36 PILGRIMAGE

Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

Pilgrimage is a phenomenon common to many faiths and found throughout history in many regions of the world (Coleman and Elsner, 1995). It may be defined as a journey to a sacred place that is intended to evoke a deep spiritual experience and enrich the person who undertakes it (Morinis, 1992; Turner and Turner, 1978).

In numerous religious traditions, pilgrimages often concern the fulfillment of personal vows of penance and the search for hope in changing life circumstances. Although pilgrimage can be about individual spiritual needs, the majority of such journeys are undertaken collectively and occur within larger cultural frameworks, be they religious or political. In this respect, pilgrimages can simultaneously impact both individuals and communities.

While not all pilgrimages should be conceived of as direct and literal reenactments, pilgrimages can be seen as reenactments in the sense that they are founded on established cultural scripts or “restored behaviors” (Schechner, 1985, p. 36). Furthermore, “rituals of religious replication” have the potential to bring the past into the present and, in a sense, help define the future (Bielo, 2016, p. 11). Reenactment can be defined as encompassing a whole array of human activities, both epistemic and practical. It often comprises a significant aspect of pilgrimages, because many pilgrimages involve restaging the life stories of saints or heroes or performing other sacred histories. Thus, reenactment can be found in religious rituals that are often based on repetition (Bielo, 2016). The term pilgrimage can, however, also refer to secular events and need not be understood in an exclusively religious context.

Pilgrimage is an interpretative category applied to highly diverse phenomena, ranging from tourist trips to Disneyland and visits to the sites of famous battles to journeys to religious sanctuaries (Margry, 2008; Reader and Walter, 1993).

Interestingly, the ultimate destination of a pilgrimage does not necessarily define it as either religious or secular, since traveling to secular places—for example, to the monuments of war heroes or the graves ofJim Morrison and Elvis Presley—may result in a deep spiritual experience for some individuals. A visit to a religious sanctuary, in contrast, may end with mere appreciation for the architecture or the beauty of the place. Thus, a pilgrimage may also be considered secular if it involves processes of secularization in the Western world. One key example is the transformation of religious sites into heritage sites, such that visiting them is motivated by something other than religious piety. Aside from being spiritual and/or touristic, pilgrimages can also assume a commercial character. Souvenir, food, and hotels at pilgrimage sites depend heavily on visitor numbers, which in turn depend on the impression of authenticity generated by the particular site. The existence of commercial ventures around a place often contributes to tensions between the touristic or commercial goals of vendors and the spiritual character of the site (Eade and Sallnow, 1991).

Because pilgrimages are so diverse in nature, scholars are particularly cautious in defining what a pilgrimage is. They often rely on pilgrims’ self-assessment about what kind of travel can be deemed a pilgrimage (Collins-Kreiner, 2010). The most widely accepted definitions stress that the constitutive feature of pilgrimage that distinguishes it from other forms of human mobility is its spiritual goal, and this despite the fact that the boundary between pilgrimage and tourism often remains blurred. Edith and Victor Turner’s definition of pilgrimage (1978) is one of the most widely adopted. The Turners stress the collective character of pilgrimage. Primarily focusing on Catholic pilgrimages of the past and present, they defined them as three- phase rituals that involve: (1) embarking on a journey; (2) traveling and reaching the destination (the liminal phase); and (3) returning home.

According to the Turners, the second phase generates a special form of social relations that temporarily suspends hierarchies and social divisions, which the Turners refer to as communitas. This state of communal being springs from the intense experience of the sacred. Nonetheless, the sacred remains an emic category, one that is defined from an internal point of view. It is, in other words, what pilgrims perceive to be sacred in a given moment, since the religious, sacred, and secular cannot be precisely defined without taking into consideration the particularities of their political, social, and cultural contexts. The Turners’ understanding of pilgrimage is based on the concept of so-called root paradigms, which “derive from the seminal words and works of the religion’s founder, his disciples or companions, and their immediate followers, and constitute the ‘deposit of faith’” (1978, p. 10). According to this understanding, modern-day pilgrimages are reenactments of the deeds of saints, understood broadly as spiritual teachers or figures important for a given religion. In this special form of reenactment, the faithful follow in the footsteps of these individuals by choosing to travel to places where they lived in order to evoke the founding stories (Figure 36.1).

Figure 36.1 Lourdes Cave with the figure of Our Lady. Source: John Eade.

Pilgrimage

Thus, in the Turners’ understanding of the term, the communitas brought forth by reenactment transcends not only existing social structures, but also time, forging a community of those who originally performed given rites and those who recreate the rites during pilgrimages.

Pilgrims visit places that connect them to the past and in this way confirm their sense of belonging to the community through time and space. As a form of reenactment, pilgrimages intend to evoke the impression of historical continuity. Thus, pilgrimages can be said to gain a certain control over time.

The temporality of the pilgrimage is circular in the sense that it involves the repetition of ritual practices. By the same token, when pilgrimage is seen as a means of achieving a higher purpose, it takes on a teleological dimension. Nevertheless, an orientation toward future goals does not change the fact that pilgrimages look to the past and produce knowledge about it that is shared by those participating in the ritual experience (Taylor, 2006). Furthermore, the stories reenacted and the knowledge invoked and/or constructed in pilgrimages are often central to the pilgrim’s personal identity. Similarly, the same stories can be used to construct national or ethnic identities. Thus, some pilgrimage sites become invested with religious, historical, political, or ideological significance. This is particularly true for shared sacred spaces in which various religious groups and nationalities struggle for dominance (whether symbolic or real) over a particular place. Pilgrimages can be an important means of gaining or validating power. The most telling example of such a shared pilgrimage site is Jerusalem, where the faithful of various religions reenact and venerate their pasts.

In the very heart of the city lies al-Haram al-Sarif, or Temple Mount, a shared sacred space for Jews, Muslims, and Christians (Gonen, 2003) (Figure 36.2). It has been the central sacred space for Jews since the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the First Temple of Solomon, and in Judaism, pilgrimage to the site is believed to have been a divinely ordained duty. Although the temple itself no longer exists, pilgrims emphasize and evoke its significance in rituals. The only remaining part of the Second Temple, erected after the original temple was destroyed, is

Figure 36.2 The Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Source: Pawel Baraniecki.

the Wailing Wall, which evokes the history of the Jewish religion.

The mount, the holy site of Judaism, holds a comparable status in Islam. Though the hajj is the most important pilgrimage in Islam, Muslims' religious history is strongly linked to Jerusalem, because it is the home of multiple places associated with the life of the prophet Muhammad. He traveled to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Haram al-Sarιf and is believed to have ascended from the mosque for a one-night journey to heaven. Similarly, the Temple Mount is revered by Christians who pass through the site when on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, even though primarily they visit places related to Jesus's life. The journeys recreate the origin story of the respective religions and thus reenact a custom of traveling to the Holy Land, practiced since the first centuries after the founding of each religion. It is central to Catholic and Eastern Christians' pilgrimages as well as those undertaken by Protestants, albeit less frequently. Members of the various Christian denominations journey through the Holy Land in slightly different ways. Taking different routes and emphasizing different places, they create a representation ofJerusalem that stems from the religious imagery of the specific denomination (Feldman, 2016); at the same time, the believers of each Abrahamic religion manifest their claims to symbolic dominance over the pilgrimage site when they visit it.

It is not uncommon for Christian pilgrimages to embrace aspects of other religions and spiritualities. One such example of a shared pilgrimage space are the various routes collectively comprising the Camino, which all lead to a sanctuary in Santiago de Compostela, believed by Christians to be the burial place of St. James. Here, there is no competition for religious control over the space. The Way of Saint James can be started and finished at almost any point; it is not necessary to reach the church. The aim is said to lie in the journey itself and in the transformation the pilgrim undergoes en route (Frey, 1998). Pilgrims retrace the steps of their predecessors, drawing from their experiences and using the tips published in countless guidebooks, memoirs, and blogs.

Yet the essence of the Camino pilgrimage lies in what emerges through imitating the actions of other pilgrims. This imitation offers pilgrims an opportunity to transform their personal identities.

Pilgrimages are entirely performative. They evoke experiences, meanings, and reinterpretations of religious or otherwise significant content. They also have the potential to alter social relations. They can influence gender relations within communities (Dubisch, 1995) by empowering women participating in the pilgrimage (Fedele, 2013), and they can be used by politicians to bolster their power. This was true of the Ram Rath Yatra, a large religious-political rally that took place in 1990 and lasted for over a month. The objective of its organizers was to gain votes for India's Bharatiya Janata Party through a ritualized pilgrimage, the official aim of which was to support a campaign to erect a temple devoted to Rama (a Hindu deity) in Ayodhya in northern India next to a mosque, which was subsequently destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992.

Pilgrimages may also be focused on specific political and social causes. The annual Refugee Tales Walk in the UK, for example, is an initiative intended to express solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees, one that symbolically reenacts their experiences of flight and incarceration and preserves their personal stories through discussion and literary expression (Herd and Pincus, 2016; Agnew, 2020). As such, the Refugee Tales Walk recalls the intersection between pilgrimaging and storytelling in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (written in the second half of the 14th century), which follows the ancient Pilgrims' Way to Canterbury and the shrine of Thomas Becket. Thus, while pilgrimages are strongly connected to memory, both personal and collective, they may also articulate desires to effect immediate social and political change.

Remembering as a motive for pilgrimage may be discerned in journeys to the sites of battles, such as Gallipoli or the Somme, to war memorials (Eade and Katie, 2018; Hyde and Harman, 2011; Iles, 2006), or to Holocaust concentration camps (dark tourism). In such places, the past

Pilgrimage

is reenacted by visitors paying respect to those killed, reflecting on catastrophes, or by embodying experiences that bring them closer to the commemorated events. Reenactment can also constitute the literal aim of a pilgrimage, since many people travel to places to see religious theatrical performances, such as the Christian Passion plays or Easter pageants in Oberammergau, Germany (pageant), performances depicting the life of Krishna, such as those in Brindavan, India, or reconstructions of battles staged in their historical locations. Reenactment as a cultural practice is ingrained in many ways in practices of pilgrimage and forms one of its constitutive characteristics. Thus, pilgrimages enable their participants to make roots in the past and simultaneously find hope for changing their future.

36 PILGRIMAGE

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