Pilgrimage refers to purposeful travel often done to demonstrate devotion to sites or places that adherents consider holy. The journey can be short or lengthy – as near as the neighborhood church or as far as another hemisphere. It can take a day, weeks, months, or even years. Bonnie Wheeler argues that pilgrimage is a manifestation that “life is the struggle of restless against rest; this piercing into life exiles us from our quiet roots” (Wheeler 36).
The argument Wheeler makes is that the purposeful travel to sacred sites affirms human agency, and that people often use pilgrimage as a way to arouse and contain desires that are otherwise fulfilled only in the devotee’s paradise and satisfied in their thoughts and imagination. Meaning is volitional and a gift that individuals with conflicting yearnings, such as pilgrims, give themselves and one another.
Wheeler seeks to balance Victor W. Turner’s pilgrimage thesis with his confluence model of pilgrimage. The former views pilgrimage as a social undertaking and emphasizes the liminal nature of pilgrimaging communities. According to Turner’s understanding, the social experience of pilgrimage consists of communitas. Put differently, while hierarchical political structures differentiate people by positions and social roles, communitas often comprise communities of equals who recognize each other wholly. According to this view, pilgrimages are occasions for experiencing communitas. Therefore, the Turner thesis views pilgrimages as journeys to a sacred communitas source that can be a source of renewal and healing.
Contrarily, Wheeler’s confluence theory views pilgrimage as communal as well as fragmented and private or personal. This confluence model makes it possible to see how opposing ideologies are felt and heard, and how people experience differences in the pursuit of fulfilling personal desires. These desires fill all spatial dimensions as pilgrims move confluently and ritualize what wheeler describes as “common space” (Wheeler 29). He uses the example of the Mecca pilgrimage – which is open to all Islam denominations and where prayer is situated in space – to illustrate how such journeys sometimes happen at the confluence of leisure (tourism) and devotion.
Wheeler’s confluence model offers a new understanding of the concept of pilgrimage by characterizing groups with divergent beliefs and needs traveling and sojourning to sacred sites. It also accounts for individual people whose private and frequently competing needs, identities, and desires align and go beyond the fringes of the corporeal into the collective. This way, confluence delineates the common space.
At the core of Wheeler’s confluence theory of pilgrimage is the argument for the distinction between the communal or collective and the private or personal. In other words, the theory makes a case for pilgrimage as a both a sacred and secular undertaking, as well as the division between the popular and the institutional. Wheeler aptly captures this view in his statement, “pilgrimage is not a monolithic institution; it shifts meaning as often as it shifts ritual centers” (27).
Wheeler’s theory can be applied to two pilgrimage examples studied this semester, which are the Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–1065 and the Hajj. The first was a mammoth pilgrimage to Jerusalem that preceded the First Crusade. It was led by several notable personalities, including Bishops Gunther of Bamberg, Otto of Ratisbon, and William of Utrecht, as well as Archbishop Seigfried of Mainz; its function went beyond the officially sanctioned. The German pilgrimage occurred at the confluence of the individual faith of the believers and the need to enhance the Papacy’s wealth, privilege, and influence. It represented an inaugural trip for most believers that would be defined by the ritual accomplished at the conclusion of the trip.
The pilgrimages of Christians from early Church rested principally on biblical and Hebrew traditions. The journey to Jerusalem represented a historical and cultural basis of the Great German Pilgrimage and other Christian pilgrimages. Wheeler notes, “each Christian, and the church itself, were inevitably moving on sacred pilgrimage to the heavenly city even while living side-by-side with the ‘Other,’ the non-believer” (30). However, through the Great German Pilgrimage, the pope and other crusaders also hoped to inflame Christian passion and provoke the First Crusade. There was already a conflict between Muslims and Christians nearly three decades before the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A war was in the offing in the Holy Land, brought about by adversaries of Christ and something had to be done.
It is evident that the Great German Pilgrimage occurred at the confluence of individual need for spiritual nourishment and renewal and enhance the Papacy’s influence and authority by provoking the First Crusade. The confluence model is also essential in explaining the Hajj, an annual pilgrimage by Muslims to Mecca. The Hajj can be conceptualized as a pilgrimage that goes past the sacred and sometimes transforms into religious tourism.
Viewed from the above perspective, the confluence model helps account for the numerous religious voyages. For avoidance of doubt, this confluence is between pilgrimage and tourism, wherein both the pilgrim-tourist and the pilgrim move towards the sacred site or location. From the discussion above, it is clear how Wheeler’s confluence model contributes to the understanding of the two pilgrimages mentioned above.
The confluence theory offers vital insights into pilgrimages as being both communal and also individual. These journeys often occur at the confluence of religious devotion and tourism or devotion and other interests of the pilgrims (the collective and the private or personal). For Hajj, this can include religious tourism and a sacred sojourn simultaneously. Doctrinal changes that have occurred over the decades have allowed diverse and extremely elaborate Islamic pilgrimages to develop. The number of believers to Mecca now exceed those who observe the official and Quran obligated Hajj pilgrimages.
Works Cited
Wheeler, Bonnie. “Models of Pilgrimage: From Communitas to Confluence.” Journal of Ritual Studies, vol. 13, 1999, pp. 26-41.