As the weather heats up, the concept of pilgrimages enters my mind. Somehow long ago, Protestants lost this custom. But it’s never really died out. I can see why, too. Something about a long walk along ancient paths sparks something within the human heart. Today, let’s explore where pilgrimages originated as a custom, how Protestants lost the practice while Catholics persisted, and how religions in general no longer hold a monopoly on pilgrimages at all.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 7/11/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Stumbling across pilgrimages in VR
Long ago, I spent a great deal of time exploring in virtual reality (VR). I have a really nice headset for it, so why not? As the pandemic wound its way through the world, I even wrote a few articles about VR as a way to bring people together (like this one).
I’ve always loved Italian history and culture, so I often prowled around Italy. To do this, I followed what I called “photostreams.” These were series of VR-compatible photos taken by both Google and normal travelers. Since they don’t always exactly line up with each other, each photostream tells its own story. Finding one with a nice long story can be challenging in remote areas!
One day about five years ago, I stumbled across a strange photostream in northwestern Italy. I think I’d been futzing around in central-northern Liguria trying to see the area’s famous basil greenhouses, but I can’t remember anymore.
(And yes, I found these greenhouses everywhere just a bit up and north from the coast.)
Wherever I’d found it, this photostream shot off from a well-marked village road in some tiny town well north of the Ligurian coast. From there, it led into a forest.
Intrigued, I followed it. An actual person had cared about this path so much that they’d taken pains to capture its sights with a special VR camera.
That photostream led me through forests and fields, along dirt roads and through towns, all amid beautiful summertime scenery. Finally, I ended up on a very wooded trail. At times, I’d see fencing along the sides of the path, with farms and ranches beyond. At other times, I could see nothing at all past the thick foliage.
It took me a while to notice the signs.
All along the way, I kept seeing them. For the most part, they were painted on trees along the narrow path: a white horizontal line over a red one. Blink, and you’d miss them. At first, I thought they were surveyors’ marks. They really were that simple.
Some signs weren’t nearly so subtle. They were made of wood in the shape of arrows, though others were more formal rectangular signs with lots of information for travelers. On this next shot, you can even make out the red-and-white sign for pilgrims on the signboard’s lower left. The figure in the middle is a pilgrim painted yellow. That’s about when I realized this was some kind of formal hiking trail, though I couldn’t discern what it might be called.
Often, I strained to figure out which way I should go, only to notice at last a weathered standing stone with the now-familiar colored slashes.
Some time later, I realized that I’d somehow VR-walked all the way from the northwestern edge of Italy to a fascinating walled medieval city called Monteriggioni.
Soon afterward, I found out that walk was called the Via Francigena, or “the road that comes from France.” And I also learned that this informal road takes travelers all the way from Canterbury and the west coast of France to Rome!
I was a little late to the pilgrimage game. Even as far back as 2016, many hundreds of thousands of people have rediscovered routes like the Via Francigena—and traveled it in meatspace. Even the New York Times published a writeup of it (archive). The writer of that piece, Katherine Sharp, specifically mentions that she and her husband are “not religious.” But they were still fascinated by journeys like this.
In the months that followed my own discovery, I found myself returning to that photostream over and over again. I found it relaxing to “walk” that path. Something about it, even in the virtual realm of imagination and digital images, made my heart feel happy and connected with humankind.
A brief history of pilgrimages
Nowadays, we associate pilgrimages with Christianity. However, the concept of traveling to a specific destination for a specific ritual purpose is hardly unique to that one religion. Indeed, almost 2 million Muslims performed their required Hajj pilgrimage last month. (Yes, and about 1300 died in the heat.)
Possibly the oldest pilgrimages we know about come from ancient Mesopotamia around 1700BCE. Back when gods claimed and protected specific cities, Marduk was the patron deity of Babylon itself. His son, Nabu, became associated with a nearby city called Borsippa. Since gods inhabited their statues in their cities, people had to physically cart Nabu’s statue to Babylon if they thought he wanted to visit his father.
(If Nabu’s name sounds vaguely familiar, he’s called Nebo in the Bible. He was extremely popular for quite some time. His worship lasted until about 200-500ish CE. All religions die eventually.)
In Ancient Greece and Rome, people traveled often to various sacred sites to perform rituals and metaphorically cleanse themselves. Those engaging with the Eleusinian Mysteries had a specific pilgrimage that closely resembles later Catholic ones.
Though these cultures’ pilgrimage travels were usually personal visits to religious sites, city-states also sponsored some journeys. Most of these were formal religious processions. According to a paper by Jana Kubatzki, the Greeks even began calling these processions pomp. Yes, as in “Pomp and Circumstance.”
However, these cultures didn’t have the exact same custom of pilgrimage that Christianity developed early in its history. Judaism perhaps comes closest, with not one but three pilgrimage holidays (Passover, Shauvot, and Sukkot). For these holidays, we learn in Deuteronomy 16:16 (which was probably written roughly around 700BCE), Yahweh commanded his Israelites to travel to the Temple of Jerusalem to give offerings. And they did by the thousands. Their great numbers prompted rulers like Herod the Great to build courtyards and esplanades around the Temple to hold them all.
When Romans destroyed the Temple in 70CE, the pilgrimage requirement was lifted. Jews couldn’t make pilgrimages to a temple that no longer existed in meaningful form, after all. So instead of hauling their cookies all the way to Jerusalem, Jews could celebrate these feasts at their home synagogues instead. But many still make a personal pilgrimage to Jerusalem to pray at the Temple’s one remaining part, the Western Wall.
Pilgrimages in Christianity didn’t begin right away—for a very strange but understandable reason
It’s always been so interesting to me that the earliest Christians didn’t appear to care about any of the real-world sites of their Savior’s life—nor those of his Apostles and family members—until a couple or three centuries after their religion’s creation.
The mere fact of the lateness of pilgrimages in Christianity tells me that the religion underwent a major sea change between its inception and the 3rd century. To me, it seems clear that as far as Christians were concerned at the time of their religion’s creation, Jesus and all the stuff he and his first followers supposedly said and did either didn’t matter at all to them, or else existed only on the spiritual plane, not in the physical.
The first option seems ludicrous to the point of absurdity. Indeed, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine a group of people feeling about Jesus the way today’s Christians feel about him and not immediately venerating everything he’d ever touched and everywhere he’d ever been—and committing to writing and art every single memory they had of him, of course!—much as today’s Christians do with people they find religiously impressive. People have always been, well, people.
Emperor Constantine really kick-started Christian dominance. That’s when Christians decided that their god had totally been completely human with a human birth, life, and death, as well as completely real humans as family members and disciples. That meant that they now needed to figure all that stuff out. If Jesus had been born in Bethlehem, then by golly, Christians needed to know where Bethlehem was!
(Bethlehem was a sporadically-occupied site for millennia. At the time of Jesus’ supposed birth, it might not have been inhabited at all. Historians seem divided on that question these days. However, there’s a Church of the Nativity there that marks the spot that Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena totally discovered in the 4th century using what one biblical archaeologist calls “then-famous stories recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke” (archive). She also totally discovered “the True Cross,” meaning the cross upon which Jesus had died. Hey, she kept herself busy! Current scholars seem to support Nazareth, a tiny and utterly insignificant village in the 1st century, as a more plausible birthplace of whoever inspired the character of Jesus.)
Once they had real-world sites to visit and real-world people’s shrines and burial sites to venerate, Christians jumped on pilgrimages. Until they had real-world sites and heroes in Christianity, they had no reason to do it.
Pilgrimages finally get started in Christianity
The earliest known pilgrimage route was huge. Christians called it the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum. Its writer is lost to the mists of time, but is known as “The Pilgrim of Bordeaux.” His itinerary is exactly that: Simply a list of the cities he visited, with a few tantalizing notes about unusual or particularly significant places. According to a map at World History.org, this itinerary encircled nearly the entire Roman Empire. It made an arc from Southern France all the way east to Constantinople and shot south into the Holy Land, then returned westward through Greece. It is a mind-boggling route to consider even in modern times. In the ancient world, it must have taken considerable time to complete.
The next major pilgrimage we know about, the Itinerarium Egeriae, comes to us from the 380s—and from a woman’s hand, at that. Historians think this woman, Egeria, might have been from the area now known as Spain. Along the way, she wrote to her friends back home about her travels from Constantinople all the way down the Holy Land’s western coast into Egypt, and south along the Nile. She visited all kinds of sites mentioned in the Bible and spent a solid three years in Jerusalem itself.
For a while in the early 2000s, a preservation society sought to study and preserve the various monuments and sites in Egeria’s travelogue. But it seems to have gone offline around 2022.
Those weren’t the only ancient pilgrimages, of course, just the earliest. Others, like the Pilgrimage of Paula around 386 and that of “the Anonymous Pilgrim of Piacenza” around 570, took similar trips to see the significant sites of early Christianity.
Why Christians undertook pilgrimages
(We’re a long way from Borsippa, Toto!)
At first, pilgrims clearly took these trips for their own personal reasons. They wanted to set their feet on the paths their religious heroes had taken, to see the towns those heroes had visited, and to experience the cultures they’d known.
That’s such a very human way to engage with those we admire or venerate. That’s why literary people still maintain two of Flannery O’Connor’s homes as sightseeing destinations in Georgia.
Chances are good that pilgrimages would have remained the remarkable purview of a few Christian travelers of means and leisure—if it hadn’t been for the Crusades. In 1095, Pope Urban II offered soldiers and noblemen plenary indulgences if they’d go fight the Muslims (archive).
An indulgence is forgiveness for sins. Normally, offending Yahweh dooms a believer to Hell or Purgatory after death—or to all kinds of dreadful hardships in life to atone. But by performing a list of ritual tasks, believers could avoid the burden of (even more) uncomfortable clothing and (even more) limited diets for months on end—or torture, dispossession of one’s property and titles, and a painful execution.
And I suppose Crusaders felt they had a lot of deeds needing forgiveness.
Soon enough, though, Catholic leaders extended the indulgences program to pilgrimages.
Right away, these trips become popular
Catholic leaders offer two types of indulgences (archive): partial and plenary. A plenary indulgence is the good one. It forgives all sins committed up to that point, no matter what they were. Partial is, well, not complete forgiveness.
Obviously, a plenary indulgence requires a lot more effort than a mere partial one. Believers can get a partial indulgence through simply venerating a holy relic, reciting a prayer, or visiting a shrine (archive). To get the full-meal deal, they must do the thing and some other stuff:
- Be baptized Catholics (of course)
- Have no mortal sins on their conscience
- Confess their venial sins to a priest
- Receive Communion
- “Pray for the Pope’s intentions,” which appears to mean reciting whatever
magic spellprayer the Pope has specified for that indulgence - Be “free of attachment to sin” (believers must detest sin, not want to sin, and stay out of situations where sin will likely occur)
This whole system didn’t just come out of left field. It was an extension of existing beliefs about how believers could gain forgiveness for temporal sins. More than that, it incorporated a growing set of Catholic teachings about purgatory, a sort of halfway house between Heaven and Hell. In Purgatory, sinful souls paid for their sins with many years of waiting to enter Heaven. (We covered this striking new shift in cosmological thinking in the Journey Into Hell series.)
By the late Middle Ages, pilgrimages were a popular way to gain plenary indulgences. Chaucer even wrote about one such pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales. As his story tells us (archive), all sorts of people made these trips.
Of course, with no god behind Christianity to ensure things run correctly, Catholic leaders soon began abusing indulgences. The system became pay-to-win: people with a lot of money could fast-track themselves to Heaven by donating vast sums to the Church or paying for religious buildings to be built.
Also of course, the Catholic Church’s official website sounds very touchy about this entire subject of pay-to-win indulgences. You’ve got to laugh at their answer to one question: “If the Church has the resources to wipe out everyone’s temporal penalties, why doesn’t it do so?” BECAUSE SHUT UP, THAT’S WHY. Er, I mean, they began their reply with “Because God does not wish this to be done.” I’m sure the outrage around indulgences is a big part of why Protestants never got into formal pilgrimages like Catholics did.
In 1567, Pope Pius V finally forbade the selling of indulgences. That put an end to many of the worst scandals sprouting forth from the indulgences system. But it was clearly too late to loop Protestants back into the practice. They’re still happy to visit religious sites, especially where they think revivals are happening. But they don’t get any special posthumous perks for doing it.
And they remain popular, at least with Catholics
Throughout the Reformation and past that schism, pilgrimages for indulgences remained on the Catholic menu. Nowadays, for-profit tourism companies offer hundreds of different religious pilgrimage tours for Catholic pilgrims. And the number of pilgrims themselves has absolutely exploded. A 2019 study found that the number of completion certificates offered to pilgrims at the end of the Camino pilgrimage went from 2491 in 1987 to over 270,000 in 2010.
(Last year, by the way, the official pilgrimage site said they had 446k pilgrims registered in total. However, I’m not sure how many of those got completion certificates or how many pilgrims didn’t register at all. So far this year, they’ve counted 225k people, so this pilgrimage trend isn’t letting off anytime soon.)
Extra-special pilgrimages abound as well. In 2016, when that “not religious” NYT couple went on their pilgrimage, Catholics were busy exulting in the Jubilee of Mercy pilgrimage offered by Pope Francis.
(The entire affair sounds very much like the setup for the iconoclastic 1999 movie Dogma. Pass through special Jubilee doors at participating churches and get total forgiveness! I wonder if they had guards watching out for drunken angels trying to crash their party?)
The old is new again
This year, Pope Francis declared that 2025 will be a Jubilee year (archive). This time, the theme is “Jubilee of Hope.” Accordingly, participants will be “Pilgrims of Hope.” For the rest of this year, Francis has ordered his followers to pray that next year’s a big smash hit.
As participants’ title suggests, pilgrimages figure prominently in this celebration. In a letter Francis wrote about starting the celebration, he specifically begins with descriptions of pilgrimages (archive):
The faithful, frequently at the conclusion of a lengthy pilgrimage, draw from the spiritual treasury of the Church by passing through the Holy Door and venerating the relics of the Apostles Peter and Paul preserved in Roman basilicas. Down the centuries, millions upon millions of pilgrims have journeyed to these sacred places, bearing living witness to the faith professed in every age.
And in his Papal bull (an official edict; archive), Francis makes clear from the start that an ideal Jubilee experience includes pilgrimage to Rome at least:
My thoughts turn to all those pilgrims of hope who will travel to Rome in order to experience the Holy Year and to all those others who, though unable to visit the City of the Apostles Peter and Paul, will celebrate it in their local Churches.
I’d wonder if Rome’s tourism economy sparked this message, except Popes have been encouraging pilgrimages to Rome since the 1100s or so. In the bull’s fifth section, he goes on to assert (emphases in original, as always):
Pilgrimage is of course a fundamental element of every Jubilee event. Setting out on a journey is traditionally associated with our human quest for meaning in life. A pilgrimage on foot is a great aid for rediscovering the value of silence, effort and simplicity of life. In the coming year, pilgrims of hope will surely travel the ancient and more modern routes in order to experience the Jubilee to the full. [. . .]
The Jubilee Churches along the pilgrimage routes and in the city of Rome can serve as oases of spirituality and places of rest on the pilgrimage of faith, where we can drink from the wellsprings of hope, above all by approaching the sacrament of Reconciliation, the essential starting-point of any true journey of conversion. In the particular Churches, special care should be taken to prepare priests and the faithful to celebrate the sacrament of Confession and to make it readily available in its individual form.
I really liked the implicit hint to priests in that second bit.
But some strange new interlopers have entered the pilgrimage conversation
In the past few years, I’ve been hearing about more and more people undertaking some of the more famous pilgrimage routes—in particular the Via Francigena.
I can see why. This route has such a rich history and passes through some absolutely incredible sights. It’s been around since about the 8th century, when it was called the “Frankish Route” in one bishop’s travelogue. Over the decades and centuries, the route shifted slightly to account for changes in local economies and safety levels, but overall it’s been about what this map depicts: a fairly straight shot southeast from Calais to Rome. At various times, some local governments even kept their local roads and towns in good safe condition for travelers.
By now, the pilgrimage routine is well-established. Pilgrims pick up their “pilgrim passports” in Canterbury in the very southeast corner of England. The pilgrimage’s official beginning starts in the South Porch of Canterbury Cathedral. From there, pilgrims get their passports stamped at the shrines and churches along the way. Upon reaching Rome, they earn a certificate called a “Testimonium.”
All told, the pilgrimage covers between 1200-2000 miles (2000-3,200km) depending on the exact route taken. I say that because this map may show a straightforward line, but pilgrims can choose a number of detours and alternate routes that still count for the pilgrimage. Whatever they decide, that’s a lot of time to be walking! Most guides I’ve seen suggest they plan for it to take about three months!
Probably the most popular Catholic pilgrimage route is the 500-ish-mile-long Camino de Santiago. But one hiking site leans much more toward the Via Francigena. As they tell us (archive):
This [the Via Francigena] is perhaps one of the best pilgrimage walks and it is beautiful: going through medieval towns with narrow cobblestone streets and you get to walk past olive groves, vineyards and hazelnut farms. We even sleep at an agriturismo on the Francigena Way: Orvieto to Rome trip!
The Italian towns are very beautiful with old medieval walled centres on hill tops. There are also quite a few things to see in them as well. Kerren says “The towns are a real highlight of the trip and quite different to some of the towns I visited on the Sarria to Santiago walk which were just small local towns.” [. . .]
“Some days we didn’t see another trekker at all so this really is a quiet walk.” The Via Francigena shows hikers a very authentic part of Italy, away from the known tourist spots, and the majority of the other walkers are Italian.
By contrast, the site says, “the Spanish Camino [de Santiago] has quite an industry around it – with restaurants offering pilgrim meal deals, small cafes next to the path and lots of shops selling Camino memorabilia.” If someone takes Via Francigena, they need to carry plenty of food and water just in case!
(Here’s another writeup of the Via Francigena/archive that I thought was interesting.)
The appeal of pilgrimages to heathens
As you might suspect, a lot more is going on than just wanting to sightsee.
According to a recent story in Religion News (archive), only about 40% of Camino de Santiago pilgrims said they undertook the trip for “purely religious reasons.” That leaves a whole lot of people doing it for some reason besides an indulgence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to one 2019 study today’s Christian pilgrims say they go on these trips for many of the same reasons offered up by atheist pilgrims.
One woman in the Religion News piece took her first walk some 15 years ago to rejuvenate herself after “a bad relationship” left her yearning for the pilgrimage journey her father had taken decades earlier.
Other nonreligious travelers cite a number of reasons for taking a pilgrimage walk, including “health, grief, transition, cultural exploration, history and adventure.” One particular nonreligious pilgrim described her motivation in a way that really caught my eye:
[Sharon] Hewitt doesn’t consider herself religious but recognized a type of devotion in the rituals and challenges of the eight days of walking.
“I didn’t do it for religious reasons, but there is overlap,” says Hewitt. “A lot about religion is discipline, just like the Camino. After a hard night, you still get up and go on.”
What she describes fits in with what some researchers are calling “secular spirituality.” This term describes a sense of connection to something “greater than yourself.” Often, people describe this feeling with religious terminology, but it’s not specifically religious.
The secular language of devotion and connectedness is still very new
I can all but feel humanity itself yearning for new ways to describe these older-than-old needs that so many of us have. These are needs that religion has not answered, and indeed can never answer in its current form.
Maybe it never could. Maybe at best it only provided a vehicle by which believers could stumble a bit closer to the answers. For a long time, that vehicle functioned more or less adequately. Medieval pilgrims probably had similar motivations as modern ones, but a religious veneer provided them with the plausible deniability they needed to justify spending a month (or years) away from home. Nowadays, most people don’t need that veneer. Anyone who can manage can take these trips for any reason they please.
So as America in particular becomes more and more secularized, I expect people will find more ways to express these universal human feelings and seek answers to the questions we’ve always had. As we do, we’ll grow beyond Christian language and framing.
And we must, because that is a very constricting language and framework indeed. (I’ve written the Christianese 101 “classes” to prove it). The language and framing Christians use speaks of power, not of love; of false rebirth and imaginary safety from the very real dangers in our world; of human incapability, evil, and fragility rather than our inevitable wins against evil and the unknown and our vast capacity for kindness, understanding, and charity.
To speak the language of Christianity nowadays is to cut oneself off from so much of the human tapestry that one becomes almost a mere observer of it rather than an embedded and integral part of it. Christians may consider that distancing a positive, but it really isn’t. We need all hands on deck in the coming crises of climate change, population displacement, international conflict, terrorism, and more.
By performing slow-burn rituals like pilgrimage, people have to sit with themselves for way longer than we’re used to doing these days. They breathe the air that centuries of people breathed, walk the paths they walked, see the sights they saw. Devotions like this can return us to the tapestry—and embeds us more tightly within it.
That is the vision I have for humanity, and I will do all that I can to bring it about.
NEXT UP: Speaking of Pope Francis, he recently excommunicated a very big name in tradcath (“traditional Catholic”) circles. Well, sorta. We’ll cover who that poor sorry bastard is, why it happened, and most importantly why today’s tradcaths have no earthly clue who they are fucking with. See you soon!
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