Pilgrims were walking to holy places long before Christianity named the practice
The word pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus, someone who has come from far away. Yet sacred journeys are far older than the Latin term: Greeks trekked to the oracles at Delphi and Dodona, and Athenians processed along a Sacred Way to Eleusis centuries before any Christian set out for Jerusalem.
At its simplest, a pilgrimage means travelling, often on foot, to a place that matters deeply within a faith, then coming home changed. Religions sanctify many kinds of spots: where a founder or saint was born or died, where a revelation or miracle happened, or where a god is believed to dwell. Shrines and temples grow up around such sites, and visitors arrive hoping for healing, answers or some other spiritual gain. The scholar Ian Reader stresses that motives are mixed, blending the lofty with the practical, from seeking enlightenment to asking favours for oneself or for dead relatives.
Ancient examples are everywhere. Egypt, Mithraic Persia, India, China and Japan all had pilgrim traditions. The Eleusinian mysteries began with a walk from the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens along the Hierá Hodós. Early Hebrew pilgrims went to Shiloh, Dan and Bethel before Jerusalem became the focus of three annual festivals, among them Passover and Shavuot. Hinduism speaks of tirtha yatra, a journey to a ford or crossing, while Buddhists travel to Lumbini, to Bodh Gaya where the Buddha found enlightenment, to Sarnath where he first preached, and to Kushinagar where he died.
Some pilgrims had no destination at all. Early Celtic Christian wanderers called the Peregrinari Pro Christ, or white martyrs, abandoned home and clan and trusted Providence to guide them, founding abbeys and spreading their faith across Britain and continental Europe as they went. Christian travel to the Holy Land is described from the fourth century, when Saint Jerome encouraged it and Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, helped establish it, though Origen had gone in the third.
Pilgrimage has also been big business. In the Middle Ages, lodging at popular shrines and later organised group tours around the Mediterranean made it a real economic sector, and better infrastructure from the 19th century reshaped it again. Researchers Wallace and Jean Dalby Clift have even proposed it as a Jungian archetype, and some studies report that pilgrimage walks bring physical, psychological and social benefits.
Source: Pilgrimage
