Pilgrimage

To make a pilgrimage means to undertake a journey—typically in the context of religious practice—of personal or ritual significance. The journey can be external and physical (as in the case of the pilgrims journeying to Thomas Becket's tomb in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), internal and spiritual (as in the case of Christian, who narrates his own allegorical vision in The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan), or both. The tradition is ancient: Scholars have found relics and records of various forms of it that date back into preclassical times. Most major world religions have sanctioned, or still sanction, some form of sacred travel in their practices and rituals, but pilgrimage is not purely a formal religious phenomenon. Many "pilgrimages" in modern times—arguably including such secular activities as tourism, symbolic political action, and journeys of personal self-discovery—testify to the lasting power of ritual travel as a manifestation of human yearning and the search for meaning, even in an era ostensibly dominated by a culture of scientific rationalism. Pilgrimage would seem to be as compelling a human phenomenon as ever—both as ritual and as metaphor.

Ritual and place

Primative religions tended to locate the divine in particular places—the river, the sun, the volcano, the forest, and so forth. Practically speaking, if you wanted to talk to a god, goddess, or spirit, you had to go for a visit. The practice of pilgrimage, including those pilgrimages associated with modern monotheistic religions whose basic tenets asset that God is everywhere, harks back to that primitive religious impulse to identify particular places as sacred.

Even faiths such as Islam and Judaism, whose doctrines center on the idea of a universal God, manage to square that universality with particular places. The Israelites of the book of Exodus, for example, spurned the polytheism of Egypt and fled into the wilderness; eventually, though, even though their God was "everywhere," they came to carry with them a portable temple, in the form of the Ark of the Covenant and its tabernacle, which ultimately became a permanent "place" of worship and pilgrimage when the first Temple of Jerusalem was built around it. In Islam, the holy city of Mecca and the black stone of the Kaa'ba serve to give focus to the worship of Allah, and are places of officially sanctioned pilgrimage.

The pilgrimage itself often becomes as important as the sacred place sought. Psychologists have identified repetition and ritual as one of the ways that children give structure to a big, frightening world (a tendency that goes out of control, for example, in those diagnosed with autism); as adults, people justify rituals for many reasons, but they remain a way of structuring a human experience that might be otherwise impossibly complex. Just as the rituals of worship provide structure to the sometimes frightening business of talking to God, pilgrimage offers a way to surrender to a sense of continuity and connection—it becomes a ritual journey that symbolizes the progression of life itself.

Literary and historical pilgrimage

Perhaps among the best-known literary pilgrimages is that which gave Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1390) its frame narrative. The route along the "Pilgrim's road" that wound its way from London through Kent to Canterbury was well-known and well-traveled, and its proximity to London attracted a diverse crowd of pilgrims, giving Chaucer an ideal setting for bringing together people of widely varying class and standing. Chaucer never completed his cycle, though this did not prevent others, such as the anonymous scribe of the Northumberland MS. of the Tales, from completing the story for him via "Beren's Tale" and a scene of the arrival in Canterbury at the shrine of Thomas à Becket. As would actual pilgrims of the day, the pilgrims in this scribe's tale purchased tin hat-badges and vials of "holy water," which were for sale just outside the cathedral close, and enjoyed a pint of ale at a local pub.

Some of Chaucer's readers may indeed have regarded his satirical portraits of pilgrims as apt epitomes of the sort of irreligious attitudes and characters that pilgrimages drew; among early proto-Protestants such as the Wycliffites the value of pilgrimage was frequently denounced. Henry VIII, working with his minister Thomas Cromwell, had the shrine destroyed in 1538 as he severed ties to the Roman Catholic Church, and the custom of pilgrimage in England came to a close.