Egeria the pilgrim

In the fading decades of the Roman Empire, a provincial Christian woman from a community of ‘sisters’ somewhere on the Atlantic coast of either Galicia or Gaul set off on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Egeria climbed Mount Sinai and met the ascetic hermits of the desert. She made the acquaintance of bishops, experienced the divine mysteries at the heart of early Christian worship and, incidentally, recorded a unique account of the creation of an archaeology of the Bible. She is one of the very earliest witnesses to the Easter festivities and ceremonies that grew up around Christ’s tomb on Golgotha and the site of the nativity in Bethlehem. Her energy and optimism, her stamina and powers of observation, should have assured her a seat alongside the greatest women travel writers; but her journeys were almost completely unknown to historians before the late nineteenth century.

Some time in the 600s a monk named Valerius wrote to his fellow brethren about the ‘blessed Egeria’ who ‘fearlessly set out on an immense journey to the other side of the world’. In the ninth and twelfth centuries her journeys and writings were occasionally quoted in works describing the Holy Places. More than half a millennium later, in 1884, the scholar J. F. Gamurrini unearthed a manuscript in the collection of a lay fraternity in Arezzo, in Italy, recognised it as a copy of Egeria’s missing account and published it three years later. Regrettably, the beginning and ending of the manuscript are missing, so any dedicatory preface that might have revealed something about Egeria’s background, or the immediate motivation for her journey, is irretrievably lost, along with the earlier and later stages of her travels.

We first meet Egeria on the dramatic approach to the 2,285-metre (7,497-ft) Mount Sinai, Jebel Musa, armed with the words of the Bible as her Baedeker and the landscape as a revelation of its literal truth:

…we made our way across the head of the valley and approached the Mount of God. It looks like a single mountain as you are going round it, but when you actually go into it there are really several peaks, all of them known as the Mount of God, and the principal one, the summit on which the Bible tells us that ‘God’s glory came down’, is in the middle of them. I never thought I had seen mountains as high as those which stood around it, but the one in the middle where God’s glory came down was the highest of all, so much so that, when we were on top, all the other peaks we had seen and thought so high looked like little hillocks far below us.

Late on Saturday, then, we arrived at the mountain and came to some cells. The monks who lived in them received us most hospitably, showing us every kindness. There is a church there, with a presbyter; that is where we spent the night and, pretty early on Sunday, we set off with the presbyter and the monks who live there to climb each of the mountains.

They are hard to climb. You do not go round and round them, but straight up each one as if you were going up a wall, and then straight down to the foot, till you reach the foot of the central mountain, Sinai itself. Here then, impelled by Christ our God and assisted by the prayers of the holy men who accompanied us, we made the great effort of the climb…

So at ten o’clock we arrived on the summit of Sinai, the Mount of God where the Law was given, and the place where God’s glory came down on the day when the mountain was smoking.

…As we were coming out of church the presbyters of the place gave us ‘blessings’, some fruits which grow on the mountain itself. For although Sinai, the holy Mount, is too stony even for bushes to grow on it, there is a little soil round the foot of the mountains… and in this the holy monks are always busy planting shrubs, and setting out orchards or vegetable beds round their cells.

From Sinai, Egeria made her way north and west along what is now the Gulf of Suez and then east into Arabia, following in the footsteps of the children of Israel, each day’s journey linking an ancient staging post:

…the desert is of a kind where they have to have quarters at each staging post for soldiers and their officers, who escorted us from one fort to the next. All the way I kept asking to see the different places mentioned in the Bible.

I am struck by the thought that, in a period in which historians, with the benefit of hindsight, search for signs of imminent imperial collapse, a nun from the Atlantic West could make such a prolonged and extensive tour without, apparently, being burdened by fears for her own security, or getting into any trouble. It seems that in the 380s the Roman empire’s arm was still long, and still effective. In the fertile Nile delta, the Goshen of the Book of Genesis where Pharaoh told Joseph to settle his people, Egeria describes vineyards, orchards, well-kept fields and gardens. She renews an acquaintance with a bishop: ‘I knew him quite well from the time I visited the Thebaid, and he is a holy man, a true man of God.’ Then, like any modern tourist, having seen all the sights she leaves Egypt and returns to Jerusalem, whence she had come.

The Christian Jerusalem that Egeria knew at the end of the fourth century was substantially the vision of Constantine the Great and his mother, Helena. He was acclaimed emperor in York – Eboracum – in the province of Britannia in 306 after the death of his father, the co-emperor Constantius. Six years later he defeated his rival Maxentius in a great battle at the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber River, inspired by a vision of Christ. In 313 he promulgated an edict at Milan that enshrined tolerance towards Christians in Roman law; twelve years later he convened the Council of Nic?a, to which bishops came from across the Roman world, establishing orthodoxy in worship and theology. Before his death in 337, he was baptised.

In his last years, Constantine seems to have supplied the funds for Helena to construct, beautify and otherwise enhance the monuments of Christianity in the Holy Land. In a uniquely early campaign of what we would now call biblical archaeology, she is supposed^* to have identified the site of the Crucifixion and the physical remains of the True Cross; she built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and another on the Mount of Olives. She had Hadrian’s temple, which stood on the site of Calvary, torn down and Constantine ordered the construction of a shrine there to surround the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was entombed before his resurrection.

Egeria knew these places some fifty years later, by which time much had changed. The shrine had been enclosed in a building called the Anastasis, expanding eastwards into a grandiose complex enclosing the hill of Golgotha within a great basilica called the Martyrium. These buildings became the focus for pilgrimage and intense veneration, especially during the lengthy celebrations concentrated on the commemoration of the resurrection at Easter.

Loving sisters, I am sure it will interest you to know about the daily services they have in the holy places… All the doors of the Anastasis are opened before cock-crow each day, and the monks and nuns… come in, and also some lay men and women, at least those who are willing to wake at such an hour…

On the seventh day, the Lord’s day, there gather in the courtyard before cock-crow all the people, as many as can get in… The courtyard is the ‘basilica’ beside the Anastasis, that is to say, out of doors, and lamps have been hung there for them… Soon the first cock crows, and at that the bishop enters, and goes into the cave in the Anastasis.

Egeria goes on to describe the prayers and psalms, how the Anastasis is filled with a heady odour from the censers taken into the cave. She evokes a strong sense of mystery, of anticipation, of a profound connection to the tragedy and wonder of the ascension. She goes on to describe the special ceremonies associated with Pentecost:

Just after seven in the morning, when the people have rested, they all assemble in the Great Church on Golgotha. And on this day in this church, and at the Anastasis and the Cross and Bethlehem, the decorations really are too marvellous for words. All you can see is gold and jewels and silk… You simply cannot imagine the number, and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and lamps…

Through the penitential fasting of Lent and in the Great Week of Easter, as she calls it, Egeria’s account conjures an atmosphere of devotion, of endurance, of fascination with what had now become a sophisticated and highly developed liturgy. The late fourth-century Easter celebrations in Jerusalem were an intense and deeply absorbing experience, of which Egeria is an unsurpassed witness. They testify to the physical endurance and sacrifices of the faithful and to the magic of the resurrection cult and biblical miracles that had drawn her and her indefatigable companions from the Atlantic edge of the known world to marvel and affirm their faith in the sands of Jordan.

Egeria’s writings, so fortunately preserved, are a unique record of a woman’s restless thirst for adventure and hunger to affirm her faith by the physical experience of immersion in the lands of the Bible. They are a founding canon for those unquenchably curious women like Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, Margery Kempe and Celia Fiennes,^† for whom the thrill and risk of travel are irresistible.