What Is a Pilgrimage?

A pilgrimage sets ordinary life aside for a period. Travellers leave home, follow a route with others doing the same, and arrive somewhere with a particular significance. The effort is part of the point, which is why walking routes have survived even where transport would be easy.

Different traditions give different reasons: fulfilling a duty, seeking healing, giving thanks, marking a life change, or simply spending time apart from routine. Many pilgrims describe the value as lying in the walking and the company rather than the arrival.

Several pilgrimages are known well beyond their own traditions:

• •Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, expected of Muslims who are able
• •The Camino de Santiago, a network of walking routes across Spain
• •Kumbh Mela, an enormous Hindu gathering held in rotation at four sacred riverside sites
• •Pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha is said to have been awakened

Scholars studying pilgrimage often notice shared features. Pilgrims frequently wear something that marks them out, follow a set route with recognised stopping places, and encounter strangers as equals in a way ordinary life rarely allows.

Anthropologists have described this middle stage of a journey as a period where normal social distinctions loosen. Whether or not that holds everywhere, the observation captures something many pilgrims report about walking beside people they would otherwise never meet.

Pilgrimage has not faded. Some routes are busier now than at any point in their history, and many walkers describe their reasons as partly religious, partly cultural and partly personal.

That mixture creates its own questions. Sacred sites face crowding, environmental strain and the pressures of tourism, and communities along the routes have to balance welcome with the cost of hosting very large numbers of visitors.

Pilgrimage has always had an economic dimension alongside a spiritual one. Medieval pilgrimage routes supported inns, guides, workshops producing badges and tokens, and the towns that hosted major shrines.

That continues today at considerable scale. Hajj involves the movement of close to two million people within a few days and requires enormous permanent infrastructure. The Camino supports hundreds of businesses along its routes. Recognising this is not cynicism about the practice, since the same was true in the twelfth century, but it does explain why access to pilgrimage has often been shaped by cost as much as by devotion.

Many medieval pilgrims bought small badges at the shrines they visited, usually cast cheaply from a lead and tin alloy and pinned to hats or clothing. Each shrine had its own designs. The scallop shell became linked with Santiago de Compostela, while visitors to Canterbury could buy small flasks said to contain holy water associated with Thomas Becket. Large numbers of these badges have been recovered from riverbanks and excavations, giving historians evidence of ordinary pilgrims whose names were never written down.

Written sources add personal and imaginative detail. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, from the late fourteenth century, frames its stories around a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury, mixing religious purpose with gossip, rivalry and entertainment. The Book of Margery Kempe describes one woman's journeys to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago. In England, many shrines were destroyed during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, including Becket's, which shows how closely pilgrimage was bound to wider religious and political change.

The Hajj shows how a pilgrimage can be built from a fixed sequence of actions. Before arriving, pilgrims enter a state of consecration called ihram. Men wear two plain white unstitched cloths, so wealth and rank become hard to see, and pilgrims avoid certain actions such as cutting hair or arguing. In Mecca they walk seven times around the Kaaba, a rite called tawaf, and then pass seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwa, recalling Hagar's search for water for her son Ishmael.

The central day is spent standing in prayer on the plain of Arafat. Pilgrims then gather pebbles at Muzdalifah and throw them at stone pillars in Mina, a ritual rejection of temptation, before an animal sacrifice that Muslims around the world mark at the same time with the festival of Eid al-Adha. Because the Islamic calendar is lunar and about eleven days shorter than the solar year, the Hajj moves through the seasons, falling in winter in some decades and in intense summer heat in others.

Walking the Camino de Santiago today follows a set of practical customs. Pilgrims carry a credential, a folded card often called a pilgrim passport, and collect stamps in it from hostels, churches and bars along the route. Yellow arrows painted on walls, posts and rocks mark the way, a system begun in the 1980s by a Galician priest, alongside the scallop shell symbol. Many pilgrims sleep in simple hostels called albergues, some run by volunteers, parishes or religious communities, which offer bunk beds at low cost to people carrying a credential.

In Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrim office issues a certificate called the Compostela to those who have walked at least the last 100 kilometres, or cycled at least the last 200, and who state a religious or spiritual motive. The stamps in the credential are the evidence. The most popular route, the Camino Francés, runs roughly 800 kilometres from the French side of the Pyrenees and takes most walkers around five weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people now receive the certificate each year, compared with only a few thousand a year in the mid-1980s.

Japan has one of the world's best-known circular pilgrimages. On the island of Shikoku, pilgrims visit 88 Buddhist temples linked by tradition with Kukai, also called Kobo Daishi, a monk of the early ninth century who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism and was born on the island. The full loop on foot is roughly 1,200 kilometres and usually takes between one and two months, though many people now travel by car or bus, or complete it in sections over several years. At each temple, pilgrims chant, make offerings and have a stamp book inscribed with brushed calligraphy and red seals.

Many walkers wear a white vest and a conical sedge hat and carry a wooden staff. The staff is treated as a stand-in for Kobo Daishi himself, and hats often carry the phrase dogyo ninin, meaning two travelling together, expressing the belief that the saint walks beside each pilgrim. Local people keep a custom called osettai, offering pilgrims food, drinks, small gifts or a place to rest, and refusing is considered impolite. Pilgrims often hand over a slip bearing their name in return. The custom draws residents into the pilgrimage, letting them take part without ever leaving home.

A pilgrimage is a purposeful journey to a sacred place, found across nearly every religious tradition, and its meaning usually lies as much in the road and the company as in the destination.