Turner Pilgrimage

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The Center out There: Pilgrim's GoalAuthor(s): Victor TurnerReviewed work(s):Source: History of Religions, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Feb., 1973), pp. 191-230Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062024 .Accessed: 08/11/2011 19:25

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Victor Turner THE CENTER OUTTHERE: PILGRIM'SGOAL

As an example of how a social anthropologist of my theoreticalposition would approach the study of a specific type of ritualsymbols, namely, those associated with religious pilgrimages,I am presenting some "work in progress." I have begun to make acomparative study of pilgrimage processes, not only as they existat a given time but also as they have changed over time, and ofthe relations into which different pilgrimage processes haveentered in the course of massive stretches of time. The main focusof my research at the moment is on those pilgrimage processes,many of which have consolidated into pilgrimage systems, to befound in the major historical religions: Christianity, Islam,Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, andShintoism. In addition, I have begun to collect materials onpilgrimages in archaic societies, such as Ancient Egypt, Babylonia,the civilizations of Meso-America, and pre-Christian Europe.Finally, I do not intend to overlook any indications I can find ofpilgrimage behavior or pilgrimage-like behavior in the non-literate societies customarily studied by anthropologists.In previous work I have described my theoretical interests,including the study of "processual units," social "antistructure,"and the semantics of ritual symbols. All these interests convergeon pilgrimage processes, as we shall see even in the tentativeformulations of this paper. For pilgrimages are "liminal" phenom-ena-and here we shall be concerned with the spatial aspects of

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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goaltheir liminality; they also exhibit in their social relations thequality of communitas; and this quality in long-established pilgrim-ages becomes articulated in some measure with the environingsocial structure through their social organization. Pilgrimagesmay also be examined in terms of the "extended-case history"approach. Whenever we have satisfactory documents or oralnarratives of the personal experiences and observations of pilgrimsand detached investigators, we can envisage the social processinvolving a particular group of pilgrims during their preparationsfor departure, their collective experiences on the journey, theirarrival at the pilgrim center, their behavior and impressions at thecenter, and their return journey, as a sequence of social dramasand social enterprises and other processual units to be isolatedby induction from an appropriate number of cases in which thereis a development in the nature and intensity of relationshipsbetween the members of the pilgrimage group and its subgroups.We are also able, by this technique, to raise problems concerningthe social and cultural relations between the pilgrimage group andthe successive sociocultural environments through which it passes.The accounts of such intrepid pilgrims-to name only three out ofhundreds-as Hsuan-tsang (ca. 596-664) who left China in 629to visit in turn the famous Buddhist centers in India; Canon PietroCasola of Milano who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1494,and Sir Richard Burton who went on the hajj from Suez to Meccain 1853 disguised as a wandering dervish named Abdullah ofIndo-British extraction, seem to be admirably detailed, and whenthese are related to what is known of the social, political, andcultural circumstances of their times and journeys, should giveus useful clues to the nature of the dynamic interdependencebetween structure and communitas in different religions andepochs. They certainly tell us much about the organization ofgroup activities and social life, the economics and logistics of thejourney, the symbolic and social settings at different way stations,and the sacred and profane attitudes, individual and collective,of the pilgrimage groups.Most of the accounts I have read stress the opposition betweensocial life as it is lived in localized, relatively stable, structuredsystems of social relations-such as village, town, neighborhood,family, etc.-and the total process of pilgrimage. To take anexample at random from my growing pile of data, C. K. Yang, inhis book Religion in Chinese Society, comments on the pilgrimmood at the celebration of the birthday of the deified general Ma192


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History of ReligionsYuan (first century A.D.): "For three days and nights, the emo-tional tension and the religious atmosphere, together with therelaxation of certain moral restrictions, performed the psycho-social function of temporarily removing the participants from theirpreoccupation with small-group, convention-ridden, routinizeddaily life and placing them into another context of existence-the activities and feelings of the larger community. In this neworientation local inhabitants were impressed with a distinct senseof community consciousness."' The remarks of Malcolm X on thedissolution or destructuring of many of his stereotypes after hisexperience of what he calls the "love, humility, and true brother-hood [that] was almost a physical feeling wherever I turned"2 atthe culmination of his pilgrimage to Mecca are striking:You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pil-grimage, what I have seen and experienced has forced me to re-arrangemuch of my thought-patterns previously held [remember that this re-arrangement is a fairly regular feature of liminal experience] and to tossaside [Malcolm X's emphasis] some of my previous conclusions.... Duringthe past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the sameplate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on thesame rug)-while praying to the same God [Malcolm X's italics]-withfellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was theblondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in thewords and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt thesame sincerity that I had felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria,Sudan, and Ghana. We were truly [Malcolm X's italics] all the same(brothers)-because their belief in one God had removed the "white" fromtheir minds, the "white" from their behavior, and the "white" from theirattitude. ["White" for Malcolm X, here represents power, authority,hierarchy, "structure."] I could see from this, that perhaps if white Amer-icans could accept the Oneness of God, then, perhaps, too, they couldaccept in reality the Oneness of Man-and cease to measure, and hinder, andharm others in terms of their "differences" in color.3

This is one of very many quotations one could make fromvarious literatures illustrating the "communitas" character ofpilgrimage. But here I would like to distinguish between threetypes of communitas, a distinction I made first in The RitualProcess,4 for it is of decisive importance in considering the natureof the social bond in pilgrimage situations. These types are (1)existential or spontaneous communitas, the direct, immediate, andtotal confrontation of human identities which, when it happens,tends to make those experiencing it think of mankind as a homo-geneous, unstructured, and free community; (2) normative1 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1961), p. 89.2 Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York, 1966), p. 325.3Ibid., pp. 340-41.4 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969).

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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalcommunitas where, under the influence of time, the need to mo-bilize and organize resources to keep the members of a groupalive and thriving and the necessity for social control among thosemembers in pursuance of these and other collective goals, theoriginal existential communitas is organized into a perduringsocial system (this is never quite the same as a structured groupwhose original raison d'etre was a utilitarian one, for normativecommunitas began with a nonutilitarian experience of brother-hood and fellowship the form of which the resulting group tried topreserve, in and by its religious and ethical codes and legal andpolitical statutes and regulations); and (3) ideological communitas,which is a label one can apply to a variety of utopian models orblueprints of societies believed by their authors to exemplify orsupply the optimal conditions for existential communitas.Now it seems to me from my preliminary survey of pilgrimagedata that while the total situation fosters the emergence ofexistential communitas, it is normative communitas that con-stitutes the characteristic social bond among pilgrims and betweenpilgrims and those who offer them help and hospitality on theirholy journey. For example, we learn from Dom Bede Jarett'sarticle on "Pilgrimages" that in the course of time, "individualtravelling to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella and other pilgrimcenters develops into properly organized companies," that"clerics prepared the whole route beforehand and mapped out thecities of call," that "troops are stationed to protect pilgrims, andhospices established along the line of travel."5 King Stephen ofHungary, for example, established the "King's Peace" and "madethe way safe for all, and thus allowed by his benevolence a count-less multitude both of noble and common people to start forJerusalem"-as the old chronicler, Glaber puts it. "Pious journeysgradually harden down and become fixed and definite ... and areallowed for by laws, civil and ecclesiastical."6 Ultimately, asDom Bede writes, "pilgrimages become regarded as part of'normal life.' "7 Normative communitas reigns. Yet the com-munitas spirit is still latent in the norm and can be reanimatedfrom time to time. Let me take a Hindu example, one to which Iwill revert later. This is the great Maharashtrian pilgrimage to visitthe shrine of Vithoba Bhave at Pandharpur, southeast of Poonain the Deccan. G. A. Deleury8 thus describes "the psychology5 Bede Jarrett, "Pilgrimages," The Catholic Encyclopedia.6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.8 G. A. Deleury, The Cult of Vithoba (Poona, 1960).194


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History of Religionsof the Varkaris"-members of a specific Hindu Vaishnavite schoolof spirituality devoted to the deity who is regarded by them as anavatar of Vishnu, although he is sometimes considered as a com-bined form of Vishnu and Shiva (Harihara):

[Although a Varkari is supposed to go on the pilgrimage to Pandharpurevery year he] has not the psychology of one who would abide by a rulebut of one who fulfils an essential and well-loved promise. [That] is whythere is no sanction for the Varkari who would not perform his annualpilgrimages, and it could not be otherwise. The problem does not evenarise: the Varkari is too keen on his pilgrimages to miss any of them ofhis own free will: and it is a proverb amongst Varkaris that if one of themis not seen at the pilgrimage he must be dead or dying.This characteristic of a freely-taken engagement gives to the pilgrimagea remarkable quality of spontaneousness. It is with all the joy of his heartthat a Varkari takes part in it. This spontaneity is not hampered by astiff frame: although there is a definite organization, it is meant more tocanalize the enthusiastic participation of the pilgrims than to impose atotalitarian rule on them. For instance, there is no hierarchy [my italics]among the members of the procession. The pilgrimage has no director;there is no distinction between priests, officiants, clerks, and faithful: allthe pilgrims are on the same level, and if there is an authority it is not dueto any office, but to the spiritual personality of some of the pilgrims acknowl-edged as "guru" by their followers.Yet, as we shall see, distinctions of caste are nevertheless main-tained during the pilgrimage journey, though in modified form.In pilgrimages, the mere demographic and geographical facts oflarge numbers of people coming at set times and considerabledistances between the pilgrim's home and sacred site themselvescompel a certain amount of organization and discipline. Theabsolute communitas of unchanneled anarchy does not obtainhere. What we see is a social system, founded in a system of religiousbeliefs, polarized between fixity and travel, secular and sacred,social structure and normative communitas, which may aspire toan open morality in Bergson's sense, may even imagine it pos-sesses one, but stops short at the cultural bounds of a specificreligious world view. Daily, relatively sedentary, life in village,town, city, and fields is lived at one pole; the rare bout of nomadismthat is the pilgrimage journey over many roads and hills consti-tutes the other pole. As we shall see, the optimal conditions forflourishing pilgrimage systems of this type are societies basedmainly on agriculture, but with a fairly advanced degree ofdivision of craft labor, with patrimonial or feudal politicalregimes, with a well-marked urban-rural division but with, at themost, only a limited development of modern industry.Today, reports from all over the world indicate that, if anything,larger numbers of people than ever are visiting pilgrim centers.195


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's GoalIn this case, however, pilgrimage is not integrated, as it was inmedieval Europe and Asia, for example, into a wider socioculturalsystem. My guess at the moment is that during the present tran-sitional period of history, when many institutionalized socialforms and modes of thought are in question, there is going on areactivation of many cultural forms associated traditionally withnormative communitas. Social energy is being withdrawn fromstructure, both prebureaucratic and bureaucratic, and it is"cathecting" various modalities of communitas. New manifesta-tions of existential communitas are also taking place; but whenthose who manifest them wish them to persist in community andseek symbols to safeguard their persistence, such symbols tendto be drawn from the repertoire of communitas groups down theages and communicated to the present era by writing and othersymbolic codes. In this way, there is a cross-influence betweennew and traditional forms of communitas, leading in some casesto the recovery of traditional forms that have long been enfeebledor at a low pulse. More detailed work is needed, however, by wayof depth studies of pilgrimage centers that are "booming" at thismoment. Clearly, such factors as the general and rapid increaseof the world's population, the improvement of communications,the spread of modern means of transportation, the impact of massmedia on travel, have all had the effect of sending up the numbersof visitors to shrines, many of whom should perhaps be con-sidered as tourists rather than pilgrims per se. Nevertheless, myown observations in Mexico and the data I shall present indicatethat in the age of Aquarius, pilgrimages, like many other liminalor "underground" (as opposed to "mainline") manifestations ofthe religious, not to mention the esoteric and the occult, aresurfacing once again as significant, visible, social phenomena,just as they surfaced in the past in periods of destructuration andrapid social change (e.g., in the waning of the Roman Empire, andin the waning of the Middle Ages).But let me put these speculations aside for the moment andconsider some published definitions of pilgrimage, for these maygive us some clues as to the character of the phenomenon. Let us,then, take a look at an assortment of definitions culled from thebooks at my disposal. Some of these have been written by believersin religions having pilgrimages; others by pilgrims themselves;others by historians, including historians of religion. Togetherthey may shed some light on the properties and functions ofpilgrimages as sociocultural phenomena and on the attitudes196


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History of Religionspeople in different religions or of no religion have held towardthem. A "pilgrim," for the Oxford English Dictionary, is "onewho journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion,"while a "pilgrimage" is "a pilgrim's journey." "Sacred," for thissource, means "consecrated or held dear to a deity . . . dedicatedor reserved or appropriated to some person or purpose; made holyby religious association, hallowed." Authorities discussing thedifferent historical religions are much more specific than this.For example, the Jewish Encyclopedia defines pilgrimage as "ajourney which is made to a shrine or sacred place in performanceof a vow or for the sake of obtaining some form of divine blessing."Every male Israelite was required to visit the Temple three timesa year (Exodus 23:17; Deuteronomy 16:16). The pilgrimage toJerusalem on one of the three festivals of Passover, Shavuot, andSukkot was called "re'iyah" (= "the appearance"). The Mishnah,a digest of laws made by Rabbi Judah, the Patriarch (ca. 135-220)says, "All are under obligation to appear, except minors, women,the blind, the lame, the aged, and one who is ill physically ormentally." A minor in this case is defined as one who is too youngto be taken by his father to Jerusalem. While the appearanceof infant males was not obligatory, wives and children usuallyaccompanied their husbands and fathers, as in all public gatherings(Deuteronomy 31:12).9The element of obligatoriness in the ancient Israelite pilgrimageis found again in Islam, where, according to A. J. Wensinck in theEncyclopedia of Islam, the central Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj(probably derived from an Old Semitic root, h-dj, meaning "togo around, to go in a circle") "is a journey obligatory on everyMuslim, man or woman, who has reached the age of puberty andis of sound mind. [It must be performed] at least once in his or herlife provided that they have the means to do so."10The notion of making a pilgrimage to perform a vow or obtaina blessing is also clearly conceptualized in North China in connec-tion with mass religious gatherings for "celebrating the birthday orother event in connection with a god." There are two major typesof devotional acts at the pilgrimage shrine, known as hsu yilanand huan yiian. Hsu yiian "was the making of a wish before the godwith the vow that, if the wish should come true, one would comeagain to worship and offer sacrifice. Huan yian was worship andsacrifice to the god as an expression of gratitude after the wish

9 "Pilgrimage," The Jewish Encyclopedia.10 A. J. Wensinck, "The Islamic Hadjdj," The Encyclopedia of Islam.197


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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalhad come true, whether it was recovery from sickness, the bringingof prosperity, or the begetting of a male heir. One might [also]thank the god for the fulfillment of wish during the past year, andthen make a new wish for the coming year."'1It is necessary to say a few words about the matter of pilgrimageas obligation and pilgrimage as a voluntary act involving a vow,or, as they say in Ibero-America, "a promise" (promesa). Eventhough obligation is stressed in several religions (e.g., in connec-tion with the Pandharpur Hindu pilgrimage mentioned earlier, inancient Judea, and in modern Islam), many categories of people,such as women, minors, and the sick under Mosaic law, non-Varkaris at Pandharpur, women who are unable to travel withtheir husbands or relatives within the prohibited degrees in Islam,were exempt from this duty. In addition, in Islam dispensationscould be granted on grounds of illness or infirmity, unusualinsecurity on the route (wars or banditry), or lack of the necessaryfunds to provide for one's family during absence as well as for theexpenses of pilgrimage. Even for those upon whom obligationrested it was a moral one; there were no sanctions behind it.Nevertheless, it was important that even where there was obliga-tion, it should be voluntarily undertaken; the obligatory shouldbe regarded as desirable. Thus, Professor B. Lewis writes of thehajj in medieval Islam, "Every year, great numbers of Muslims,from all parts of the Islamic world, from many races and fromdifferent social strata, left their homes and travelled, often overvast distances, to take part in a common act of worship. Thesejourneys, unlike the mindless collective migrations familiar inancient and medieval times, are voluntary and individual [myitalics]. Each is a personal act, following a personal decision, andresulting in a wide range of significant personal experience . . .[The hajj was] the most important agency of voluntary, personalmobility before the age of the great European discoveries . . . [it]must have had profound effects on all the communities fromwhich the pilgrims came, through which they travelled, and towhich they returned."'l2Christian pilgrimages tended at first to stress the voluntaryaspect and to consider sacred travel to Palestine or Rome as actsof supererogatory devotion. But a strong element of obligationcame in with the organization of the penitential system of theChurch. When this became authoritatively and legally organized,

11Yang, p. 87.12 Bernard Lewis, "Hadjdj," The Encyclopedia of Islam.198


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History of Religionspilgrimages were set down as adequate punishments inflicted forcertain crimes. As Bede Jarett writes: "The hardships of thejourney, the penitential garb worn, the mendicity [the beggar-dom] it entailed, made a pilgrimage a real and efficient penance."l3Thus when one starts with obligation, voluntariness comes in;when one begins with voluntariness, obligation tends to enter thescene. To my mind this ambiguity is a consequence partly of theliminality of the pilgrimage situation itself-as an interval betweentwo distinct periods of intensive involvement in structured socialexistence out of which one opts to do one's duties as a pilgrim,and partly of the patrimonial and feudal orders of society inwhich pilgrimage systems seemed to have a stabilizing functionin regard to both local and international relations within a systemof shared religious values. For such orders of society, thoughrelatively stable in themselves, occupy a historical and logicallimen between societies based, as Sir Henry Maine would havesaid,14 on status and those based on contract. In the former case,in the early law of Europe, as in the law of tribal society, most ofthe transactions in which men and women are involvedare not specific, single transactions involving the exchange of goods andservices between relative strangers. Instead, men and women hold land andother property, and exchange goods and services, as members of a hierarchyof political groups and as kinsfolk and affines. People are linked in trans-actions with one another because of preexisting relationships of status be-tween them. As Maine said in a pregnant phrase: "... the separation ofthe Law of Persons from that of Things has no meaning in the infancy ofthe law... the rules belonging to the two departments are inextricablymingled together, and ... the distinctions of the later jurists are appropriateonly to the later jurisprudence." We can only describe the Law of Things,i.e., the Law of Property, in these types of society by describing also the Lawof Persons, or status; and we can only discuss the law of status by talkingabout ways of owning rights over property.15

In our modern industrial society rights of ownership are alsorarely unrestricted, but the restrictions usually arise throughcontractual arrangements which we make ourselves (such asgranting leases, mortgaging, pledging, etc.) or through testa-mentary restraint on things we inherit (and testamentary disposi-tion again involves a voluntary act) or through a whole mass ofregulations and by-laws defining property zones for special users,licensing vehicles for special purposes, etc. But in tribal and pre-feudal societies these sorts of restraints, and, of course, the13 Jarrett (n. 5 above), p. 85.14 See Sir Henry Maine,Ancient Law (London, 1861).15 Max Gluckman, Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965),pp. 48-49.

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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalcorresponding rights, derive from status and kinship and areconsequently much more closely interwoven in the social structure.Now in the medieval period, both in Islamic and Christian lands,the notion of voluntariness and contract was becoming establishedwith the diversification of social and economic life. Indeed, thefeudal oath of fealty was a kind of contract whereby a man vowedbefore witnesses to be another's vassal and tenant and serve himin many ways in return for armed protection and a measure ofphysical security. But such voluntariness swiftly became obliga-tion, and the oath itself was partly an acknowledgment of theobligation of fidelity to the lord. Furthermore, the status of vassaland tenant then tended to be inherited, to become what anthro-pologists would call an ascribed or ascriptive status. In pilgrimagewe see clearly displayed this tension and ambiguity betweenstatus and contract and an attempt to reconcile them in the notionthat it is meritorious to choose one's duty. Enough room is leftto the individual to distance himself briefly from inherited socialconstraint and duty, but only enough room so as to constitute,as it were, a public platform in which he must make by word ordeed a formal public acknowledgment of allegiance to the over-arching religious, political, and economic orders. Yet we see evenhere the thin edge of the contractual wedge that will lead eventuallyto a major loosening of the structure of society. Pilgrimagesrepresent, so to speak, an amplified symbol of the dilemma ofchoice versus obligation in the midst of a social order wherestatus prevails.Yet pilgrimages, though generically framed by obligation andinstitutionalized in a great system of obligation, so to say, withinthat frame, represented a higher level of freedom, choice, volition,structurelessness, than did, say, the world of the manor, village,or medieval town. It was Yin to its Yang, cosmopolitanism to itslocal particularism, communitas to its numerous structures.Islam tended to emphasize pilgrimage as a central institutionmore than Christianity did and gave communitas almost the roleof a "mandala" center, geographically represented by the blackstone on the Kaaba wall at Mecca, turning liminality itself into itsopposite. Here I cannot refrain from quoting B. Lewis again on thehajj in medieval Islam:The needs of the pilgrimage-the commands of the faith reinforcing therequirements of government and commerce-help to maintain an adequatenetwork of communications between the far-flung Muslim lands; the ex-perience of the pilgrimage gives rise to a rich literature of travel, bringinginformation about distant places, and a heightened awareness of belonging

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History of Religionsto a larger whole. This awareness is reinforced by participation in thecommon rituals and ceremonies of the pilgrimage in Mecca and Medina, andthe communion with fellow-Muslims of other lands and peoples. The physi-cal mobility of important groups of people entails a measure of social andcultural mobility, and a corresponding evolution of institutions.16And here follows an interesting comparison from the perspectiveof communitas/structure, with on the one side the stratified,rigidly hierarchic society and intense local traditions within thecomparatively small area of Western Christendom, and on theother the situation in medieval Islam.The Islamic world has its local traditions, often very vigorous; but thereis a degree of unity in the civilization of the cities-in values, standards,and social customs-that is without parallel in the medieval west. "TheFranks," says Rashid al-Din "speak twenty-five languages, and no peopleunderstands the language of any other." It was a natural comment for aMuslim, accustomed to the linguistic unity of the Muslim world, with twoor three major languages serving not only as the media of a narrow clericalclass, like Latin in Western Europe, but as the effective means of universalcommunication, supplanting local languages and dialects at all but thelowest levels. The pilgrimage was not the only factor making for culturalunity and social mobility in the Islamic world-but it was certainly animportant one, perhaps the most important.17

However, one must comment here that even if Christian pil-grimages did not have the immense scope of the hajj, they hadsimilar effects in bonding together, however transiently, at acertain level of social life, large numbers of men and women, whowould otherwise have never come into contact, due to feudallocalism and rural decentralization of economic and political life.Indeed, some of the major pilgrimage centers, such as Compostellanear the northwest corner of Spain, attracted huge crowds ofpilgrims from every country in Europe. But if one can speak of a"catchment area" as a metaphor for the geographical area fromwhich the majority of pilgrims are drawn to a particular shrine,the catchment areas of European pilgrim centers were certainlymuch smaller than Mecca's. Europe was the continent of the greatregional and protonational pilgrimage centers. We find that,according to Ivor Dowse,18 there were in England alone, duringthe medieval period, at least seventy-four well-attended pilgrim-age sites and shrines, and in Scotland, before the ProtestantReformation, thirty-two.19 Furthermore, we find the beginningsof a tendency to arrange pilgrim shrines in a hierarchy with

16 Lewis (n. 13 above), p. 37.17 Ibid.18 Ivor Dowse, The Pilgrim Shrines of England (London, 1963).19Ivor Dowse, The Pilgrim Shrines of Scotland (London, 1965).201


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's Goalcatchment areas of greater and lesser inclusiveness. Thus inEngland, Canterbury and Walsingham were of the first nationalimportance, though Chichester (Saint Richard), Durham (SaintOswold, Saint Cuthbert, and Saint Bede), and Edmundsbury(Saint Edmund, King and Martyr) ran them close, while there weremany shrines like Saint Walstan's at Bawburgh in Norfolk,Saint Gilbert of Sempringham's in Lincolnshire, Saint William'sat York, and Saint Aidan's of Lindisfarne in Northumberland-still an important pilgrimage center-which were mainly local orregional in scope.

A similar pattern of national, regional, district, and intervillagepilgrim catchment areas exists in Mexico today, as we shall see.What seems to have happened there after the Spanish Conquest,as in medieval Europe, is that any region possessing a certaincultural, linguistic, or ethnic unity, often corresponding also to anarea of economic interdependence, tended to become at once apolitical unit and a pilgrimage catchment area. But since thecommunitas spirit presses always to universality and ever-greaterunity, it often happens that pilgrimage catchment areas spreadacross political boundaries. At the level of kingdoms, pilgrimageprocesses seem to have contributed to the maintenance of somekind of international community in Christendom, for French,Spanish, German, and Dutch speakers visited the shrine of SaintThomas-a-Becket at Canterbury, while, as R. L. P. Milburn writes:"'Men may leave all gamys / That saylen to Saint Jamys.' So ranthe old song declaring that, in the Middle Ages, Englishmen wereprepared to face the extreme discomforts of an overcrowdedpilgrim ship if only they might reach the famous shrine of St.James at Compostella and there receive, perhaps, those benefitsto body and soul which seemed to spring from a place hallowedby the Apostle."20There was in fact a distinct tendency toward the kind ofreligious unity aimed at by Islam symbolized by the great Pan-European pilgrimage centers such as Compostella. To give anidea of the feeling-tone of a major pilgrimage, I will include atranslation of a citation in Raymond Oursel's Les pelerins dumoyen age. This quotation, by an unknown author (for Ourseldoes not footnote it, but only puts it in quotes), describes the laststage of a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James the Greater atCompostella. It provides, as it were, the ideal model of the kindof communitas hoped for on such occasions.

20 Foreword to Dowse, The Pilgrim Shrines of England.202


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History of ReligionsArrival at Compostella

And the long sought splendourBurst upon the evening of the trailWhich now had the feeling, the fragrance of farewell.Into the sanctuary, huge as a ship in full sailWinged and emblazoned,Religiously they entered.The shadows echoed with murmursAs if the great ship, between sleep and wakingWere drowsing on the mystery of a dream.Column after column they passed,Altar after altar,Unable to think, careful and fragile,They went on and on,Twisting the hardened old fold of their pilgrim hat with their fingers,Ashamed.So dirtyWithered and stiffenedPoorBefore this very great Saint now in his richesHigh up there; and how greatly benevolent.Their footsteps quietened; the nave was risingTo the very heights and infinities of heaven.They hardly breathed.They fled along like a flock at bay before the dog,Frightened, driven, jostling each other-TwoThreeFourTenA hundredA thousandCrowds beyond number!This was the whole of Christendom in one single beingAdvancing up the bedrock pavementIn one irresistible BodyTo the place that love and the vow of its heart had centered on.The cathedral spread over all the loneliness of that holy place,Her mantle of velvet and nightAs a mother veils her child.And happily she enfolded all her forgiven childrenIn her great loop of glittering glory. 203


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's GoalShe gave them for their wearinessThe siege throneand graceof fulfilmentAnd she rockedthem with the tenderhummingof her voice.21A further aspect of pilgrimage is suggested by the Buddhistconcept of such sacred journeys. It seems that Buddhist usagederived at first from Hindu practices. This makes it interestingthat the Pali form of the Sanskrit word for pilgrimage (pravrajya:Pali, pabbajja, literally, "a going forth," "retirement from theworld") should be the technical term for admission or "ordina-tion" to the first grade of the Buddhist monkhood. Some Buddhist,as well as Hindu holy men, like the "palmers" of medieval Europe,spent their whole lives visiting pilgrim centers. But the point Iwish to make is that there is a rite de passage, even an initiatoryritual character about pilgrimage. I will revert to this further onand consider what it means.I myself tend to see pilgrimage as that form of institutionalizedor "symbolic" "antistructure" (or perhaps "metastructure")which succeeds the major initiation rites of puberty in tribalsocieties as the dominant historical form. It is the ordered anti-structure of patrimonial-feudal systems. It is infused withvoluntariness though by no means independent of structuralobligatoriness. Its limen is much longer than that of initiationrites, and it breeds new types of secular liminality and communi-tas. I will discuss the connection between pilgrimages, fairs orfiestas, and extensive marketing systems later, and hope to do agood deal of work in these areas in the near future. Its influenceextends into literature, not only in works with direct reference topilgrimage, such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bunyan'sPilgrim's Progress, or even Kipling's Kim, but also the numerous"Quest" or "Wayfaring" tales, in which the hero or heroine goeson a long journey to find out who he or she really is outsidestructure-recently D. H. Lawrence, Conrad, and Patrick Whiteprovide examples of this genre. Even 2001 has something of thispilgrimage character, with a Kaaba-like "black stone" in outerspace, near Jupiter, largest of the peripheral planets.

I wish briefly to indicate, too, that as the pilgrim moves awayfrom his structural involvements at home his route becomesincreasingly sacralized at one level and increasingly secularizedat another. He meets with more shrines and sacred objects as headvances, but he also encounters more real dangers such as bandits

21 Raymond Oursel, Les ple'rins du moyen age (Paris, 1963), p. 94. Translationby Mrs. Victor Turner.204


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History of Religionsand robbers; he has to pay attention to the need to survive andoften to earn money for transportation; and he comes acrossmarkets and fairs, especially at the end of his quest, where theshrine is flanked by the bazaar and by the fun fair. But all thesethings are more contractual, more associational, more volitional,more replete with the novel and the unexpected, fuller of possi-bilities of communitas, both as secular fellowship and comrade-ship and sacred communion, than anything he has known at home.And the world becomes a bigger place. He completes the paradoxof the Middle Ages, that it was at once more cosmopolitan andmore localized than either tribal or capitalist society.At this point, before looking in detail at Europe, Asia, andMexico, I will go further south and examine some features of theritual topography of certain traditional African societies. Topog-raphy, in this case the representing of certain ritual features ofthe cultural landscapes on maps, will be quite prominent in thispaper. In many ways I remain a Durkheimian in my methodology.One is that I begin a study by regarding social facts or collectiverepresentations, like the ideas, values, and material expressionsassociated with pilgrimages, as being, in a sense, like "things."Just as a physical scientist looks at the physical world as anunknown but ultimately knowable reality, so the sociologist orsocial anthropologist must approach the phenomena of societyand culture in a similar spirit: he must suspend his own feelingsand judgments about social facts at the beginning of an investiga-tion and rely upon his observations, and in some cases experimentwith them before he can say anything about them. As Durkheimhas often said, a thing is whatever imposes itself upon the ob-server. To treat phenomena as things is to treat them as data whichare independent from the knowing subject. To know a socialthing the observer, at least at first, cannot fall back upon intro-spection; he cannot come to know its nature and origin by seekingit from within himself. He must in his first approach go outsidehimself and come to know that thing through objective observa-tion. But after collecting and analyzing the demographic, eco-logical, and topographic facts, I would go beyond Durkheim'sview in laying stress, as Znaniecki does, not only on rules, pre-cepts, codes, beliefs, etc., in the abstract, but also on personaldocuments which give the standpoint of the actors, or on theirown explanations and interpretations of the phenomena. Thesewould constitute a further set of social facts. So too would one'sown feelings and thoughts as an observer and as a participant.205


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's GoalAnthropologists have sometimes noted that in certain societies aritual topography, a distribution in space of permanent sacred

sites, coexists and is, as it were, polarized with a political one.Thus, among the Shilluk of the Sudanese Republic, ProfessorEvans-Pritchard has shown how a system of ritual localitiesbecomes visible and relevant on major national rites of passagesuch as the funerary and installation ceremonies of kings. Theseritual sites and territorial divisions do not precisely coincide withmajor political centers and divisions such as the national capital,provinces and provincial capitals, and villages headed by aristo-crats.22 Meyer Fortes has gone further, in giving us those over-lapping transparent diagrams so familiar to generations ofanthropology students, in his book, The Dynamics of Clanshipamong the Tallensi,23 by showing how Tale clans or maximallineages are linked by different sets of ties in dominantly politicaland dominantly ritual situations. He shows, too, how earth shrinesare set up outside settlements, while lineage ancestral shrines arelocated within them. Moreover, in the ritual field itself certainshrines have become pilgrimage centers for non-Talis, many ofwhom come from as far away as the coast of the Gulf of Guinea,a journey of several hundred miles.G. Kingsley Garbett has suggested, following Gelfand andAbrams, how, underlying the divisions between relatively autono-mous Shona chiefdoms in Rhodesia, there still exists a set ofconnections between spirit mediums who are believed to be themouthpieces of ancient chiefs of the Monomatapa royal dynasty.24Whether this system of ritual linkages-and it was a system sinceit was partially reactivated to organize unified resistance to theBritish in the Shona Rebellion was itself the attenuated andsymbolic successor of a once fully operational political system,as some scholars such as Terence Ranger and J. Daneels suppose,it nevertheless continues to operate, like the Tale cults of the earthand external Boyar, as a symbol of "common interests andcommon values."25 These earth shrines, too, were closely identi-fied with the indigenous people of the region, the Talis, ratherthan with the incoming Namoos.22 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the NiloticSudan (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 23-24.23 Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi (London, 1945),p. 109.24 G. Kingsley Garbett, "Religious Aspects of Political Succession among theValley Korekore," in The History of the Central African Peoples, ed. E. Stokesand R. Brown (Lusaka, 1963), passim.25 Fortes, p. 81.

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History of ReligionsI do not propose to multiply citations here, but would like to

point to the further distinction made in many West and CentralAfrican societies between ancestral cults and cults of the earth, andbetween political rituals organized by political leaders of con-quering invaders and fertility rituals retained in the control ofindigenous priests. Each of these opposed types of cults tends tobe focused on different types of shrines situated in different locali-ties, resulting in overlapping and interpenetrating fields of ritualrelations, each of which may or may not be hierarchically struc-tured. Brutally to simplify a complex situation, it might be saidthat ancestral and political cults and their local embodiments tendto represent crucial power divisions and classificatory distinctionswithin and among politically discrete groups, while earth andfertility cults represent ritual bonds between those groups, andeven, as in the case of the Tallensi, tendencies toward still widerbonding. The first type stresses exclusiveness; the second inclusive-ness. The first emphasizes selfish and sectional interests andconflict over them; the second, disinterestedness and shared values.In studies of African cults of the first type, we find frequentreference to such topics as lineage segmentation, local history,factional conflict, and witchcraft. In cults of the second type, theaccent is laid on common ideals and values, and, where there hasbeen misfortune, on the guilt and responsibility of all rather thanthe culpability of individuals or factions. In cases of homicide,for example, in many parts of West Africa the whole land may bepurified by an earth priest.Rituals of the second type, those stressing the general good andinclusiveness, become more prominent in the so-called historical,higher, or universal religions such as Christianity, Judaism,Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and Hinduism, although they donot, of course, in any sense, replace the first type, the locallybonded religious congregations. In addition, individual responsi-bility is now extended from the domain of immediate kin andneighborhood relations in localized normative systems to that ofthe generic human "brother" and the "neighbor" who might beanyone in the wide world but whom one should "love." The"other" becomes a "brother"; specific siblingship is extended to allwho share a system of beliefs. Yet despite this shift, the polardistinction between cultural domains of exclusivity and inclusivityremains. The first domain is topographically and geographicallyexpressed in the focusing of religious activity on localized shrines,situated in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and meeting207


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's Goalhouses, which are themselves parts of bounded social fields andwhich may constitute units in hierarchical or segmentary politico-ritual structures. Where, then, in the complex large-scale societiesand historical religions are we to look for the topography of theinclusive, disinterested, and altruistic domain? The short answer,as we have seen, is in their system of pilgrim centers.The question was first raised for me, in two recent visits toMexico, by the observation of great numbers of pilgrims comingfrom all parts of Mexico on important feast days (and to someshrines every day) at such centers as the Villa de Guadalupe nearMexico City; Chalma, some seventy miles from Mexico City;Acambaro in Guanajuato; and Naucalpan near Mexico City wherethe shrine of Our Lady of the Remedies is situated. I found thatpeople came, in tens of thousands during the principal fiesta tothese and to other centers which I visited, by many means oftransportation: on foot; on horse- and donkeyback; by car, train,and airplane; and, today, overwhelmingly by bus and coach.They came as individuals; in family groups; and in organizedparties of industrial workers, bank employees, office employeesof the different branches of government, schools, parishes, andbusiness organizations. To the basilica of the Patroness of Mexico(and now also of the Americas), Our Lady of Guadalupe, camepilgrims not only from Mexico and all the Latin-American coun-tries, but also from the United States and Canada, and even fromEurope, India, the Philippines, and other parts of Christian Asia.Clearly, too, these throngs came not only for solemnity but alsofor festivity and trade. At all the pilgrimage centers I visitedthere was dancing by brightly feathered troupes of traditionalperformers. Often there were rodeos, bullfights, and fairs withFerris wheels and roundabouts; and always there were innumer-able stalls and marquees where almost everything could be had,from religious pictures and objects to confectionery, food, clothing,and domestic utensils. Communion, marketing, the fair, all wenttogether in a place set apart.For an anthropologist "nothing social is alien," and here waspatently a social phenomenon of great interest and possiblesignificance. I turned eagerly to the anthropological literature onpilgrimages not only in Middle and Latin America, but also inother parts of the world, but could find relatively few gleaningsfor my intellectual comfort and sustenance. It was almost thesame when I turned to contemporary ecclesiastical and religioussources. Here was a great extant popular process, demographically208


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History of Religionscomparable with labor migration, involving millions of peoplethe world over in many days and even months of traveling, richin symbolism and undoubtedly complex in organization, and yetvery largely ignored by the often competing orthodoxies ofsocial science and religion. Why was there this neglect? In thecase of the anthropologists, there may have been a combination ofcauses: the concentration, until quite recently, on the elicitationand analysis of highly localized, fixed, and focused structuresand patterns rather than on patterns and processes on a nationalor even international scale, coupled with an almost obsessiveemphasis on kinship, law, politics, and economics rather than onreligion, ritual, metaphor, and myth; on pragmatics rather thansymbolics. Religious leaders, on the other hand, have been silencedby their ambivalent feelings about pilgrimages. On the one hand,they seem to regard them as in a way meritorious and pious, buton the other, as suspect, being tainted with primitive and peasantsuperstitions, and bearing all too clearly the marks of an ancientpaganism. Though operationally on a wide scale, pilgrimageshave somehow brought features of what Robert Redfield wouldhave called the "Little Tradition" into what should have beentheologically, liturgically, and, indeed, economically controlled byleading representatives of the "Great Tradition."It seems that matters were not always thus, for we find that inthe Middle Ages, especially in the centuries when Gothic architec-ture throve, "the age of the towering pilgrimage churches andcathedrals, was, economically speaking, the age of the greatfairs," and that "the church herself had every interest in protect-ing as valuable sources of revenue the markets and fairs heldunder its patronage."26 It is still the case, in Mexico, that priestsand religious of a specific parish associated with a pilgrimage shrinefoster the devotion paid to its santo, but since the Reforma in themid-nineteenth century they have had no authority to protectthe markets and fairs: the local administrative bureaucracy hasthese firmly under its own control. The Catholic church in theMiddle Ages had, in any case, a greater tolerance for populartradition than it has today, when it is seeking to "modernize"its image and thinking. It was Calvin rather than Erasmus whoprobably did most to foster the modern disapproval of pilgrimages,for he thought that they "aided no man's salvation," and eventhough the Council of Trent rather weakly affirmed that "placesdedicated to the memories of saints are not vainly visited," the

26 Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York, 1967), pp. 164, 165.209


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The Center out There: Pilgrim's GoalCalvinist version of the Protestant Ethic seems to have won the dayin Northern Europe and North America. Pilgrimages, for Calvinand the Puritans, are mere "peregrinations," wasting time andenergy that might be better put to the service of demonstrating,in the place where God has called one, that one has been personally"saved," by a thrifty, industrious, and "pure" style of life.Or as Nanak; the first Sikh guru put it in the Indian context,when asked by a Muslim why he did not turn in the direction ofMecca to pray: "There is no place where God is not."When I began to investigate pilgrimages more closely, I came tosee that they might well constitute objectively a connected net-work of processes each involving a journey to and from a particularsite. Such sites were places where, according to believers, somemanifestation of divine or supernatural power had occurred,what Eliade would call a "hierophany." In Mexico the most typicalhierophanies were held to be miracles brought about by images orpaintings of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and certain saints. It shouldbe said that Mexico differs from Europe in that images rather thanrelics of saints are there the major sacred objects of pilgrimagedevotions. This may have been due to the virtual monopoly overthe relics of the major saints maintained by the great religiouscenters (and notably the pilgrimage centers) of Europe and todifficulties involved in the transportation of holy relics across theAtlantic; but there may well have been a pre-Columbian in-fluence at work here, in view of the tendency of the Maya, Aztecs,and Tarascans to make vivid and putatively efficacious effigiesand paintings of their deities.

Less indirect, however, than statuary and paintings known tohave been man made, is the celebrated case of the Dark Virgin ofGuadalupe, La Virgen Morena. The Virgin Mary, in her advocationas the Immaculate Conception, is believed to have appeared inperson to an Aztec commoner, Juan Diego, ten years after theconquest of Mexico by Cortes, and to have imprinted her image,that of a mestiza girl, on the rough cloak or tilma of magueyfibers (the century plant) which he was wearing. This miraculouspainting is still the central focus of veneration for all CatholicMexicans, and it is estimated that an average of 15,000 pilgrimsand tourists come every day to contemplate it in its glass-frontedframe over the high altar of the basilica at Tepeyac. Most of theother images of the Virgin (except the original statue of our Ladyof Ocotlan) are believed to be human artifacts, though many areheld to produce miraculous effects. These two Virgins are linked210


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History of Religionsto the period immediately following Cortes's conquest and to thetwo nations most involved with the conquistadores of HernanCortes-Guadalupe to the Aztecs and Ocotlan to the Tlaxcalans,rivals of the Aztecs and allies of Cortes.What Mexico shares with medieval Europe is, however, itsnetwork of pilgrimage routes and trails, many of which convergefrom different directions on a single pilgrimage center whileothers crisscross as pilgrims travel to different holy places. WalterStarkie's book on the pilgrimage trails to the shrine of Santiago ofCompostella and Francis Watts's Canterbury Pilgrims and TheirWays abundantly document this point.27 Moreover, in Mexico,as in many parts of Catholic Europe, one finds that towns andmunicipalities contain several sodalities or brotherhoods (herman-dades), each of which includes in its annual activities a pilgrimageto the place where its patron saint is most highly venerated.It is interesting to note here that wherever a municipio containsor is near a major pilgrimage center, its inhabitants, though theymay participate in festive and marketing activities associatedwith the pilgrimage saints' feast days, tend themselves to go intheir capacity as pilgrims to distant shrines rather than to nearones. Yet these same people participate daily in the local mayor-domia (or stewardship of local religious affair) system. I found thisto be the case, for example at Amecameca, which I mention later.This brings us to the very important point that, generallyspeaking, pilgrimage shrines in Central Mexico (though not inYucatan) tend to be located not in the centers of towns and citiesbut on their peripheries or perimeters or even at some distancebeyond them (see fig. 1). Thus, the hill of Tepeyac, where the shrinecomplex of the Virgin of Guadalupe is located, is on the northernrim of Mexico City; the basilica of our Lady of Zapopan, the greatpilgrimage center of the city of Guadalajara which has the statesof Michoacan, Nayarit, and Jalisco as its main pilgrim catchmentarea, is situated on the northwestern limits of the city; the basilicaof our Lady of Ocotlan stands on a small hill outside the south-eastern boundary of the city of Tlaxcala; while the extremelysacred image of Our Lady of the Remedies is kept in the Churchof San Bartolo in Naucalpan, some nine miles northwest of the oldSpanish colonial capital of Mexico, but now almost engulfed byspreading suburbia. Of pilgrimage sites dedicated to one or anotherimage or advocation of Christ, that of the Sacromonte is on a hill

27 Walter Starkie, The Road to Santiago (Berkeley, Calif., 1965); FrancisWatts, Canterbury Pilgrims and Their Ways (London, 1917).211


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's Goal

0 ? 01 Mexico ??

Mexico: State, Church, andPilgrimage CentersState CapitalsDiocese Centers 0Pilgrimage Centers X

FIG. 1

outside the town of Amecameca in the State of Mexico, while theimportant basilica of Saint Michael of Chalma, which houses amiraculous crucifix, is located at a distance of about seventymiles from Mexico City whence many of the pilgrims come. Again,in contrast to Europe where many traditional pilgrimage centersare great city cathedrals such as Canterbury, Durham, Chartres,Toledo, Ancona, and Aachen, few Mexican cathedrals attractpilgrims from afar. Of course, the most popular contemporaryEuropean Catholic pilgrimage centers are also in peripheralplaces. One need only mention the shrines of the Virgin at Lourdes,Fatima, Czestochowa, La Salette, and Oostacker (in Ghent,Belgium, an offshoot and imitation of Lourdes).This peripherality of the holiest shrines is by no means confinedto Christian pilgrimage systems. For example, Deleury writes ofthe pilgrimage to Pandharpur that "Pandharpur is situated onthe borderline [my italics] of the region covered by the 'palkhis'[a palkhi is literally a palanquin carrying a representation of agod's or saint's footprints, padukas (not an idolatrous image,but representing samadhi, 'the Experience'), and here standsfor a group of pilgrims following the same guru or spiritual

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History of Religionsteacher, living or dead] . . . Not only is Pandharpur not in thecenter of the Marathi-speaking countries, but it is quite possiblethat in former times it was situated on the boundaries of Kannada-speaking countries."28 Again, Mount Kailas and Lake Manas,two of the holiest places of pilgrimage for Hindus, are located onthe further side of the Himalayas in Western Tibet. Today, ofcourse, ever since the occupation of Tibet by China, Indianshave been denied access to these natural shrines, already regardedas holy in the Mahdbhdrata. Even in good weather they are diffi-cult of access. Marginal though they are, however, they are at thesource of the five great rivers of India, including the Ganges,Indus, and Brahmaputra.29 An apparent exception to the pe-ripherality of pilgrimage centers is Mecca, where the black meteoricstone near the Kaaba is regarded by all Muslims as "the navel ofthe world." The hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, 'Arafat, and Mina,is the fifth of the five "pillars" of Islam. It is still observed annuallyand continues to exert a profound influence on the entire Muslimworld. Despite its centrality for the religious domain, however,Mecca is certainly peripheral to each and all of the many socialand political systems into which Muslims have become secularlyorganized. It is almost as though Islam by a kind of paradox hadmade sacred peripherality itself central to man's authenticexistence, at least in terms of the ideal model it presents to theworld. According to the Meccan press, from 1957 to 1962 there wasan annual total of between 140,000 and 180,000 pilgrims, comingfor the limited period of the hajj proper and excluding those whocame from the Arabian peninsula itself. These arrived by air, sea,or land transportation from such widely dispersed areas as Egypt,Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria, Iraq,and even from the Soviet Union, as Malcolm X attests in hisAutobiography.The peripherality of pilgrimage shrines and the temporalstructure of the pilgrimage process, beginning in a Familiar Place,going to a Far Place, and returning, ideally "changed," to aFamiliar Place, can be interestingly related to van Gennep'sconcept of the rite of passage, with its stages of separation, marginor limen, and reaggregation. The liminal stage, when the subjectis in spatial separation from the familiar and habitual, constitutesa cultural domain that is extremely rich in cosmological meaning,conveyed largely by nonverbal symbols. Liminality represents a

28 Deleury, p. 78.29 See Bhagwan Shri Hansa, The Holy Mountain (London, 1934).213


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's Goalnegation of many of the features of preliminal social structures,and an affirmation of another order of things, stressing genericrather than particularistic relationships.Now, pilgrimages seem to have attributes both of the wider-community, earth-shrine, types of ritual we have glanced at inAfrica and of the liminal stage of rites de passage. The networksformed by intersecting pilgrimage routes-which are themselvesstudded with subsidiary shrines and way stations and lined withmarkets and hostelries-represent at the level of preindustrial,politically centralized, high-agricultural cultures, the homologuesof those reticulating the earth shrines and shrines of nonancestralspirits and deities found in many stateless societies in Sub-Saharan Africa with a simple agricultural technology. Here theperipherality of pilgrimage centers distinguishes them from thecentrality of state and provincial capitals and other politico-economic units. It further distinguishes them from centers ofecclesiastical structure such as the sees or diocesan centers ofarchbishops and bishops. This peripherality may be regarded asone spatial aspect of the liminality found in passage ritual. Alimen is, of course, literally a "threshold." A pilgrimage center,from the standpoint of the believing actor, also represents a"threshold," a place and moment "in and out of time," and suchan actor-as the evidence of many pilgrims of many religionsattests-hopes to have there direct experience of the sacred,invisible, or supernatural order, either in the material aspect ofmiraculous healing or in the immaterial aspect of inward trans-formation of spirit or personality. As in the liminality of initiationrites, such an actor-pilgrim is confronted by sequences of sacredobjects and participates in symbolic activities which he believesare efficacious in changing his inner and, sometimes, hopefully,outer condition from sin to grace, or sickness to health. He hopesfor miracles and transformations, either of soul or body. As wehave seen, in the pilgrim's movement toward the "holy of holies,"the central shrine, the route becomes increasingly sacralized as heprogresses: at first it is his subjective mood of penitence that isimportant while the many long miles he covers are mainly secular,everyday miles; then sacred symbols begin to invest the route;while in the final stages, the route itself becomes a sacred, some-times mythical journey until almost every landmark and ulti-mately every step is a condensed, multivocal symbol capable ofarousing much affect and desire. No longer is the pilgrim's senseof the sacred private; it is a matter of objectified collective repre-

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History of Religionssentations which become virtually his whole environment andgive him powerful motives for credence. Not only that-the pil-grim's journey becomes a paradigm for other kinds of behavior-ethical, political, etc.As societies diversify economically and socially and as particu-laristic multiplex ties of locality and kinship yield place to a widerange of single-interest relationships between members of func-tional groups over ever wider geographical areas, individual optionand voluntarism thrive at the expense of predetermined corporateobligations. Even obligations are now chosen-they result fromentering into contractual relations. The individual replaces thegroup as the crucial ethical unit. No longer is a "particular erroratoned for," as Kirsch and Peacock have recently written in theirreadable textbook, by a "particular sacrifice," but "man worshipsby begging forgiveness for a deep sinfulness within his total self." 30And, as Max Weber has pointed out, the individual extruded fromprevious corporate, mainly kin-based matrices becomes obsessedwith the problem of personal or individual salvation. The need tochoose between alternative lines of action in an ever more complexsocial field plus the increasing weight, as he matures, of responsi-bility for his own decisions and their outcomes, prove too muchfor the individual to endure on his own, and he seeks some trans-cendental source of support and legitimacy to relieve him fromanxieties about his immediate security and ultimate fate as a self-conscious entity.31 Yet salvation has a social as well as a personalaspect in all the historic religions, as Durkheim understood in hisstudy, Suicide-when he demonstrated that higher suicide ratesprevailed in religious groups, such as Protestant sects, that stressedpersonal responsibility without corporate support for one's ownsalvation. To understand the nature of this social aspect and itsrelationship to the voluntarism of pilgrimage it is necessary to takeanother look at the notion of liminality.My own observations in Zambia in Central Africa of the behaviorof novices during the liminal phase of Ndembu circumcision ritessuggested that these boys, "leveled" and "stripped," as ErvingGoffman would say, of antecedent status, standing, and rank,developed a fellowship, a comradeship among themselves based onindividual choice of friends rather than on kinship and neighbor-hood, somewhat in the fashion of modern military recruits in the

30 Thomas Kirsch and James Peacock, TIhe Human Direction (New York,1970), p. 186.31 See the central argument of Dr. M. J. Field's ethnopsychiatric study of paganpilgrims in modern rural Ghana, Search for Security (Evanston, Ill., 1960).215


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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalsame barrack room at a boot camp. Like these recruits, too, theycame under the strict control of generalized elders, in contrast totheir secular situation where subordination was parceled outamong several particularistic kin relationships. No longer were theygrandsons, sons, nephews, but simply anonymous novices,confronting the general category of initiated elders. Socialstructure, in brief, as I said earlier, was simplified and homogen-ized. When control was relaxed the novices looked upon each otheras equals, each an integral person rather than a social personasegmentalized into a series and a set of structural roles andstatuses. Friendships made in these circumstances of liminalseclusion sometimes lasted throughout life, even though there wasno formal age-set or age-grade system among the Ndembu. AsI have done elsewhere, I call this modality of social relatedness"communitas," borrowing the term-though not its meaning-from Paul Goodman and distinguishing it from "community"which refers to a geographical area of common living.32In rites of passage, novices or initiands pass from one position orcondition of structure to another. But in the passage from struc-ture to structure they may, and usually do, if the rites are collec-tive in character, experience communitas. Liminality, the optimalsetting of communitas relations, and communitas, a spontaneouslygenerated relationship between leveled and equal total and indi-viduated human beings, stripped of structural attributes, togetherconstitute what one might call "antistructure." Communitas,however, is not structure with its signs reversed, minuses insteadof pluses, but rather the fons et origo of all structures and, at thesame time, their critique. For its very existence puts all socialstructural rules in question and suggests new possibilities. Com-munitas strains toward universalism and openness; it must bedistinguished, for example, in principle from Durkheim's notionof "mechanical solidarity," which is a bond between individualswho are collectively in opposition to another solidarity group.

32 The term "gemeinschaft," similar to "community" as used by T6nnies, com-bines two major social modalities which I distinguish-"structure" and communi-tas. By "structure" or "social structure" I do not mean what L6vi-Strauss or hisfollowers mean by these terms, i.e., a structure of "unconscious categories" locatedat a deeper level than the empirical, but rather what Robert Merton has termed"the patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets and status-sequences"consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society and closely boundup with legal and political norms and sanctions. "Gemeinschaft," in that it refersto the bonds between members of tightly knit multifunctional groups, usuallywith a local basis, has "social structure" in this sense. But insofar as it refers to adirectly personal egalitarian relationship, "gemeinschaft" connotes "communitas,"as, for example, where Tonnies considers friendship to express a kind of gemein-schaft or "community of feeling" that is tied to neither blood nor locality.

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History of ReligionsHere communitas is asserted for the "part" at the expense of the"whole," hence denies its own distinctive quality. In "solidarity,"unity depends on "in-group, out-group" oppositions, on the We-They contrast.The historical fate of communitas seems to have been to passfrom openness to closure, from "free" communitas to the soli-darity given by bounded structure, from optation to obligation,from W. H. Auden's "needless risk" to the "endless safety." Butin its genesis and central tendency, communitas is universalistic.Structures, like most species, get specialized; communitas, likeman and his direct evolutionary forebears, remains open and un-specialized, a spring of pure possibility as well as the immediaterealization of release from day-to-day structural necessities andobligatoriness. The relationship between social structure and socialcommunitas varies within and between societies and in the courseof social change. In tribal societies communitas is, as I have said,often relegated to a mere interval between status incumbencies.Even then it is regarded by the guardians of structure as dangerousand is hedged around with numerous taboos, associated with ideasof purity and pollution, or concealed beneath a mound of ambigu-ous symbols.In societies of greater complexity and diversity, religions developwhich emancipate, to some degree, communitas from this envelop-ment. These religions recognize some of the antistructural featuresof communitas and seek to extend its influence throughout wholepopulations as a means of "release" or "salvation" from the role-playing games which embroil the personality in manifold guiles,guilts, and anxieties. Here the pioneering communities formed byprophets, saints, and gurus together with their first disciples,provide the cultural models and paradigms. Seeking oneness isnot from this perspective to withdraw from multiplicity; it is toeliminate divisiveness, to realize nonduality. Thus even thesolitary mystic achieves communitas by reaching the root, the"Atman," he believes exists identically in all men, indeed, in allbeings, embracing nature as well as culture in communitas. Butthis theologizing of experience is to reduce what is essentially aprocess to a state or even the concept of a state, in other words,to structuralize antistructure.

Pilgrimages seem to be regarded by self-conscious pilgrims bothas occasions on which communitas is experienced and journeystoward a sacred source of communitas, which is also seen as asource of healing and renewal. In this kind of thinking, too, the217


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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalhealth and integrality of the individual is indissoluble from thepeace and harmony of the community; solitude and society ceaseto be antithetical. Let me now quote some expressions by articu-late pilgrims of varying religious affiliations of their subjectivefeelings of communitas.I begin with the account of a Nahuatl-speaking Mexican Indianlady, Luz Jimenez, who once served as a model for the famousmural painter, Diego Rivera. Every year she used to go from hervillage of Milpa Alta on the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of OurLord of Chalma This famous shrine was only about forty milesfrom her home, but to reach it the Milpa Alta pilgrims had to walkor ride across mountains, then infested by bandits and thieves.Her account was recorded by the anthropologist Fernando Horca-sitas in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and translated byhim into Spanish. I translate into English her description of howvarious groups of pilgrims halted for a meal at Agua de Cadena,about halfway through their journey:There in Agua de Cadena they used to dismount from the horses to heatup the food. Many of the menfolk collected firewood and made large firesto warm the food. It was indeed a lovely sight! Here, there, and everywherewe could see food being eaten. The better-off brought chicken, turkey andtamales. But many of our fellow-creatures had nothing, not one tortilla nora single piece of bread. But everywhere they received some food. Pilgrimscalled to them, "Please come and eat your tortilla!" Another would say"Come along, hurry, here is another tortilla, with meat!" Others againgave them tamales, until all who had no food were filled.33Notice the stress here on dining together, commensality as a sym-bol, a symbol which also appears in the other personal documentsof communitas.

Many readers will have seen the lyrical passages in The Auto-biography of Malcolm X where Malcolm describes his experiencesin Cairo, Jedda, and Mecca as the first Black Muslim to go onthe hajj. I quote almost at random: "Love, humility, and truebrotherhood was almost a physical feeling wherever I turned.""All ate as One [commensality is here stressed too], and slept asOne. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented theOneness of Man under One God." "Never have I witnessed suchsincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brother-hood as is practised by people of all colors and races, here in thisAncient, Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and allthe other prophets of the Holy Scriptures."34 It is sadly likely33Fernando Horcasitas, De Porfirio Diaz a Zapata: Memoria Nahuatl de MilpaAlta (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas, 1968), p. 57.34Malcolm X, pp. 325, 330, 339.

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History of Religionsthat Malcolm X's discovery through pilgrimage of what he callsthe "true brotherhood of men of all colors and races," in sharpcontrast to his previous antiwhite stance and his announcementof this in the United States, led swiftly to his assassination byracist fanatics.Another interesting document of pilgrimage experience comesfrom an article by the late Irawati Karve, formerly professorof sociology and anthropology at the University of Poona. Shehad decided to take the road to Pandharpur as a member of adindi, a subdivision of the palanquin group mentioned earlier,making the pilgrimage to the shrine of Vithoba Bhave. Her per-sonal situation was complex and interesting. She was at once aseasoned social scientist, a liberal, something of a feminist, anauthor of novels and poetry in English, and a Brahmin! She wassteeped in the Western rationalist tradition but had strong nation-alist sympathies. She records how deeply she was moved by thecommunitas she experienced among her fellow pilgrims, so moved,in fact, that she could not endure their division into caste-bounddindis within the palkhi or palanquin group, the salient religiousunit of the pilgrimage. If she had been content to accept the stand-point either of her own caste or of detached anthropologicalobservation, perhaps she would not have been so evidently stirredup and involved. But then, as is so often the case, we would havebeen deprived of a lot of the truth of the situation. Thus she writes:

oJust as I had become friendly with the Brahmin group, the Maratha womenhad also taken me to their hearts.... After I had taken my meal with them[which none of the other Brahmin women had done-taboos against com-mensality with subcastes other than one's own are strong in Hinduism],I felt that they were more friendly. Many of them walked alongside of me,held my hand, and told me many things about their life. Towards the end,they called me "Tai," meaning "sister." A few of them said, "Mark you,Tai, we shall visit you in Poona." And then one young girl said, "But willyou behave with us then as you are behaving now?" It was a simple question,but it touched me to the quick. We have been living near each other forthousands of years, but they are still not of us, and we are not of them.35These remarks raise the important point that though pilgrimagesstrain, as it were, in the direction of universal communitas, theyare still ultimately bounded by the structure of the religioussystems within which they are generated and persist. Thus, it ishighly unlikely that if one of Malcolm X's companions during thecircumambulation of the Holy Kabah suddenly proclaimed loudly

35Irawati Karve, "On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage," Asian Studies30, no.1 (1962): 19.219


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's Goalthat he was a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist,he would have been warmly welcomed into the "brotherhood"around him. For, just as ancestral shrines are polarized withearth shrines in West Africa, so are localized mosques, temples,and churches polarized with pilgrimage shrines in the major hist-oric religions to form a single system and share a common culturalcontent, though one pole stresses the model structure and theother normative communitas. However, until now communitaslives within structure, and structure within communitas. Totalor global brotherhood or communitas has hardly yet overlappedthe cultural boundaries of institutionalized religious structures.Communitas itself in time becomes structure bound and comesto be regarded as a symbol or remote possibility rather than asthe concrete realization of universal relatedness. Thus pilgrimagesthemselves have generated the kind of fanaticism which, in theMiddle Ages, led to their Christian reformulation as Crusades andconfirmed the Muslim belief in the spiritual necessity of a Jihador holy war, fought for custody of the pilgrimage shrines of theHoly Land. When communitas becomes force rather than "grace,"it becomes totalism, the subordination of the part to the wholeinstead of the free creation of the whole by the mutual recognitionof its parts. Yet when communitas operates within relatively widestructural limits it becomes, for the groups and individuals withinstructured systems, a means of binding diversities together andovercoming cleavages.This was well understood by Deleury, who, like Karve, pointedout that on the Pandharpur pilgrimage the members of the variouscastes were not mixed together but the members of each dindibelonged to one subcaste (Jati) only. In his view, however, this wasnot in opposition to the antihierarchical ideal of the pilgrimage,clearly stated by the hymns and sermons, sung by all on the road.On the contrary, he writes, it wasa solution of the problem of the distinction of castes and of their life to-gether. The idea of a group composed of individuals coming from differentcastes with different cultures, traditions, and customs could only be anartificial juxtaposition and not a true community.... The Varkari solutionis a happy compromise between the reality of the distinctions betweencastes and the ideal of a social community to unite them. . . . The hard-ships of the way contribute to bind the various groups together and thegood will of all prevents hurt and spares the feelings. Slowly but trulya palkhi consciousness (embracing all its sub-caste divisions) grows throughthe willingness and kindness of all.36

36 Deleury, p. 105.220


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History of ReligionsHere we see how the Pandharpur pilgrimage, like the Muslim hajj,remains within an established religious system. It does not lowerdefenses between castes, just as Islam does not allow those beyondthe Umma (the nation of Islam) to visit the holy places of Meccaand Medina.

Nevertheless, it may be said that, while the pilgrimage situationdoes not eliminate structural divisions, it attenuates them, removestheir sting. Moreover, pilgrimage liberates the individual fromthe obligatory everyday constraints of status and role, defineshim as an integral human being with a capacity for free choice,and within the limits of his religious orthodoxy presents for hima living model of human brotherhood and sisterhood. It alsoremoves him from one type of time to another. He is no longerinvolved in that combination of historical and social structuraltime which constitutes the social process in his rural or urbanhome community, but kinetically reenacts the temporal sequencesmade sacred and permanent by the succession of events in thelives of incarnate gods, saints, gurus, prophets, and martyrs.A pilgrim's commitment, in full physicality, to an arduous yetinspiring journey, is, for him, even more impressive, in thesymbolic domain, than the visual and auditory symbols whichdominate the liturgies and ceremonies of calendrically structuredreligion. He only looks at these; he participates in the pilgrimageway. The pilgrim becomes himself a total symbol; indeed, asymbol of totality; ordinarily he is encouraged to meditate ashe peregrinates upon the creative and altruistic acts of the saintor deity whose relic or image forms the object of his quest. Thisis, perhaps, akin to the Platonic notion of anamnesis, recollectionof a previous existence. However, in this context it would be moreproperly regarded as participation in a sacred existence, with theaim of achieving a step toward holiness and wholeness in oneself,both of body and soul. But since one aspect of oneself consists ofthe cherished values of one's own specific culture, it is not unnatur-al that the new "formation" desired by pilgrims should includea more intense realization of the inner meaning of that culture.For many that inner meaning is identical with its religious corevalues. Thus social and cultural structures are not abolished bycommunitas and anamnesis, but, as I said, the sting of theirdivisiveness is removed so that the fine articulation of their partsin a complex heterogenous unity can be the better appreciated.Some might say that pure communitas knows only harmoniesand no disharmonies or conflict; I am suggesting that the social221


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The Center out There: Pilgrim's Goalmode appropriate to all pilgrimages represents a mutually ener-gizing compromise between structure and communitas; in theo-logical language, a "forgiveness of sins," where differences areaccepted or tolerated rather than aggravated into grounds ofaggressive opposition.Thus, in order fully to understand pilgrimages in Mexico itwould be necessary to take into account the contemporaneousstructure of Mexican society and culture and to examine itshistorical vicissitudes and changes. For this structure and cultureinvades the social organization and symbolism of Mexican pilgrim-ages today just as much as the present and past caste structuresof Hinduism permeated the pilgrimage of Pandharpur. Here I mustconfess that my paper necessarily becomes programmatic andanecdotal rather than an exhaustive analysis, for my interestin Mexican pilgrimages is a recent development, beginning onlyduring a trip in the summer of 1970. However, I can at least setout the lines on which an analysis of Mexican pilgrimages mightfruitfully proceed, eking out this project with some observationaldata and the first fruits of library research.

Pilgrimages, then, may be studied synchronically and diachron-ically, as they are today and as they were in various yesterdays.I cannot here discuss fully the historical aspects of pilgrimages.37A synchronic study of pilgrimages would entail, in the first place,the making of an inventory of all the shrines and localities clas-sified by Mexicans themselves as centres of pilgrimage (peregri-nacion, romeria). Then, in each case, it would be necessary to seekto establish the scope and range of a shrine's catchment area, thatis, the geographical regions and social groups and classes whichprovide it annually with pilgrims. Within this geographical areawill be found regions of greater and lesser concentration. For ex-ample, in the case of the most renowned Mexican pilgrimage shrine,that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, pilgrims come not only from everystate of the Mexican republic, but also, as we saw, from the UnitedStates, Catholic Canada, Spain, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala,the Philippines, and every South American nation, indeed, fromall over the Catholic world, including Rome itself. Near the otherend of the scale, we find pilgrimages on a regional basis, such asthe black Cristo of San Roman near Campeche, whose shrine is

37 I would like to commend to the attention of the reader a brilliant study, justpublished, by a young Queens College, New York, historian, Ralph della Cava,of the genesis, growth, and adventures of a pilgrimage devotion in northeastBrazil in the late nineteenth century, in its full social setting. It is called Miracleat Joaseiro (New York, 1970).222


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History of Religionsvisited mainly by pilgrims from the state of Campeche and bysailors and fisherman from along the adjacent Gulf Coast. Evensmaller pilgrimages exist which hardly involve more than theinhabitants of a dozen villages, such as the miraculous crucifix ofSan Juan, near Uruapan in Michoacan. Here the crucifix, rescuedfrom the village of Paricutin when the volcano of that name erup-ted from a farmer's field, is said to be performing miracles in itsnew setting, having saved the inhabitants of Paricutin from theflames and lava of the opened underworld.It seems that pilgrimage centers can almost be arranged intoa ranking order of importance. Since, however, they are open inprinciple to any Catholic anywhere who has a personal devotionto the pilgrimage santo, one finds that any center can draw indi-vidual devotees from any part of Mexico. Nevertheless, the oldercenters have become the objects of organized pilgrimages, wherethe typical units are not individuals but such groups as parishes,sodalities, and confraternities; and parties drawn from such seculargroups as trade unions, cooperatives, branches of government, andprivate firms. Time brings and consolidates structure. To cater forthe needs of these groups, elaborate market, transportation, cater-ing, recreational, and lodging arrangements have been developed,each social class, ethnic category, and cultural region having itsown distinctive type of travel and accommodation. A synchronicstudy would also concern itself with the central organization ofpilgrimages, with the organization of pilgrimage parties as theytravel from their points of origin to the center and back again. Itwould have to concern itself with the fixed symbols which markthe pilgrimage routes from beginning to end, from the localchurch or chapel or domestic shrine devoted to the pilgrimagesanto in the ward, village, or home of the pilgrims, through theholy places encountered on the way; to the cluster of shrines,stations, rosary walks, holy wells, caves, sacred trees, and otherfeatures of sacred topography that prepare the way for the pil-grims' encounter with the most sacred image, that of the Christ,Virgin, or saint, which is the ultimate goal of the journey. As oneapproaches the Holy of Holies the symbols become denser, richer,more involuted-the landscape itself is coded into symbolic unitspacked with cosmological and theological meaning.Recently I received a letter from the Israeli scholar, ShlomoDeshen of Tel-Aviv University, who has published extensively onthe sociology of religion, briefly outlining for me the pilgrimagestructure of Israel today-which principally concerns Oriental and223


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The Centerout There: Pilgrim's GoalNorth African but not European Jews. What he says about Israel,mutatis mutandis, also applies to modern Mexico. He writes thatthere are dozens of small pilgrimages rooted in localized personalitiespeculiar to specific "ethnic" [by "ethnic" he means "culturally distinctive"]groups and locales. Each of these events attracts up to 3,000 people. Inrecent years these memorial celebrations seem to have become increasinglypopular. There is a gradation from memorial celebrations in domesticset

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