Pilgrimage

What it is

Travel to a place held sacred, undertaken as a religious or transformative act — where the journey itself is generally understood to be part of the practice rather than a cost of arriving.

The major examples are enormous:

• Hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca, obligatory once in a lifetime for Muslims who are able, drawing well over two million people annually
• Kumbh Mela — the Hindu gathering at rotating river confluences, at its largest the biggest human assembly on earth, with attendance estimated in the tens of millions
• The Camino de Santiago — the network of routes across Europe to Santiago de Compostela, the French Way running around 800 kilometres
• The Shikoku pilgrimage — a circuit of eighty-eight temples in Japan, about 1,200 kilometres
• Kailash kora — circumambulation of the mountain sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Bön practitioners
• Varanasi, Jerusalem, Lourdes, Karbala, Bodh Gaya, and a very long list of others

Where it came from

Independently, nearly everywhere, and early. The pattern is remarkably consistent: a place is marked as different, travel to it is undertaken with effort, and the effort is understood as constitutive rather than incidental.

The most influential theoretical account is Victor Turner's. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep's work on rites of passage, Turner argued that pilgrimage is a liminal experience: the pilgrim separates from ordinary social structure, enters a threshold state in which normal roles and hierarchies are suspended, experiences communitas — an unstructured fellowship of equals — and then returns transformed.

That model has been enormously influential and is substantially contested. John Eade and Michael Sallnow's Contesting the Sacred (1991) argued the opposite: that pilgrimage sites are typically arenas of competition — between denominations, between clergy and laity, between locals and visitors, between commercial and religious interests — and that the harmonious communitas Turner described is more often absent than present. Anyone who has watched two groups dispute access to the same shrine will recognise the correction.

How it is done

On foot, historically and increasingly again. The Camino's modern revival has been dramatic: from a few thousand pilgrims annually in the 1980s to hundreds of thousands, a large proportion of whom describe themselves as non-religious.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the plainest explanation does most of the work here, and it is unusually satisfying.

A person walking twenty-five kilometres a day for a month is: taking sustained moderate exercise; outdoors, in daylight, all day; sleeping to a rhythm set by fatigue rather than by a screen; carrying only what they need; without work, obligations or most decisions; in incidental contact with strangers on the same road; and doing one simple thing repeatedly for long enough to stop narrating it.

Every one of those has its own evidence base for wellbeing. Together they are close to an optimal psychological intervention, and no metaphysics is required to explain why people come back changed.

This is the same verdict reached about tai chi and about breath, and it is one of the site's recurring findings: the traditions arrived at practices that work, for reasons other than the ones they gave.

We can say the destination matters less than the framework claims and more than the sceptical account allows. A goal makes a month of walking coherent, and an arrival gives it a shape. That the place is sacred to someone is what makes the road exist.

We can say the risks are real at scale. Hajj crowd disasters have killed large numbers — the crush at Mina in 2015 caused more than two thousand deaths by some counts — and heat, disease transmission and stampede remain serious concerns at the largest gatherings, which is why they are among the most heavily managed events on earth.

We can say that where a pilgrimage crosses into someone else's sacred site, the access questions apply. Uluru is the clearest local instance: a place of enormous significance to visit, and one the traditional owners asked people not to climb for decades before the climb was closed in 2019.

We cannot say what people find at the end. The consistent report is that the walking was the point, which most pilgrims discover somewhere around the second week and every guidebook says in advance.

Further reading

• Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978).
• John Eade and Michael Sallnow (eds.), Contesting the Sacred (1991) — the counter-argument.
• Nancy Frey, Pilgrim Stories (1998) — ethnography of the Camino, good on what walkers actually report.