn pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Saint Gregory of Nyssa, despite the many corruptions surrounding them, called these holy places “memorials of the immense love of the Lord for us men.”23 And it was through pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century that the practice once again became respectable in the Protestant world. A pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1862 by Prince Edward, son of Queen Victoria and later King Edward VII, gave it a royal seal of approval and respectability. In 1869, Thomas Cook started organizing pilgrimage groups to go to the Holy Land, and this was the origin of the global travel agency that bears his name—the original package holiday was a pilgrimage. Soon afterwards, Prince George, later King George V, went on a pilgrimage organized by Cook. In England in the late nineteenth century, local pilgrimages to cathedrals began again, and in the twentieth century several places of pilgrimage that were suppressed during the Reformation were revived, like the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk.
In the Middle Ages, Chartres Cathedral, about sixty miles from Paris, was one of the most important places of pilgrimage in Europe. Even before the cathedral was built, Chartres had been the focus of pilgrimages to a sacred well, the Well of the Strong Saints. The cathedral was built around it, and the well can still be visited in the crypt. Nearby, also in the crypt, is a shrine of Our Lady of Chartres, a Black Madonna. At the time of the French Revolution, pilgrimage stopped abruptly. The modern revival began only in 1912, when the poet Charles Péguy went to Chartres on a pilgrimage with a group of friends and wrote a book about it that became a best seller. Now tens of thousands of pilgrims a year go to Chartres, some on a three-day walking pilgrimage from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.24
Santiago de Compostela, where the cathedral houses the supposed relics of Saint James, the patron saint of Spain, was one of the most popular sites of pilgrimage in medieval Europe. Numbers are hard to estimate, but some indication of the scale is given by the fact that the monastery of Roncesvalles, one of the first resting places in Spain for French pilgrims who had crossed the Pyrenees, fed some 100,000 pilgrims a year.25
The number of pilgrims traveling from northern Europe to Santiago de Compostela plummeted following the Protestant Reformation. Moreover, in the subsequent war with Elizabethan England, Sir Francis Drake led a naval raid on the nearby city of La Coruña in 1589, and the archbishop of Santiago hid the relics of Saint James so that the English could not capture them. He hid them so well that the shrine was empty for nearly three hundred years, and the number of pilgrims was reduced to a trickle. The relics were not rediscovered until 1879, and after being authenticated by Pope Leo XIII, they were replaced in 1884 under the high altar, where they remain to this day.26 However, the pilgrimage itself was not revived until 1949, when a small group of French scholars went on a pilgrimage that was filmed and shown on television in the 1950s, helping to reawaken interest. Even so, the number of pilgrims was small. In the 1980s, a few enthusiasts made sure that the way, or camino, was well marked with signs and established a series of facilities for pilgrims along the route.
What happened next was remarkable. Here are the annual numbers of pilgrims as recorded by the Spanish authorities:
Number of pilgrims traveling to Santiago de Compostela on foot, by bicycle, or on horseback
|
Year |
Number |
|
1987 |
1,000 |
|
1991 |
10,000 |
|
1993 |
100,000 |
|
2004 |
180,000 |
|
2015 |
263,000 |
The great majority of these pilgrims walked, but a minority, around 10 percent, traveled by bicycle, and a few, less than 1 percent, went on horseback.27 These numbers do not include people who traveled to Santiago by plane, train, bus, or car.
As in the Middle Ages, there is now a wide network of pilgrimage routes to Santiago, from several starting points in France, including Vézelay, in Burgundy, and Paris; from Portugal; and from several places in Spain itself. All twelve of the major routes with waymarks are called the Camino de Santiago.
Elsewhere in Europe, old pilgrimage routes are being reopened. In Norway, the most important medieval pilgrimage center was the shrine of Saint Olaf in Trondheim. Pilgrimages there began soon after his death in 1030 and in the Middle Ages became immensely popular. But when the Lutheran reformation reached Norway in 1537, pilgrimages were banned, and they ceased until the late twentieth century, when increasing numbers of people began walking to Trondheim once again. In the 1990s, the path from Oslo to Trondheim, about 400 miles long, was signposted, and it was officially opened by Crown Prince Haakon in 1997.28
Meanwhile in Wales and Scotland, old pilgrim ways are being reestablished. In England, the British Pilgrimage Trust, of which I am a patron, is helping to reopen the ancient pilgrimage footpaths, first and foremost the pilgrim’s way from Southampton to Canterbury over the South Downs. The 220-mile walk takes about eighteen days, connecting sixty-five churches, three cathedrals, seventy-five prehistoric sites, five holy wells, fifteen ruined priories, monasteries, or abbeys, eight rivers, ten holy hills, five castles, fifty villages, forty pubs, eight towns, and four cities.29
In Russia too, after the end of Communist rule in 1991, many Russian Orthodox churches and monasteries reopened, and ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims now make their way to the local holy places.
I have been on several pilgrimages in India, in continental Europe, in Britain, and to the Holy Land. Like many other people who go on such journeys, I have found them inspiring, and they have often been times of great happiness. Some of my recent pilgrimages have been with a godson. I have stopped giving birthday and Christmas presents, because most people have too many possessions. Instead I give experiences. When my godson was fourteen, I suggested that his present could be to go on a pilgrimage with me to Canterbury, along the last 10 miles of the old pilgrim path, starting at a village called Chartham. I did not know whether this would appeal to him or not, but he accepted enthusiastically.
We took the train to the small station at Chartham and set off through fields, woods, orchards, and meadows. We had a picnic lunch at Bigbury Camp, an Iron Age hill fort, and passed through the village of Harbledown, where we looked for the Black Prince’s Well on the grounds of a medieval almshouse. It was so overgrown that we were only able to find it with the help of an old lady who lived in one of the almshouses. It was a small spring in a recess under an old stone arch, with mossy steps going down to it.
By the time we reached Canterbury, my godson was flagging; he was not used to walking so far, and we had a short rest. We then walked around the cathedral clockwise, circumambulating it, making it our center. We entered the cathedral and lit candles at the place of Saint Thomas Becket’s martyrdom and in the dark, mysterious crypt. We prayed, then went to a tearoom for tea. We returned to the cathedral for choral evensong, which was extremely beautiful. Then we went home to London by train. It was an extraordinarily happy day for both of us.
This set a precedent, and in the ensuing years we followed the same pattern, walking to a cathedral, walking around it clockwise, visiting the shrine, and having tea before attending choral evensong. When he was fifteen, we went to Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, walking along the banks of the river Cam as this great medieval building loomed large over the flat fenland. We lit candles and prayed to Saint Etheldreda, a seventh-century Anglo Saxon female saint, at her shrine, which was a major place of pilgrimage in pre-Reformation England. In 2016, when my godson was sixteen, we walked to Lincoln Cathedral, traveling about eight miles along a footpath at the top of the Lincoln Edge, an escarpment of Jurassic limestone overlooking the valley of the river Trent. The final approach to the cathedral was up the cobbled Steep Hill, the medieval pilgrim street. Finally, we entered the great, sacred space, prayed and lit candles at the shrine of Saint Hugh, and went to choral evensong.
The contemporary reawakening of pilgrimage in Europe is remarkable. As societies become increasingly secular and materialistic, this ancient spiritual practice is undergoing an astonishing revival.
Benefits of Pilgrimage
There have been few specific scientific studies of pilgrimage, but the evidence so far suggests that pilgrimages have a beneficial effect of reducing anxiety and depression.30 There are also countless personal stories about inspirations and healings. What’s more, many pilgrims find that as they travel on foot, they meet other pilgrims, and nonpilgrims, in a socially leveled way. Normal distinctions of wealth, education, and social class seem less relevant. And local pilgrimages have the great advantage of being low-cost and accessible to everyone capable of walking.
Most scientific studies that relate to pilgrimage are generic. Indeed, some of them merely prove the obvious. But it is reassuring to know that the obvious is also scientifically observable.
First, walking itself has many proven benefits. It promotes mental health and well-being, improves self-esteem, mood, and quality of sleep, and reduces stress, anxiety, and fatigue.31
Second, people who exercise in the fresh air and in green spaces tend to benefit more than those who exercise indoors, as discussed in chapter 3.32
Third, purposeful activity is more satisfying and contributes more to well-being than purposeless activity; this is a basic tenet of the practice of occupational therapy.33
Fourth, physical exercise protects against depression and other kinds of ill health.34
Fifth, healing is influenced by people’s hopes and expectations. The placebo effect is very powerful and shows up strongly in drug trials, particularly if patients and their doctors believe they might be taking a new wonder drug.35 If pilgrimages increase people’s hopes and expectations, which they do, we might expect that visits to holy places would result in healing, which they do. When supportive people surround those who hope for healing, sharing their hopes and expectations, the effects are stronger still.
Over the years, the Roman Catholic Church has emphasized the role of the saints in healing. Canonization requires at least two posthumous miracles, often involving physical healing, and millions seeking hope and healing have made pilgrimages to holy places such as Lourdes, in France.
Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, rose to prominence in 1858, when a peasant girl saw apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at a grotto. The virgin told her to dig in the ground, from which a spring of water began to bubble up. Cures began almost immediately as people drank the water. Today the flow is much greater, and pilgrims bathe in the thousands of gallons that gush from the ground. Lourdes is one of the most important places of pilgrimage in Europe, with about six million pilgrims a year.36
Many thousands of people claim to have been cured there miraculously. The official Lourdes medical bureau investigates claims of cures in a rigorously scientific spirit, and some of the claims have been very well authenticated.37 Even skeptics admit that some very sick people get better at Lourdes, although they do not call these healings miraculous; they think of them as examples of the placebo effect, or as spontaneous remissions.
If a pilgrimage helps someone to get better, then the pilgrim’s prayers have been answered. Calling the cure a spontaneous remission leaves the remission unexplained. If faith in God and in the Holy Mother of God makes spontaneous remission more probable, then faith works.
Less easy to document are the inspiration and encouragement that many people receive from going on a pilgrimage. To travel with the purpose of being in a holy place, and then to be in that place, can have transformative effects and give the experience of spiritual connection. Why?
What Makes Holy Places Holy?
Holiness is about connection and relationship. The word comes from a root that means “whole” or “healthy.” We are not holy when we are separated and disconnected from each other, from the more-than-human world, and from the source of all being. We experience that which is holy when we are connected to the source of life that goes far beyond our own limited natures. Some places evoke this experience more than others, whether because of their physical nature, their human associations, or both.
Some places are holy because they are naturally numinous, like some mountaintops, springs, waterfalls, and caves. For example, Glastonbury Tor is a striking hill that rises up above the low-lying land around it. It would stand out and attract the eye even if did not have a medieval tower at its summit. Uluru, or Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone structure, an “island mountain,” surrounded by relatively flat land in central Australia, and appears to change color throughout the day. Glowing red at dawn and sunset, it is an obvious and very striking landmark, of great cultural importance for the indigenous people of that area and now a major tourist attraction.
Some places may have a particular power because of their orientation, because of underground water flows or underground flows of electricity, called telluric currents, or because of their connection with the surrounding landscape. The properties of these places depend on their connections with their terrestrial surroundings, and also on their relationships to the sky and the heavenly bodies.
In some cultures, specialist diviners evaluate the powers of places, and in some cases help to decide where temples, shrines, or tombs are constructed. In Europe this art is called geomancy; in China, feng shui, which literally means “wind and water.” The techniques of geomancy are not easily translated into conventional scientific terms, but include an understanding of the relationships of the topology and the flows of energy through the landscape. Joseph Needham summarized some of the principles of traditional feng shui in his Science and Civilisation in China:
The forms of hills and the directions of watercourses, being the outcome of the moulding influences of winds and waters, were the most important, but, in addition, the heights and forms of buildings and the directions of roads were potent factors. The force and nature of the invisible currents would be from hour to hour modified by the positions of the heavenly bodies, so that their aspects as seen from the locality in question had to be considered.38
Many holy places are bridges between heaven and earth; they connect the earth to the sky. They are a kind of gateway, as in Jacob’s dream at Bethel (Genesis 28:10–19). Standing stones played this connecting role in megalithic cultures, and in ancient Egypt standing stones took on a particularly refined appearance in the form of obelisks, tapering columns with a pyramidal top, often made of a single stone. In setting up standing stones or obelisks, or in building towers, spires, and minarets, humans create places that have a literal vertical dimension.
In the ancient groves of the Holy Land, there were sacred trees or poles sacred to the mother goddess Asherah; these were major sites of Jewish worship until they were condemned by the prophets and destroyed during the reigns of kings Hezekiah and Josiah. In Hindu temples, there are often metal-clad flagpoles in front of the main shrine called dwajasthambam, which are said to connect the heavens to the earth. Many Christian churches have towers or spires, and many mosques are accompanied by minarets.
Symbolically, all these structures link the heavens and the earth. But the connection is more than symbolic: It is literal. Precisely because these structures reach up toward the sky, they attract lightning. They have always acted as channels for very real energy coming from the sky into the earth, and from the earth into the sky. Nowadays they have lightning conductors attached to them for this very reason. Electricity is polar. The movement of electric charge is a two-way process. As the negatively charged pathways of ionized air called step leaders move downwards from clouds towards the earth, the strong electric field induces tall objects to send out positively charged streamers that grow towards the cloud. They often have a purple glow. But not all positive streamers make contact with a step leader. They wait. Then step leaders close the gap with some of them, and lightning strikes.
Lightning also strikes tall, natural structures such as mountaintops, and walkers are advised to stay away from summits and pinnacles during thunderstorms.39 Trees are often channels for lightning, and some species, including oak and ash, are more often struck than others, such as birch and beech. One reason for the sacredness of oaks in Druidic times may well have been their proneness to lightning, and they were sacred to the thunder god both in Scandinavia, as Thor, and in ancient Greece, as Zeus. A place where lightning has struck acquires a special quality in many different cultures. Significantly, an intriguing book about Native American sacred places in the United States is called Where the Lightning Strikes.
Until about two hundred years ago, most lightning-attracting structures were attached to religious buildings, like church spires or minarets. In the nineteenth century, large secular structures were erected, such as the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.—the world’s largest obelisk, at 554 feet high—and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, rising 1,063 feet high; these, too, are major attractors of lightning. In the twentieth century, the tallest buildings were skyscrapers, which are now the principal magnets for lightning in cities. But in many smaller places, religious buildings remain the main attractors. In my hometown, Newark-on-Trent, the spire of the parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene is 236 feet high. It was completed around 1350 and is still by far the tallest structure in Newark, continually channeling lightning into the ground beneath this holy place.
Until recently, the scientific explanation for lightning concentrated on the electrical potential difference between thunderclouds and the ground, treating it as a local phenomenon. However, the ancient intuition that lightning links the heavens and the earth turns out to be correct. The electric charge on the clouds is linked to electrically charged regions some fifty miles higher in the sky. Electric discharges called sprites, glowing orange or red, pass between thunderclouds and the upper atmosphere. The upper atmosphere itself is greatly influenced by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles released from the sun, and the speed and density of the solar wind depend on solar activity such as flares.
This space weather affects the northern and southern lights, which are themselves plasma discharges, and also influences the amount of lightning on earth: The stronger the solar wind, the greater the number of lightning discharges.40 Influences from much further away also increase lightning discharges, particularly the cosmic rays from supernovas, or exploding stars. Thus lightning literally comes from the heavens and is channeled through tall structures into the earth. The places where it strikes are literally charged.
All tall buildings are struck by lightning, although in very few cases do people record when this happens. But this is now technically possible. Lightning strike recorders are commercially available, and they detect when a surge of current goes down a lightning conductor. Some even send a text message when a strike occurs. If I were running a church, temple, or minaret, I would install one of these devices and make the data available online. There are already fascinating online maps and archives of lightning strikes in many parts of the world, together with real-time updates,41 but they give broad brushstrokes and do not focus on specific places.
In building temples, cathedrals, churches, and mosques, people make structures that are explicitly related to God, or ultimate being, or the source of all health and holiness. And shrines that commemorate holy events, people, and deeds give a link to the source of their holiness. In many cases, this link is provided by physical relics, such as the Buddha’s tooth in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, or the bones of saints in many cathedrals and churches. The traditional idea that these bones provide a direct link with the people they came from has taken on a new lease of life with DNA analysis. Even very ancient bones, like those of Neanderthals from four hundred thousand years ago, contain DNA that can be analyzed using modern molecular techniques.
A skeleton discovered in Leicester in 2012 had several signs of being the remains of King Richard III of England, who died in 1485, and DNA recovered from the bones enabled his identity to be confirmed with a high degree of probability. He was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015. Richard was a king rather than a saint, but no doubt many venerated relics of saints contain traces of their DNA.
Ironically, relics of extinct species in the form of bones and skeletons play a central role in cathedrals of science, such as the Natural History Museum in London. These places are like centers of scientific pilgrimage.
Finally, holy places may be holy because they contain a kind of memory of what has happened there before. If many people have prayed, experienced healing, been inspired in a holy place, this makes it more likely that others will be affected positively by this place. According to the hypothesis of morphic resonance (discussed in chapter 5), people in a particular state of sensory stimulation resonate with those who have been in a similar state before. When we enter a holy place, we are exposed to the same stimuli as those who have been there before, and therefore come into resonance with them. If pilgrims to a holy place have been inspired, uplifted, and healed there, we are more likely to have similar experiences of spiritual connection. Holy places can grow in holiness through people’s experiences within them.
Two Practices of Pilgrimage
GO ON A PILGRIMAGE
There is no need for your pilgrimage to be expensive, elaborate, or very time-consuming. In fact, it may be better to start with somewhere local, to get to know where you live in a new way. When you open yourself to the idea, try to feel which local holy place calls you, or at least some place that you feel is important for you.
There is a wide range of choice. In England, for instance, there are many ancient sacred places, like stone circles and long barrows, sources of rivers, holy springs and wells, venerable trees, and ancient churches and great cathedrals, echoing with sacred singing and chanting almost every day. The land is literally enchanted by these perpetual choirs.
In North America there are some of the greatest sacred groves and natural sanctuaries on earth, many local, wild, and beautiful places, and also some great churches and cathedrals, including the cathedrals of Saint Patrick and Saint John the Divine in New York, Washington National Cathedral, and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, as well as powerful Roman Catholic shrines like the Sanctuary of Chimayo, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where many healings happen.
It is best to walk at least part of the way, if only for the last mile or two, because that makes the pilgrimage more real, more embodied.
Go with an intention, something you would like to give thanks for, ask for, or seek inspiration for. If possible, take a pilgrim’s staff with you, made from any suitable wood, such as hazel; this is the definitive visual emblem of the pilgrim throughout the centuries. If possible, learn some songs before you set off or pick them up from other pilgrims along the way. Sing them when you reach holy wells, ancient trees, and the goal of your journey.
When you arrive at the holy place, do not go straight in, but if possible walk around it. This circumambulation, usually clockwise, helps to make the holy place the center. Then give an offering, maybe of flowers, as in Hindu temples, a song, a thanksgiving, or simply a cash donation. In the holy space, you can make your prayer, and in many cathedrals and churches, you can light a candle. Finally, pray for blessings on your life, on your journey home, and on those to whom you are returning.
TURN YOUR JOURNEYS INTO PILGRIMAGES
Whenever I go to a new place, I try to find the sacred center and go there to pay my respects. In India I go to the local temple; in Buddhist countries, to a stupa or monastery; in Muslim countries, to the mosque or the shrine of a saint. In Europe and the Americas, I go to the church or cathedral that is at the center of the community. Many Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are kept open every day, so it is possible to go in, light a candle, say a prayer, and connect with that holy place. I find this grounds me and links me to the villages, towns, and cities I am visiting, and to the people who live there, as well as providing a quiet place to become centered after a journey. I ask for blessings on my time in that city and on those whom I am going to meet, as well as on my friends and family at home.
I suggest you try something like this on your journeys.