14
TO BE A PILGRIM
Chaucer’s raunchy Wife of Bath rides in the margin of the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.
Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.
She was a worthy woman all her life,
Husbands at the church door had she five,
Thrice had she been at Jerusalem;
She hadde passed many a strange stream
At Rome she had been, and at Bologne,
In Galice at Saint James, and at Cologne;
She coude much of wand’ring by the Way.
Of all the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath is surely the liveliest, and would probably have been the best company. Most of them have a fund of bawdy stories, but she is much the raunchiest, boasting hilariously of her ability to exhaust one husband after another with her insatiable demands in bed – and able to justify her behaviour with agile, entirely apposite, quotations from Old and New Testaments. She is also certainly the most widely travelled of the company. The list of places she had visited ‘wand’ring by the Way’ gives us a map of the world as imagined by the (prosperous) pious European at the end of the fourteenth century – a spiritual geography determined almost entirely by relics and pilgrimage. These were the great sights and sites of the known world, the sacred places par excellence.
Pilgrims wearing scallop shell badges on their hats worshipping the statue of Saint James of Compostela. The saint is being beheaded in the background.
Boulogne was easily reachable for English travellers as they headed for the continent: it held a much-venerated statue of the Virgin Mary, with crown and sceptre, carrying the Christ child, which had arrived by boat, unaccompanied, some unknown time before and then began to work miracles and attract followers. A large number of English pilgrims went further and made the long journey to Rome, particularly at times when the Pope was offering special indulgences. At Santiago de Compostela, the relics of Saint James the Apostle were a major international attraction and in Cologne were the bones of the Three Kings who came to worship the Christ child. In both these places, you could be physically close to, almost in contact with, the remains of people who had seen and touched Jesus. In the Holy Land you could be in the very places where Jesus had been born, lived, taught, died and risen. To have visited Boulogne, Cologne, Compostela and Rome was rare, to visit Jerusalem more than once exceptional; but the Wife of Bath, affluent thanks to her skills as a cloth-maker (and to her many deceased husbands) was clearly one of the great frequent flyers of medieval pilgrimage. She had been to Jerusalem no fewer than three times, and was now on her way to the most popular shrine in England, the tomb and relics of Saint Thomas Becket, in the cathedral where the martyr-archbishop was murdered, in Canterbury.
The golden shrine containing the relics of the Three Kings, in Cologne Cathedral, which was rebuilt to house them
She may have been rich, but she was also brave. Most of these pilgrim journeys were long and expensive, and they were always arduous and risky. Many who set out were robbed or died on the journey. (You were advised to make your will before you left home.) Yet we know that large numbers of people undertook them, both from contemporary accounts, and more directly from the many surviving badges or other objects that they brought back to England from the great centres of pilgrimage. These are on the whole cheap souvenirs, just an inch or so high: intimate little mementos of a great religious journey. They are of course demonstrations to friends and neighbours that you have travelled, but perhaps also a reminder of a closer approach to the divine, a moment of grace which your souvenir helps you relive.
In the British Museum are many such souvenirs, the sort of thing which the Wife of Bath might well have bought on her travels and either sewn to her hat (which Chaucer says was splendid), or carried with her to show to her companions. From Jerusalem a small lead bottle – an ampulla – designed to be worn round the neck, to hold water or oil that had been poured over holy relics and so had absorbed some of their sanctity; a cap badge from Rome with the papal keys and Saints Peter and Paul, whose tombs were the focus of intense devotion; another from Boulogne showing the miraculous statue arriving in its boat; a cockle shell coarsely made of lead, to signal that you had walked or ridden along the path to Compostela; and many souvenirs from Canterbury, among them one showing Becket in his archbishop’s mitre, as he appeared on his reliquary in the cathedral.
Souvenirs the Wife of Bath might have bought: (clockwise from top left) a lead flask for holy oil or water from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem; badge showing the heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul from Rome; badge showing the head of Thomas Becket in Canterbury; badge of the Boulogne statue of the Virgin and Child in a boat
Looking at these little metal objects, which were presumably laid out on stalls for pilgrims to buy, evocative and temptingly tactile, it is easy to understand why a spurious sequel to the Canterbury Tales, entitled the Tale of Beryn, reports that while most of Chaucer’s company bought some souvenirs, two of them – the Miller and the Pardoner – simply shoplifted them. It was clearly a common practice, and some of the badges in the British Museum were probably pilfered. But we do know for certain the history of some of these mementos, and they tell a more sobering story.
Many of the badges now in museums, especially those in the Museum of London, were found in the mud of the Thames. When pilgrims arrived safely back at the dock, they might drop a pilgrimage badge into the water as a thank-offering for their safe return after a perilous journey. What was it that led people of all classes in such numbers to incur the expense, hardships and risks involved in going on pilgrimage? What was the point?
Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge:
The basic motivation is to go to a place of special holiness and pray there.
Christianity is a materialist religion. It emphasizes the material world and the human body as vehicles of the divine. So people may find it helpful to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, to see the places where he lived and died and to pray there.
At a very early stage, Christians began putting the tombs of the martyrs in great churches, often under the altar. So an association develops between the body of Christ and the body of the martyr. People go to be near it, to touch it, to kiss it, to have contact in some way with relics.
The most frequently venerated relic of Becket at Canterbury was the water in which his brains and blood were said to have been washed. This was endlessly diluted, and little drops were put into lead capsules, which were sealed and would have on them an emblem of Canterbury. In this way, you could take away some of the holiness.
The intensity of the desire to be near the saints and martyrs made relics by far the most valuable moveable objects in medieval Europe. Competition to own them was fierce. Possession of them brought prestige, attracted pilgrims, and gave rise to some of the finest metalwork and the greatest buildings. The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a gothic masterpiece built in the 1240s by Saint Louis to house the Crown of Thorns, cost 40,000 livres: the relic itself, believed to have been on Jesus’ head during the crucifixion, cost him over three times that.
If relics could not be bought, they might be stolen or taken by force. St Mark’s in Venice was built to receive with appropriate magnificence the body of the saint, which Venetian merchants stole from Alexandria on the orders of the Doge, in 828. And when the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa conquered Milan in 1162, he removed the city’s most precious possession – the bones of the Three Kings who had worshipped the Christ child – and took them to Cologne. There they were housed in a golden reliquary of incomparable splendour, and a new cathedral was built in their honour – the largest gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. It is that reliquary in that new cathedral which the Wife of Bath travelled to see, and it can still be seen there today.
The euphoric climax of the pilgrimage was of course the sight of the shrine itself, and pilgrims would often make the final approach on their knees. What all such places, far or near, offered was the possibility of drawing closer to the divine, of praying more effectively, perhaps with the help of a particular saint, of seeking healing or forgiveness. What it always required was leaving your home and your daily routines, and setting off, usually in a group, with a clear spiritual focus in view. Eamon Duffy describes the importance of travelling:
The journey itself is part of the point. The metaphor of life as a journey is a very old one. The technical term for the Last Rites, the final communion you receive as you are dying, is viaticum, ‘journey money’. Both life and death have long been thought about as journeys – into the unknown.
The danger and discomfort were also part of the point – pilgrims knew that they would end up footsore and weary:
A lot of pilgrimages were penitential. Those who had done bad things were given, as a penance, the instruction to make a journey. So people go on pilgrimage at life-changing moments, essentially to sort their heads out. Walking or travelling can be a way of separating yourself from the world in which you are usually enmeshed, enabling you to see life with a new kind of radical simplicity, experiencing danger and discomfort.
In other words, the place where things change is not necessarily the shrine or sanctuary: it is often on the journey itself. There, without the support of familiar structures and daily routines, without many possessions, you are dependent on your companions or on strangers. And when you return to your old patterns, you should be able to see them, yourself and God more clearly.
Pilgrimage plays a large part in many faiths and, strikingly, most of them see it as functioning in very much the same way. It is felt that in some places the divine is more immediately present, especially places where the foundational figures of the faith were active on earth. Christians visiting the Holy Land hope to see Bethlehem and Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee and Calvary. Sikhs make the journey to Amritsar, where the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy scriptures that are a perpetual guide to the faithful, are preserved in the Golden Temple (Chapter 25).
Four great sites of pilgrimage are recommended to followers of the Buddha, all clustered in the north-east of the Indian sub-continent: Lumbini in Nepal, where the Buddha was born; Kushinagar, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where he died; Bodh Gaya, in India’s Bihar state, home to the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment; and finally, just a few kilometres north-east of the great Hindu pilgrimage city of Varanasi, lies the deer park at Sarnath, where the enlightened Buddha gave his first teachings (Chapter 19), the spot now marked by an enormous circular stupa on which – in spite of signs forbidding it – pilgrims stick small sheets of gold leaf. Devdutt Pattanaik, who writes on Indian religious life, strikes a note very close to Eamon Duffy’s:
Pilgrims walk around the stupa in the deer park at Sarnath, near Varanasi in northern India, where the Buddha preached his first sermon.
I think that by walking this trail you connect yourself with the Buddha. Human beings are not comfortable just with ideas. We need something tangible. We need to link ideas to things we can touch and feel, or to a place or time. A river or a mountain or a deer park is a physical reality, the very place where the Buddha lived and walked and breathed. We need that tangibility to come into touch with the divine.
Near the stupa in Sarnath are hostels and temples built in the styles of the different countries from which pilgrims come – there are temples from Japan and Myanmar, Tibet and Sri Lanka, Thailand and China – so that walking round the town is like a whirlwind tour of the religious architecture of eastern Asia. Sarnath thus becomes more than a place of individual pilgrimage: here the whole Buddhist world is gathered in prayer.
There is, however, one great pilgrimage that stands out among all the others: Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. It was here that according to the Qur’an Abraham built the Kaaba, the granite structure which is the holiest site in Islam, here that water sprang at the Zamzam well to refresh Abraham’s slave-girl Hagar and their son Ishmael, and here that Muhammad was born and cleansed the Kaaba of idols. Islam has five ‘pillars’, five elements that the faithful must make central to their lives. The first four are faith, prayer, charity and fasting. The fifth stipulates that every able-bodied Muslim, if they can afford it, should at least once in their life make the pilgrimage to Mecca during the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. Such a journey was, for most of history, and for most Muslims, especially women, simply out of the question. Thanks to air travel, however, millions every year now can and do make Hajj, visiting the great mosques at Mecca and Medina, and posing enormous logistic challenges to the authorities. Keeping the pilgrims safe is the supreme responsibility and honour of the kings of Saudi Arabia. It is a duty which must be performed whatever the political tensions or divisions within the Islamic world, and it brings them an incomparable prestige: their proudest title is ‘Custodian of the two holy mosques’.
Batool Al-Toma is director of the New Muslims Project, a UK-based service that supports converts to Islam. While it would be inappropriate to compare her in any other respect to the Wife of Bath, she has gone on Hajj a remarkable thirteen times:
Any pilgrimage is good for the soul. People who go on pilgrimage are in search of something to regenerate themselves, to fulfil their spiritual needs, to reconnect with God. And they have to prepare well. You need to be able to leave your family in safe hands while you are away, to make sure that they are sustained and looked after. It’s not something that you take lightly. Then you prepare yourself. The practical side is really important, because being ‘a guest of God’, as we call pilgrimage, can be daunting. You depend on strangers. But people are so warm and hospitable and generous. They will give you prayer beads that they have just bought or been using, and ask you to remember them in your prayers.
Millions of pilgrims come to Mecca every year and turn to pray towards the black cube of the Kaaba, visible here in the centre of the great mosque complex
A pilgrim, or ‘Hajji’, is called to make a movement from their everyday community and to embark on a journey that may last months or longer. They are to become for a time part of a much larger community, focused only on God, one where wealth and status should mean nothing, and then they are to bring something of that experience back into their everyday life. Batool Al-Toma continues:
There is a sense that when you go on Hajj, you all become equal, because our attire is kept modest. Men wear two items of cover, rather like two very large bath sheets. They are made from towelling material, unsewn, and one is wrapped around from the waist down probably to mid-shin, while the other is just thrown around the shoulders like any kind of a shawl or cover. They will begin and end their Hajj with just these two pieces of cloth. Women are encouraged to wear a dress. A lot of women like to choose white, because the men wear white, but it can be a dress of any colour as long as it is clean and comfortable and respectful.
Dressed like this, it is not possible to see whether people are rich or poor. They are all pilgrims. When you arrive, you see people coming from all over the world, and it puts the little discussions that we have back home about our faith into new perspective. It helps us get beyond those small, hair-splitting issues. Life begins to become quite real to you. You start to think, ‘What do I really need? What do I really want in this world?’
The equalizing humility of the Hajj: three present and future kings of Saudi Arabia in the simple robes of the pilgrim: (left to right) Kings Abdullah, Fahd and Faisal
In Islam, as in Christianity, this question is itself one of the reasons to undertake this difficult and expensive journey. But whereas the aim of Christian pilgrimage is essentially to see or touch the holy object, or be in the sacred place, Hajj requires action. The pilgrims, the men all dressed identically, will walk seven times round the Kaaba, then walk to the site where Satan must be symbolically stoned, will spend the night in the desert, run like Hagar looking for water and then return to the Kaaba. Performed together with hundreds of thousands of others, often in great heat, this experience is exhausting and exhilarating, purifying and equalizing.
When hajjis return home from this transformative journey, like all pilgrims they want to take with them mementos or gifts from the holy places. These of course have fewer images than Christian souvenirs, medieval or modern, and are more often objects linked to practical aspects of devotion: a qibla compass to find the direction of Mecca, mats, caps and beads to use while praying. Some will bring bottles of water from the Zamzam well, which will refresh the faithful in moments of spiritual need (Chapter 3). But the purpose of all these objects is the same as the medieval tokens at the beginning of this chapter: to remind the pilgrim of a place and a moment of intense devotion, when they were close to God and part of a greater whole.
A golden plastic souvenir flask in which Hajjis carry Zamzam water home from Mecca. The Qur’an tells that the Zamzam well sprang up when Hagar in the desert was looking for water for her son Ishmael.
Because Hajj every year brings Muslims from all over the world to Mecca over the same short period, it affirms with peculiar power the idea of Islam as a global community, equal before God, diverse in every way, but united in prayer. It is hard to think of any mechanism other than pilgrimage which could so effectively achieve that purpose.
Today, pilgrimage is booming as never before. It is not just Mecca which has to cater for ever vaster crowds. In India improved transport now allows millions at a time to take part in the Hindu ritual bathing in the Ganges at the Kumbh Mela (Chapters 3 and 30), while the sites connected to the life of the Buddha attract more and more air-borne religious tourists from all over east Asia. Since the 1990s, Christian pilgrimage has been on the increase too, although its focus over the last century and a half has been moving from the tangible to the intangible: in place of the relics and sites that attracted Chaucer’s pilgrims, people now travel to the scenes of visions and divine epiphanies. For Roman Catholics, apparitions of the Virgin Mary have come to take centre-stage, at sites like Lourdes (which quickly became famous for miraculous cures), Fatima, Knock and Međjugorje in Europe; Guadalupe in Mexico (Chapter 16); Velankanni in Tamil Nadu in south India; and Manaoag in the Philippines. In every case, these apparitions were to poorly educated youngsters, and although not all have been approved by the Vatican – Međjugorje and Velankanni are still under discussion – all now draw enormous numbers of pilgrims every year, moved by the hope that simple piety may open the way to transformative contact with the divine. In France, only Paris has more hotel rooms than Lourdes: there are more than six million visitors annually.
There has always been a contentious side to pilgrimage. In every tradition and in every century there have been criticisms of the bad behaviour of pilgrims, the greed of those who cater for them and the commercialization of the holy places. Many, especially in the monotheisms, are uneasy about any implied suggestion that god is nearer humankind in some places than others. Most Protestants from the sixteenth century onwards held that there was simply no need for any of this: it was wastefully expensive, even idolatrous, and, most important of all, nowhere in the Bible is it clearly required. Pilgrimage for them was the daily struggle to live a godly life, a struggle requiring just as much courage and endurance as physical journeying. The ‘pilgrim’s progress’ was the surmounting of spiritual obstacles and difficulties, whether ‘Vanity Fair’ or the ‘Slough of Despond’, to find the true path to God. But, as Eamon Duffy points out, just because pilgrimage is not explicitly discussed in the Bible, that does not mean it is absent:
The practices of faith are determined as much by the imagery of the scriptures as anything else, and that imagery is saturated with pilgrimage: the wanderings of Abraham in search of the Holy Land, the wanderings of Moses and the Israelites in the desert after they left Egypt. Right from the Old Testament onwards, there are very profound images of pilgrimage.
Both Judaism and Christianity understand these images of Abraham and of Moses, leading their people into the wilderness, as journeys of transformation, pilgrimages towards places where the people can live closer to god. A new kind of godly community can emerge. It is an idea expounded in eloquent detail in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘By faith Abraham…obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.’ These biblical journeys are, however, pilgrimages of a very particular sort. The purpose is not to return, changed, to the point of departure, but rather to reach in the right spirit the place where God may be worshipped in the proper way and a new society will be possible. When, at Passover or on the Day of Atonement, Jews say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, the hope being expressed is not just of a limited visit, but that all Jews may be able to return, and remain, to witness the coming of the Messiah.
This kind of spiritual journey is a key part of the foundation myth of the United States. When a group of dissenting Puritans sailed from Plymouth in 1620 to establish a colony in New England where they could worship as they believed right, they saw themselves as the successors of Abraham and Moses, journeying by faith to establish a new community in a godly place, a ‘city on a hill’. William Bradford, who sailed on the Mayflower, later governed the colony that the emigrants established and wrote its history, expressed it unambiguously: ‘They knew they were pilgrims, and…lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country’. It is in this biblical sense that they are honoured to this day by the whole of the United States as the Pilgrim Fathers.