Varieties of Contemporary Pilgrimage

INTRODUCTION The Varieties of Contemporary Pilgrimage

S. Brent Plate

Pilgrimages seem to be almost instinctive, or at least derived from behaviors now so ingrained in our species that it’s difficult to distinguish between genetic and social origins. Of all the animals that migrate, we are surely among the most restless. But humans retain the influence of the geophysical habitat in which they pass their formative years. And often, it seems, we are drawn back to our childhood homes—if not physically, then mentally; if not out of love, then out of curiosity; if not by necessity, then by desire. Through such returnings we find out who we are. —John Janovy, Jr., Vermilion Sea: A Naturalist’s Journey in Baja California1

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wo days out of every year, on the first Saturdays of October and April, over a thousand people drive through cactus and sage, across narrow roads in central New Mexico. They drive as far as they can and then walk another quarter mile to find what they are seeking: desert sand surrounded by a chain link fence. This is the Trinity Atomic Test Site, where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945. These atomic tourists are modern-day pilgrims, looking to re-experience a place of power, to bask in the now-extinguished presence of an awesome display of scientific determination and dominance, even though there is almost nothing there (see Figure 1). Reports on the events indicate that while a somber mood would be expected, there have been some revelries as well, alongside sales of refreshments,

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Figure 1. Obelisk at Ground Zero of the Trinity Atomic Test Site. Photo by Gregory Walker (see http://www.abomb1.org/) used with permission.

T-shirts depicting mushroom clouds, and other Trinity-appropriate paraphernalia. On August 15, 2002, tens of thousands of people from all over the world gathered in rainy weather. They lit candles, cried, and prayed as they passed in front of a gravesite outside Memphis, Tennessee. This was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, and the ‘‘candlelight service’’ for the evening included hymn-singing, a speaker, a reading of the 23rd Psalm, and a time of silence, before visitors filed up to the ‘‘meditation garden’’ in Graceland. The altar-like displays accompanying the memorial event included devotional imagery such as a black-velvet SEPTEMBER 2009

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Elvis weeping alongside Jesus and Mary. While the twenty-fifth anniversary was a big event, smaller scale happenings occur every ‘‘Elvis Week’’ in mid-August in Memphis as fans/mourners/tourists/pilgrims come to pay their respects. New Zealand’s online tourism guide contains multiple links to tours of the settings for the filmed trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels. The website is emphatic that, following a purported comment by actor Elijah Wood (Frodo), ‘‘New Zealand is middle earth.’’2 Since the films have been produced, the island country’s tourism revenues have increased dramatically, as travelers are encouraged to plan their ‘‘own epic.’’ In other words, a mid-twentieth century English/Catholic/Oxford academic-novelist writes about a very fictional place called ‘‘middle earth,’’ which is then made into a series of movies that happen to be made by a New Zealand director and thus set in his homeland, and now people from around the world desire to travel to this place. The bones of bodhisattvas, splinters of Jesus’s cross, gravesites of Sufi saints, and holy cities, mountains, and rivers once held the power to attract pilgrims to them. In the current age, we find a new global environment in which the status and meanings of sacred places are being redefined. People are finding ever-new places that beckon, enticing the pilgrim to pack a bag and voyage into unknown, unexperienced spaces. Films like Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) have stimulated journeys to Santa Barbara county’s vineyards, and books like The Bridges of Madison County (Robert James Waller) have promoted mass visits to that Iowa county; in both examples, the local economies saw great influxes of tourist money. New museums and memorial spaces, from the Frank Gehrydesigned Guggenheim Bilbao to Peter Eisenman’s Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, re-invest places with the power to draw people to them from all over the world. Meanwhile, Ground Zero in New York has become one of the city’s top tourist attractions, alongside visits to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building (see Figure 2). In each case, people visit these sites because a kind of sacred power has been invested in the particular place. Some readers may balk at the idea that these are ‘‘real pilgrimages,’’ suggesting it is all just ‘‘tourism,’’ but that is to elide some crucial similarities that bear fleshing out. Many of the essays included here address

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Figure 2. Memorial at St. Paul’s chapel, next to Ground Zero, Downtown New York City. Photo by S. Brent Plate, Summer, 2002.

this difference and, generally speaking, the authors argue that there is ultimately no clear line between tourism and pilgrimage, that both are born from a desire to travel, to head into an unknown, foreign place where one might experience new sights and sounds and tastes and smells, and ultimately to be corporeally inspired by some transcendent locale. There is something about the quest itself, whether for noble, pious, pure, impure, or just plain curious reasons, that makes the journey potentially transformative. As Petrarch once said in terms that foreshadow the twentieth century biological impulses of the John Janovy epigraph above: ‘‘I do not know whence its origin, but I do know that innate desire to see new places and to change one’s home. There is something truly pleasant, though demanding, about this curiosity for wandering through different regions.’’3 In all of this, pilgrimage is tightly bound to our sense of identity, and sometimes the best way to find ourselves is to get lost. Whether or not there is a ‘‘travel gene’’ laced into the human genome, there is at least, as Frederick J. Ruf delineates in his essay, a strong human ‘‘desire to seek the strange.’’ Via the writings of William James, whose work is already invoked by the title of this special issue, Ruf SEPTEMBER 2009

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associates travel with a pluralistic experience of the world, moving us beyond ourselves into the radical potentialities of disorientation. While Ruf is clearly discussing the physical realities of travel, he also implies how writers can re-create journeys in and through their words. Saint Augustine is purported to have quipped, ‘‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.’’ So it may be little wonder that there has been a significant rise in what are called ‘‘literary pilgrimages,’’ a subject taken on by Darren J. N. Middleton in his contribution. Middleton grapples with the pull beyond the grave of famous literary figures in many corners of the globe, asking after the ways their stories, fictional and autobiographical, help us make sense of our own lives. Middleton finds himself face to face with the gravestones of Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and other writers who have found their way onto his bedstand and course syllabi, enabling him to, as he notes, ‘‘map the interior landscape of my soul.’’ What becomes interesting, as one begins to read through the essays compiled here, is the way the authors are so often implicated in their topic of study. Perhaps pilgrimage, more than other tropes of religion and ritual, disallows an objective stance. Even to study pilgrimage in some ethnographic way means that one must take part, and therein lies the rub. Indeed, I agreed to guest edit this issue of CrossCurrents because I too have felt the dizziness of travel, and the solid promising power of another place. I’m not sure I’ve ever made a ‘‘pilgrimage,’’ at least I’ve never called it that, yet I have traveled great distances to see, for example, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and other sites that drew me to them. Something was felt viscerally at each of these places, breathing awe into my body. As with contemporary tourist travel, pilgrimages operate in a tension between the movement of unsure feet and the promise of arrival, at a place where certainty abounds. So, humans may be born with itchy feet, but a pilgrimage would not work without a destination. People journey from far and wide to stand in defined and delineated places that offer the promise of a meaningful encounter. Because there is power in particular places, several pilgrimage sites, both traditional and contemporary, are discussed in the shorter essays in the second part of this issue. In his exegetical tour of contemporary Rome Graham Holderness considers the overlapping spheres of life in that city, where bus tours—some secular, some ‘‘Christian,’’ and 264

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some ‘‘ancient’’—‘‘all go around the same places,’’ as each tour operates within a ‘‘separate universe.’’ Pamela D. Winfield tunnels through a 1,200-year history of Kyoto to discover intersecting Shinto, Buddhist, and modern rituals held throughout the city at various seasons of the year. Holderness’s and Winfield’s pieces highlight cities that are widely considered sacred, yet the ground underneath them is continually shifting. ‘‘Tradition,’’ here as always, is not so much about constancy, but is rather constructed from the narration of changes that occur across time. While Rome and Kyoto may be obvious pilgrimage sites, other places might come as a surprise, leaving some scratching their heads and wondering just what it is that people see in the place. Joan Branham, for example, takes us through a tour of the Holy Land Theme Park in Orlando, Florida, noting the ways the production of space is bound up with ideological purposes, even as people have flocked to experience it. Curtis Coats discusses the recently emerged pilgrimage destination of Sedona, Arizona for New Age practitioners who find the natural, desert setting to offer a felt sense of power. And Luis Vivanco sifts through websites and blogs to find how the Australia Zoo has become a pilgrimage site, especially after the death of one of its workers, Steve Irwin, AKA ‘‘The Crocodile Hunter.’’ In each of these instances people have traveled (whether by plane, foot, or boat is irrelevant) to be in the presence of the place. For those still skeptical of the comparison between the nobility of pilgrimage and just plain tourism, one must at least be willing to entertain the notion that tourism, travel, and pilgrimage are linked by their potential power to transform human lives: to provide penance or a cure, to change people’s minds, to lead one closer to liberation, salvation, or God. Sometimes these changes are expected as the pilgrim sets out, but inherent in the nature of the journey is the element of surprise. Looking particularly into the healing function of pilgrimage, Jill Dubisch journeys to Greece, alongside others, seeking empowering ceremonies in ancient sites. In her account, Vietnam War veterans become moved when they encounter burial grounds of ancient warriors, while women find strength at the sites of ancient goddesses. Even so, many of the pilgrims seemed to get something other out of their journeys than what they were prepared for, realizing the effect of the community on the pilgrims at large. Dubisch also places doubt on a perceived difference between SEPTEMBER 2009

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travel and pilgrimage, concluding with the suggestion that such journeys offer a ‘‘re-enchantment of places that once were sacred.’’ With this in mind, and as should now be apparent, this special issue of CrossCurrents is not simply concerned with the pilgrimages emerging from modern day pop culture—Graceland visits, gravesites of literary authors, or the gravitas of film locations—for we are also interested in the ways ancient sacred spaces continue to hold sway. At the same time, the power of even the most traditional places is being remapped and reformed by media and travel technologies, changing attitudes toward religion, contemporary economic realities, and shifting social power structures. Previously mentioned contributions have indicated as much. Further implications of these new realities can be seen within several traditional pilgrimages. For one, elite tour packages, including firstclass airfare and five-star hotels, for the Hajj to Mecca can now be made online.4 Switching religions, we might find the new realities of global travel manifested in trips to the medieval Christian city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to which modern-day university study abroad programs have been set up and students can take the trek for college credit. Meanwhile, news media and documentary filmmakers set up camps at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, in 2001, as Kama Maclean details in her contribution here, resituating established ways of seeing in Indian religious environments. Many of the Sadhus who play roles in the Kumbh Mela are, as Maclean describes, ‘‘media savvy,’’ negotiating rights with photographers. The darshanic act of seeing and being seen is reinscribed in and through the reproducibility of photographic technologies. If an earlier, traditional mode of pilgrimage allowed devotees access to the divine; the newer forms must nonetheless re-imagine pilgrimage through the camera lens, producing images that may appear on the Internet. There is one final point to make here about the varieties of contemporary pilgrimage. Across the millennia and across the world, via New Media and increased travel technologies, pilgrimage occurs in and through the human body. In pilgrimage, the body-soul distinction becomes irrelevant; souls and soles are not just homophones. Part of why examinations of pilgrimage are important, like the ones offered here, is that they reveal how religion itself is vitally physical. These studies bring religion to its senses, in ways more fundamental than the 266

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abstract studies of doctrines and texts. At the heart of religion, there are bodies: breathing, sensing, feeling, and interacting with natural environments, human-made objects, and other bodies. And it is through the study of pilgrimage, both ancient and modern, that we find these key dimensions coming to life. Notes 1. Janovy, John, Jr., Vermilion Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 5. 2. See http://www.tourism.net.nz/lord-of-the-rings.html. Also see Brodie, Ian, ed., Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook Expanded (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005). 3. Petrarch, Francesco, Letters on Familiar Matters, vol. 2. Trans. Aldo S. Bernado (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 260. 4. A simple Google search turns up dozens of travel agents for Hajj packages. I was struck by one testimonial at http://www.sarainternationaltravel.com which claimed how the agency helped prepare the journey with ‘‘absolutely no stress and nothing to worry about.’’ Such a statement undermines much of the discussion about pilgrimage and the dimensions of ‘‘liminality’’ (to use the now infamous terms of Victor Turner), but also resituates the discussion in ways that might be fruitfully examined in more detail.

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