Journeys and Destinations : Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning [1 ed.] 9781443850056, 9781443847537

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Journeys and Destinations

Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning

Edited by

Alex Norman

Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning, Edited by Alex Norman This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Alex Norman and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4753-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4753-7

For Finn and Teddy One on his journey, one at his destination

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ....................................................................................................... ix Both Journeys and Destinations Alex Norman Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 History, Authenticity, and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval While Walking Saint Cuthbert’s Way Carole M. Cusack Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 23 Identity, Meaning and Tourism on the Kokoda Trail Robert Saunders Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 47 Seeking a Pagan Cathedral: The Pagan Trail in South-West England Morandir Armson Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 69 The Location of the Sacred: Methodological Reconsiderations of the Sacredness of Place Sarah K. Balstrup Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 87 The Beginning that is Already an End: Finding the Significance of Labyrinthine Travel Renée Köhler-Ryan Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 109 Journeys of Empowerment: Medieval Women and Pilgrimage Joanna Kujawa Chapter Seven ......................................................................................... 129 The Turn East: ‘New’ Religious Consciousness and Travel to India after Blavatsky Alex Norman

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Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 159 Reflexivity and Objectivity in the Study of a Modern Esoteric Teacher: In the Footsteps of G. I. Gurdjieff Johanna J. M. Petsche Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 177 The Kopan Experience as Transformative Experience: An Exploration of Participant Responses to the Ten-Day Introduction to Buddhism Course at Kopan Monastery, Nepal Glenys Eddy Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 199 Crossing Boundaries: Travel and Muslim Women Lisa Worthington Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 217 To Stay or to Leave: The Dilemma of Ancient Chinese Literati and Exilic Writing Ping Wang Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 243 The shluchim, the Rebbe, and the tiggun olam: The Two Pilgrimages within the World of the Chabad Lubavitch Simon Theobald Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 265 Out With the Tide: Colin McCahon and Imaginative Pilgrimage Zoe Alderton Contributors ............................................................................................. 287 Index ....................................................................................................... 293

PREFACE BOTH JOURNEYS AND DESTINATIONS ALEX NORMAN

The experience of travel intrigues us humans. To journey, to seek out a destination, to look back from afar upon our homelands, upon our people, and upon ourselves, these things have captivated the human imagination, it seems, for as long as we have been able to record our thoughts materially. Probably it is a phenomenon older still. The quickening of the pulse and the catch of the breath as one sees for the first time some magnificent, new vista does not seem a recent addition to the catalogue of human experience. Wonder at something new is, at least for the moment, something innately human. So too our seemingly insatiable quest for knowledge; a quest that is intimately bound with the act of travel. The long course of evolution has arranged that our survival is linked to understanding and knowledge. Often we go places not just to see them, but to know them in some sense, and to know more of the world in which we find ourselves. In the annals of human history our moments of discovery, enlightenment, and innovation have often occurred as a result of, or in order to foster a travel act of one kind or another. Travel is thus one of the key props and devices in the great drama that is humanity. The journeys human beings undertake leave tracks, and the destinations they seek out are inscribed by the cultures travellers bring with them. These are traceable through the methods of the social sciences and history. Travel, however, is a relative newcomer as a focus of study in these fields. Indeed, traditionally, editors of volumes on the various phenomena encompassed by the term ‘travel’ (tourism, pilgrimage, backpacking, migration, movement, mobility, and many others) have introduced their work with statements opining the lack of scholarly research into the field. Thankfully this is no longer as necessary as it once was. We have sufficient now to move forward with our analysis of the minutiae of travel phenomena. The various fields of the academy have, in recent decades, contributed a wealth of scholarship on all matters

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pertaining to travel. Food, for example, can now provide an insight to the importance of looking at both journeys and destinations. Recent research into the interaction of foodways with travel habits illustrates the extent to which food, religious identity, and travel function as markers of meaning.1 Travellers moving in such a mode seek out certain foods with which to mark themselves – by way of consuming them – with the signifiers of their social identity. Likewise, food itself can become a part of the identity of a destination, and thereby used in marketing and promotion.2 For the traveller, a particular food becomes the destination, where to arrive is to consume the specific meal. There are many other such examples of components of human lifeways that we might better understand through studying travel habits. The study of travel has therefore grown to be recognised as a field that not only combines the interests of many areas of research, but has significant implications for our understanding of the world around us. Among those implications are finer understandings of the impacts travel can have; on the host, on the traveller, on those left at home. Victor Turner and Erik Cohen both have been influential in this regard. Turner, along with his wife Edith, argued that the ritual dimension to the pilgrimage/tourist experience could not be overlooked.3 While the notion of tourism as a formal and ritualised practice in modern, secular Western societies is certainly questionable, Turner's emphasis on the structural unfamiliarity of travel, generally speaking, for most people. continues to have value as a scholarly lens. Similarly, Cohen’s phenomenological approach to analysing the mindset of tourists reminds us that humans are prone to remarkable change amid a quest for relative stasis.4 That so many of the early writers on tourism employed language that orbited the religious – authenticity, sacrality, meaning, identity – points to the importance of travel for the traveller and for the host. In the modern

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Amos S. Ron and Dallen J. Timothy, “The Land of Milk and Honey: Biblical Foods, Heritage and Holy Land Tourism,” Journal of Heritage Tourism (2013): 1– 14. 2 Yi-Chin Lin, Thomas E. Pearson, and Liping A. Cai, “Food as a Form of Destination Identity: A Tourism Destination Brand Perspective,” Tourism and Hospitality Research 11, no. 1 (January 2011): 30–48. 3 Victor Turner, “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191–230. 4 Erik Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Sociology 13, no. 2 (1979): 179–201.

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secular world, it seemed obvious, the religious needed to be replaced.5 This, however, also points most decidedly to the importance of travel to scholars of humanity. In casting about for words that could communicate the importance of this new field, the early researchers, like so many great explorers, landed upon those with weight and gravitas as the only ones suitable to describe the astounding view before them. As an example, the scholarly use of the term pilgrimage is now close to shedding its stigma as the veiled outlet of the great debate concerning secularisation. Scholars are increasingly recognising that ‘pilgrimage’ is an emic term employed to convey certain meanings and their journey’s location “within a complex of socio-spatial processes that are historically, culturally, and locally dependant.”6 Once scholars sought to prove the religious could be conceptually separated,7 and thus annexed from the rest of humanity’s social processes, by arguing for a sacred-profane dichotomisation of, for example, all travel phenomena. We now understand that the religious and the non-religious intermingle, overlap, and coincide,8 especially on the road. As but one example of the increased sophistication of scholarly understanding of travel phenomena, the question of pilgrimage and tourism is useful. However, scholars have also developed a much better understanding of the arguments about the good of tourism, often made by governments,9 but also sadly by organisations like the World Tourism Organisation, that are in fact part of the rhetoric of vested interest and hierarchy. Marxist theory and postcolonial studies, among others, have helped to shed light on the injustices that tourism may bring to a place or a

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Possibly the greatest of the early studies, in this respect, is Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6 Noga Collins-Kreiner, “Researching Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 2 (April 2010): 444. 7 Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 118–139. 8 See, for example, N. J. Demerath, “The Varieties of Sacred Experience: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Grove,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39, no. 1 (March 2000): 1–11; or Yves Lambert, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 303–333. 9 For example, Bojan Pancevski, “Get Packing: Brussels Decrees Holidays Are a Human Right,” The Times (UK), 18 April 2010, accessed February 20, 2012, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7100943.ece.

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people.10 Very importantly, the environmental impacts and outcomes of the tourism industry have now been made clear through committed research and scholarship.11 There can be little doubt that from the local to the global, all forms of mechanised travel have what now appear to be disproportionately negative impacts on environments compared to any putative positive social, economic, and political ones. Hopefully further research will help to stimulate investigation into sustainable travel technologies and practices such that they may be promoted in the future. These developments, and many more, highlight the importance of understanding both destinations and the journeys that take people to them. The project of editing this book was stimulated by the idea that understanding the thinking behind travel acts and habits could enhance our understanding of social facts and processes. It emerged out of a conference co-hosted by the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics and the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney in October, 2011, titled ‘The Philosophies of Travel’, convened to bring together scholars working on the paradigms of travel and the various ways travellers think about those same paradigms. These ‘philosophies of travel’ make vital revelations about the cultures from which travellers emerge. Travel might be initiated for change or as Samuel Johnson argued, to “regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” Equally, a journey may take place so as to ‘turn back’ on things reflectively, or, as Pliny wrote, “to see what we disregard when it is under our own eyes.” As it seems many societies have recognised through the millennia of human history, travel may function as education, forging, exploration (both of the worlds of others and of the self), as well as frivolity, hedonism, and colonialism. As such, this book looks at the habits, traditions, and writings of travellers from the past and the present in order to build a picture of what travel is and has been understood to be, for the traveller. This book uses a variety of methodological lenses. The scholarly contributions herein take travel practices seriously as expressions of culture and society, and of relevance as avenues for understanding the lives of human beings. The examples in this volume also take the idea of travel, and the thinking that surrounds the journeys and destinations examined, as expressions of the meaning of travel. As such it forms a 10

For example, Brian King, Abraham Pizam, and Ady Milman, “Social Impacts of Tourism: Host Perceptions,” Annals of Tourism Research 20, no. 4 (1993): 650– 665. 11 Graham Miller et al., “Public Understanding of Sustainable Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 3 (July 2010): 627–645.

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unique contribution to the scholarship on tourism through its concentration on the idea of journeying and of particular destinations, as opposed analysis of specific types of movement, however they may be conceived. Such methodological diversity is thanks largely to the authors who volunteered their time to contribute to this book. The chapters included herein cast light on topics as diverse as Emergent Church labyrinths, the travel of Chinese literati, and medieval revivals, along with meditation retreats and the notion of art works as travel portals. For this fascinating range of topics I am deeply thankful to all the authors, and especially so for their patience and perseverance in getting the volume ready for publication. In addition to acknowledging the work of the authors, thanks are also due to those who played their parts in the book’s creation. The first and greatest of those thanks should go to Annabel Carr who, as coconvenor for the ‘Philosophies of Travel’ conference, was largely responsible for its success. She has also been a constant source of encouragement for this project and would also have been a co-editor of this volume were it not for the tragic death of her newborn son, Theodore, in 2012. I, like many friends and colleagues, am honoured to remember Theodore and to bear witness to Annabel’s remarkable capacity for love, selflessness, and resilience. Thanks are also due for the ‘conference elves’ (as they are known in these parts) who helped over the course of the conference event: George Ioannides, Sarah Balstrup, Alexandra Dockrill, Wilna Fourie, Dominique Bromfield (née Wilson), Yvette Debergue and Simon Theobald. A number of my colleagues have also been invaluable for their help; Benjamin E. Zeller, George Chryssides, Douglas Ezzy, Julian Droogan, Adam Possamai, Mabel Lee, Paul Morris, Ulrike Gretzel, Mike Robinson, C. Michael Hall, and Kiran Shinde. Carole M. Cusack and Christopher Hartney have been sources of constant encouragement, and I am also indebted to Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Press for her patience and her invitation to publish this book. As ever, my partner in life, Abi Monaghan, has helped with moral support and critical reading, and with much needed encouragements to spend time on the couch watching The Office, and my son Finn deserves thanks for his tactical cuteness. As for the contents of the book itself; I leave that to you the reader to discover for yourself. Suffice it to say that for those of us engaged in the project of understanding the human condition, travel fascinates. As a collection of human behaviours it demands investigation for the complex of social processes, power relationships, and motivations that surround its examples. Despite its increasing presence as part of the normal, everyday life for millions of people around the world, travel retains the capacity to

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delight, to inspire, and to transform. In this volume, I and the other authors are proud to present our contributions, however small, to the understanding of this voice in the human fugue.

Bibliography Bruce, Steve. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Cohen, Erik. “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Sociology 13, no. 2 (1979): 179–201. Collins-Kreiner, Noga. “Researching Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations.” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 2 (April 2010): 440–456. Demerath, N. J. “The Varieties of Sacred Experience: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Grove.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39, no. 1 (March 2000): 1–11. King, Brian, Abraham Pizam, and Ady Milman. “Social Impacts of Tourism: Host Perceptions.” Annals of Tourism Research 20, no. 4 (1993): 650–665. Lambert, Yves. “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 303–333. Lin, Yi-Chin, Thomas E. Pearson, and Liping A. Cai. “Food as a Form of Destination Identity: A Tourism Destination Brand Perspective.” Tourism and Hospitality Research 11, no. 1 (January 2011): 30–48. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Miller, Graham, Kathryn Rathouse, Caroline Scarles, Kirsten Holmes, and John Tribe. “Public Understanding of Sustainable Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 3 (July 2010): 627–645. Pancevski, Bojan. “Get Packing: Brussels Decrees Holidays Are a Human Right.” The Times (UK), 18 April 2010. Accessed February 20, 2013. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7100943.ece. Ron, Amos S., and Dallen J. Timothy. “The Land of Milk and Honey: Biblical Foods, Heritage and Holy Land Tourism.” Journal of Heritage Tourism (2013): 1–14. Turner, Victor. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191–230.

CHAPTER ONE HISTORY, AUTHENTICITY, AND TOURISM: ENCOUNTERING THE MEDIEVAL WHILE WALKING SAINT CUTHBERT’S WAY CAROLE M. CUSACK

Introduction1 This chapter investigates three interlocking discourses that inform the marketing of, and the experience of walking, St Cuthbert’s Way: history (particularly the discourses of medievalism), tourism (evoking the religious pilgrimage), and identity (focused on the transformative notion of authenticity). Inaugurated in 1996, St Cuthbert’s Way is a sixty-two-mile (one hundred kilometre) heritage trail that connects the picturesque town of Melrose in the Scottish Borders to the ‘Holy Island’ of Lindisfarne (a tidal island on the Northumbrian coast).2 The walk is named for Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne (ca. 634-687CE), who in life and death was peculiarly engaged with religious travel. He became a monk at Melrose in 651CE and throughout his life journeyed extensively in Scotland and the north of England, allegedly founding churches in St Andrews and Edinburgh, among other sites.3 He was buried on Lindisfarne, and after his death a significant pilgrimage cult grew up around him and his relics. In 875 his body was exhumed by the monks who departed Holy Island due to persistent Vikings raids, and carried to locations as far apart as Melrose, 1

My thanks are due to my research assistant, Zoe Alderton, who assisted me with the initial library searches and note-taking for this chapter, and to Don Barrett, whose tireless encouragement has contributed in no small way to my research over the years. 2 Roger Noyce, The Complete Guide to St Cuthbert’s Way: Melrose to Holy Island and Holy Island to Melrose (Wilmslow: Sigma Leisure, 1999), iii-iv. 3 Roger Smith and Ron Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide (Edinburgh: The Stationery Office, 1997), xii-xv.

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Whithorn, Ripon, and Chester-le-Street, before he was interred in a splendid tomb in Durham’s Norman cathedral in 1104CE.4 His tomb was a popular place of pilgrimage and devotion until the Reformation, when Catholic shrines and sacred places in the landscape were disestablished or destroyed by Protestants who viewed such phenomena as ‘pagan’.5 The discourse of medievalism (like other positions focused on an ‘other’ to Western modernity such as orientalism) posits that the appeal of the medieval is linked to the notion that contemporary life is inauthentic and unsatisfying when compared to the ‘authenticity’ of the past.6 This is linked to the contemporary Western desire to be ‘spiritual’ while remaining outside of formal religion, which has resulted in religious practices such as pilgrimage being disembedded from traditional faith institutions, and becoming intimately imbricated with secular practices like travel, creating ‘fusion’ phenomena including spiritual tourism.7 Such practices are part of the quest for an authentic self that is core to contemporary Western spirituality, and which involves material consumption and bricolage.8 This ‘spirituality’ shares with medievalism the suspicion of Western modernity and secular culture and a yearning for an authentic personal identity. St Cuthbert, a historically significant figure, has been invoked in discussions of the development of English/British ‘identity’ in the early Middle Ages, and it has also been speculated that through the experience of landscape, modern people can encounter the past and encounter figures such as Cuthbert, and experience them ‘authentically’.9 This chapter emerged from the experience of walking St Cuthbert’s Way with my partner Don Barrett in the early October of 2006. The walking season finished on 30 September, which necessitated that we carry

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John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of the Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300-1200 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 167-168. 5 Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), passim. 6 Hyounggon Kim and Tazim Jamal, “Touristic Quest for Existential Authenticity,” Annals of Tourism Research 34, no. 1 (2007): 181-201. 7 Alex Norman, Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). 8 David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 118. 9 Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, eds Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 1-26.

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Image 1: The Square in Melrose (image courtesy of Don Barrett)

carry our luggage, rather than use a baggage transfer service. Victor and Edith Turner claimed that “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.”10 St Cuthbert’s Way is marketed through strategies of history and heritage, making it more than simply a hike in the countryside or a mode of exercise. Walkers encounter the haunting Anglo-Saxon landscape (in a region of Britain that is sparsely populated and scarcely industrialized, and thus a convincingly medieval topography in the modern world); the trail is bookended by major monastic sites of medieval Christianity, and many smaller, less important churches are visited en route. Further, as Sean Slavin has argued, the simple activity of walking along a pilgrimage trail offers the possibility of self-transformation, albeit of a secular kind. He observed that “[t]he practice of walking allowed us to understand and explore a nexus between the body, self and the world.”11 While the lure of the authentically medieval may prove a chimaera, in that the route offers a 10

Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 11 Sean Slavin, “Walking as Spiritual Practice: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,” Body and Society 9 (2003): 16.

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sequence of carefully constructed sites and spectacles that are more akin to what David Brown terms “genuine fakes,”12 the process of embodied movement through the landscape may nevertheless provide an authentic mode of self-transformation.

Cuthbert, Medieval Sanctity and Religious Travel When Cuthbert became a monk at Old Melrose in 651, the Papallysponsored mission to the Anglo-Saxons led by Bishop Augustine who arrived in 597CE was just passing from living memory. Paganism was in decline and a struggle had developed between the Rome-oriented AngloSaxon Church and the Irish Church, which looked to its parent monastery of Iona in the Hebrides and ultimately to Ireland for leadership. The differences between the two Churches involved such matters as the calculation of the date of Easter and the type of tonsure worn by monks. At the 664CE Synod of Whitby, King Oswiu of Northumbria settled the Easter dispute in favour of the Roman party. Cuthbert was educated in the Irish tradition, but after the Synod of Whitby he served as Prior of Lindisfarne under Abbot Eata, during which time Lindisfarne (founded by the Irish Aidan in 635CE) adopted the Roman usage.13 Cuthbert’s sanctity impressed his fellow Christians and around 700CE an anonymous monk of Lindisfarne wrote a Life of Cuthbert after the saint had been disinterred in 698CE and found to be physically incorrupt. The Venerable Bede (ca. 672-735), a monk of Jarrow and historian of the Anglo-Saxon church, composed a verse Life of Cuthbert in 716, wrote a prose Life about five years later, and also wrote about Cuthbert in his Historia Ecclesiastica, completed around 731.14 It is from Bede that Cuthbert’s travels during his life are known. His postmortem journeys, as his corpse was carried around the north of England and the south of Scotland by the monks of Lindisfarne after Viking raids caused them to evacuate the monastery, are chronicled in Symeon of Durham’s Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius, hoc est Dunelmensis, Ecclesie (‘The Little Book on the Origins and Progress of this Church, That Is Of Durham’), which was written between 1104 and 1107CE. Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 955-1010) also wrote a life of

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David Brown, “Genuine Fakes,” in The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth-Making in Tourism, ed. Tom Selwyn (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 33-47. 13 Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967[1947]), 124-126. 14 D. H. Farmer, “Introduction,” in The Age of Bede, ed. D. H. Farmer, trans. J.F. Webb, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 16.

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Cuthbert, testifying to his emergence as a national, rather than a ‘regional’, saint.15 Bede portrays Cuthbert as a pious child, though as a young man he appears to have done military service before entering the monastery. Prior to being tonsured he received a vision of St Aidan being taken into heaven, and was miraculously given food for himself and his horse by God, when journeying at the start of winter. He became a monk of Old Melrose, and a few years later accompanied Abbot Eata to Ripon in North Yorkshire, where a new monastery was founded.16 Bede’s vita paints a portrait of Cuthbert as a man in harmony with nature who had a close bond with birds and animals (the common eider ducks found in the Farne Islands are still called ‘Cuddy ducks’ after Cuthbert). Bede also records an anecdote concerning Cuthbert praying throughout the night, standing up to his neck in the sea. At daybreak he came out, knelt down on the sand, and prayed. Then two otters bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur. They finished, received his blessing, and slipped back to their watery home.17

Preaching, pastoral care, and evangelism took Cuthbert considerable distances: he travelled to Coldingham and Lindisfarne on the east coast, to Carlisle in the west, and is believed to have founded churches in Scotland at Dull, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. In his last years as Bishop of Lindisfarne he lived as a hermit on isolated Inner Farne. He died in 687CE and was buried on Lindisfarne. Almost immediately, his tomb became the site of miracle cures and other manifestations of his sanctity.18 Eleven years after Cuthbert’s death his tomb was opened and his body discovered to be incorrupt. He was re-interred in an above ground sarcophagus in the church on the island, which was tantamount to being unofficially canonized. The see of Lindisfarne prospered through pilgrimage

15 Mechthild Gretsch, Ælfric and the Cult of the Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65-66. 16 Bede, “Life of Cuthbert,” in Farmer and Webb, The Age of Bede, 50-51. 17 Bede, “Life of Cuthbert,” 56. 18 Rex Gardner notes that “[i]f we exclude the miraculous from his story [Bede’s prose Life of Cuthbert], of the 46 chapters in his biography we are left with only six (chapters 9, 16, 26, 37, 39, 40).” In R. Gardner, “Miracles of Healing in AngloCeltic Northumbria as Recorded by the Venerable Bede and His Contemporaries: A Reappraisal in the Light of Twentieth Century Experience,” British Medical Journal 287, no. 6409 (1983): 1927.

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to the saint’s tomb, but on 7 June 793CE the invading Vikings sacked Lindisfarne. Symeon of Durham states: They came like stinging hornets, like ravening wolves, they made raids on all sides, slaying not only cattle but priests and monks. They came to the church at Lindisfarne, and laid all waste, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug down the altars and bore away the treasure of the church. Some of the brethren they slew, some they carried away captive, some they drove out naked after mocking and vexing them. Some they drowned in the sea.19

After this traumatic experience, the first recorded attack by Scandinavian pirates on a Christian site, Viking raids become increasingly frequent and the coastal monasteries of Christendom, including Iona, Wearmouth, Jarrow and Noirmoutier, were the sites of further attacks. At Lindisfarne the monks were relieved to discover that the tomb of their saint had not been violated by the invaders. The damaged buildings were repaired and the community continued, precariously, to occupy the island.20 In 875, desperate and vulnerable as Viking dominance of the sea and coastal regions grew, the monks of Lindisfarne exhumed Cuthbert’s body and departed the island, beginning a pilgrimage that lasted more than a century. This ended in the re-burial of the saint behind the high altar of Durham Cathedral, approximately seventy miles to the north of Holy Island, in 1070CE. During this period of exile, the monks carried with them major cult items, including the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript.21 Sites at which the saint’s body rested included Whithorn in Dumfriesshire, Chester-le-Street in County Durham, Crayke in North Yorkshire, and Ripon, Cuthbert’s residence during his early years as a monk.22 The importance of Durham as his final resting place emerged in 995CE, after the coffin became bogged and it was intuited that Cuthbert wished to be interred at nearby ‘Dunholm’. In 1070 a wattle church was erected and the saint’s body ceased its perambulations. Three years later a stone building, the White Church, replaced the temporary church, and in 1104 Cuthbert’s

19 Symeon of Durham, quoted in M. Scott Weightman, Holy Island (Seahouses: Weightman, 1987), 6. 20 D. J. Hall, English Medieval Pilgrimage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 84. 21 Rupert Bruce-Mitford, “The Lindisfarne Gospels in the Middle Ages and After,” The British Museum Quarterly 29, nos 3-4 (1965): 98-100. 22 Hall, English Medieval Pilgrimage, 88.

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body was translated to the new, but as yet uncompleted, cathedral of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, to lie behind the high altar.23

Medievalism and Heritage in the Cult of St Cuthbert The cult of Cuthbert was, from the beginning, peculiarly rich in material objects connected to the saint. Alan Thacker notes that he was buried in a precious cloth ‘given to him by Abbess Verca … [and] interred in a stone sarcophagus given by another high ecclesiastic, Abbot Cudda … A golden fillet adorned the brow of the saint and at his breast hung the famous gold and garnet cross’.24 Cuthbert’s corpse was gorgeously clad in luxurious ecclesiastical attire, and the exhumation and translation of the saint’s relics in 698CE was accompanied by the manufacture of a multitude of further cult objects, the most celebrated being the magnificent insular illuminated manuscript, the Lindisfarne Gospels. Michelle Brown comments that the colophon added by Aldred, the provost of Chester-le-Street, in 970CE which names “himself, Eadfrith and Aethelwold (both bishops of Lindisfarne) and Billfrith the anchorite as those responsible for constructing the Gospels ‘for God and for St Cuthbert’ … embodies a well-preserved piece of community folklore” linking the text directly to the saint.25 Other cult objects, like the small Stonyhurst Gospel of St John that was placed in Cuthbert’s coffin in 698, were probably gifts to the community on the important occasion of the translation of the relics. Bede states that the monks placed Cuthbert’s incorrupt body in a “light chest” (levis theca) in 698. John Higgett argues that the oak casket, decorated with incised halflength apostles, which was one of up to four coffins from which fragments were identified in 1827 when the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral was opened, is certainly the original coffin, the “light chest.”26

23

Hall, English Medieval Pilgrimage, 89-91. Alan Thacker, “Lindisfarne and the Origins of the Cult of St Cuthbert,” in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, eds Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), 105. 25 Michelle P. Brown, “The Lindisfarne Scriptorium from the Late Seventh to the Early Ninth Centuries,” in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, eds Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), 152. 26 John Higgett, “The Iconography of St Peter in Anglo-Saxon England and St Cuthbert’s Coffin,” in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, eds Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), 268-270. 24

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In 934 King Athelstan “presented rich gifts to St Cuthbert, among which a stole and maniple are expressly inventoried.”27 These beautiful and rare medieval embroideries have survived to the twenty-first century, as have Cuthbert’s pectoral cross, portable altar, the Stonyhurst Gospels, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and finally the carved coffin, which John Crook interpreted as a British adaptation of “fashions in Merovingian Francia” regarding the veneration of saints.28 Until Henry VIII instigated the English Reformation in the 1530s the shrine of St Cuthbert attracted a constant stream of pilgrims. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the medieval Catholic pilgrimage to Durham was interrupted. However, in the early nineteenth century a combination of factors, including the Romantic movement’s interest in both picturesque medieval ruins (whether genuine or reconstructed) and the exotic Catholicism they evoked, and the Enlightenment values of freedom that facilitated the removal of religious discrimination in the form of legislation such as the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, resulted in a revival of Catholic devotional practices in both the high Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.29 The second half of the nineteenth century in England was a time of accelerated change, which was characterised by the retreat of institutional Christianity, the development of new religious options (such as Spiritualism, founded by the Fox sisters in America in the 1850s and the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott), and the growth of individualism and consumer capitalism as factors in the formation of the modern lifestyle. Increased affluence also manifested a Romantic dimension, considered in the light of consumer culture. Colin Campbell has argued that the origins of modern consumerism lie in Romanticism, in that the imagination fuels a cycle of desire and acquisition that “never actually closes.”30 This cycle of desire and acquisition applies equally to experiences (of the past, of nature, of exotic cultures, of culinary or sensual treats) as it does to objects pure and simple. The emergent secularity of the nineteenth century West also facilitated the complex ways in which travel could be used to construct personal meaning and identity. In the Victorian era, historical 27 G. Baldwin Brown and Mrs Archibald Christie, “S. Cuthbert’s Stole and Maniple in Durham,” The Burlington Magazine 23, no. 121 (1913): 3. 28 Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of the Saints, 169. 29 Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1-37. 30 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (York: Alcuin Academic, 2005), 38.

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pilgrimage routes in the United Kingdom in addition to landscapes of great beauty, were enthusiastically appreciated by both those sharing a Romantic sensibility such as that evidenced by the poet William Wordsworth and his circle in the Lake District, and by prominent Christians like the clergyman, social reformer and novelist Charles Kingsley, who coined the term ‘Muscular Christianity’. Kingsley was a prodigious hiker, horseman and rower, and advocated a manly and physically robust image of Jesus. He argued that physical activity contributed “not merely to physical, but to moral health.”31 Mass tourism emerged around the same time, with Thomas Cook’s invention of the package tour in the 1840s, which was dependent on what Sharma terms the “growth of leisure time but also on the structure of free time and the economics of the tourism industry.”32 Traditional views of travel posited tourists as ‘secular’ and pilgrims as ‘religious’; this position depended upon research by scholars like Victor Turner and Edith Turner, who viewed pilgrim behaviour within a highly structured social sphere, and whose theories posited a basic dichotomy between ‘sacred’ pilgrimage and ‘profane’ tourism.33 Religious pilgrimage thus was a journey from the profane to the sacred, which necessitated a collectively recognised location of the sacred. However, the nineteenth century innovated new modes for people to interact with history, the landscape, and their own identityformation, and these ways included travel and the touristic appreciation of heritage sites. Within the secular context, meaning for individual traveller took on dynamic forms, which were not fixed with reference to traditional institutional markers. This phenomenon was intensified in the twentieth century to incorporate what David Lyon’s terms the melange of freefloating symbols and ‘brands’ from which contemporary individuals choose to construct identity.34 Lyon notes that both pilgrimage and tourism can be informed by similar conditions. Pilgrims and tourists are not easily separable; indeed, it is possible that tourists might utilise religious traditions and sites for multiple religious and secular purposes.35 This enables touristic phenomena to be read through a religious studies lens and

31

Charles Kingsley, quoted in William J. Baker, Playing With God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32. 32 K. K. Sharma, Tourism and Socio-Cultural Development (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1994), 181. 33 Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1-39. 34 Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 74-76. 35 Gisbert Rinschede, “Forms of Religious Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 51-67.

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vice versa. Justine Digance’s redefinition of ‘pilgrimages’ as “journeys redolent with meaning” is of particular significance for this chapter.36

Heritage and Pilgrimage in Walking St Cuthbert’s Way The cult of St Cuthbert encountered the modern world in 1827 when “Dr James Raine, librarian of Durham Cathedral and rector of Meldon, opened St Cuthbert’s tomb in the feretory on 17 May,” an event reported in local print media as having “occasioned a great sensation in the town.”37 This exhumation took place against a backdrop of sectarian tensions between Catholics and members of the Church of England, which constituted a prologue to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act two years later. The Catholic tradition of pilgrimage had been interrupted by the Reformation and was revived at selected sites throughout the United Kingdom after the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act. The Marian shrine at Walsingham, originally founded in 1061CE by Richeldis de Faverches as a site of devotion to the Holy House of Nazareth, is a useful comparative example because, apart from its being almost contemporary with the foundation of Durham Cathedral, as Simon Coleman writes, “Walsingham’s picturesque, folly-like ruins proved appealing to a romanticising form of late Victorian spirituality.”38 Charlotte Boyd, a convert to Catholicism, purchased the fourteenth century Slipper Chapel in the late nineteenth century, and in the first half of the twentieth century both Roman Catholic and High Anglican pilgrimages were instituted. Protestant Christians were deeply suspicious, and in 1926 the Bishop of Durham, Herbert Hensley Henson, published an opinion piece, ‘Pilgrimage’, in the Evening Standard of 1 September, arguing that the Walsingham pilgrimage (in its High Anglican form led by the charismatic Father Hope Patten) had revived “mere ‘pageants’ rather than truly ‘religious acts’.”39 Coleman’s fascinating ethnography of Walsingham at the turn of the third Christian millennium exemplifies the changes in both religious 36

Justine Digance, “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent with Meaning,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006), 36-48. 37 Richard N. Bailey, “St Cuthbert’s Relics: Some Neglected Evidence,” in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, eds Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), 231. 38 Simon Coleman, “Meanings of Movement, Place and Home at Walsingham,” Culture and Religion 1, no. 2 (2000): 157. 39 Coleman, “Meanings of Movement,” 158.

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adherence and the functions of religion since the 1950s. He remarks of Walsingham that the town has moved: towards an almost exclusive focus on its key selling points for external consumption. Local shops selling food and agricultural equipment have been replaced by souvenir boutiques as well as a number of cafés and restaurants. Many of the houses in the middle of the village are also now owned or hired by pious incomers who are attracted to Walsingham for its sacred associations. The centre caters to the expectations of pilgrims who expect to find an ‘authentic’ mediaeval village … In contrast, the backstage of the village is made up of the distinctly non-mediaeval residential estates, located behind the Anglican shrine, which might never be seen by the visitor.40

In the early twenty-first century, sectarian concerns have largely ceased to matter, and many who are not Christian at all may journey to Walsingham, to sightsee and relish the historical setting, or even to participate in religious ceremonies, whether as part of a spiritual quest or merely as recreation or diversionary entertainment.41 The opening of the St Cuthbert’s Way trail exemplifies the modern approach to both the medieval past and the Christian religion. Roger Smith and Ron Shaw, who both worked in the tourism industry in the Scottish Borders region, mapped the route of the Way in 1995 and were directly engaged in building the physical infrastructure of the walk.42 They wrote of the opening ceremonies: the Way was inaugurated at two equally pleasant but distinctively different ceremonies in late July 1996. At the magnificent ruin of Melrose Abbey, St Cuthbert himself made a reappearance after 1,300 years to give the new walk his blessing, hoping it would become a modern pilgrimage in his memory. Three days later in Wooler, a large group of people walked part of the route to ‘first foot’ it in style.43 40

Coleman, “Meanings of Movement,” 159. Erik Cohen’s influential five-stage typology of tourists posits motivations along a continuum, in which Recreational is the most secular mode, with Diversionary, Experiential, Experimental and Existential gradually progressing to more spiritual modes. See Erik Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Sociology 13 (1979): 179-201. 42 St Cuthbert’s Way has an official website, accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.stcuthbertsway.net/index.html. This site has a ‘Walkers’ Comments’ page that was added in November 2011. In November 2012 there were still no comments posted. 43 Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, vii. 41

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These two events focus on the twin components of medieval Christian pilgrimage, a saint whose residence in life, burial in death, or miraculous relic hallows the site to which the route leads, and the group of pious pilgrims who journey along it. Yet there is more than a touch of Bishop Henson’s ‘mere pageants’ with an actor portraying St Cuthbert (a humble hermit who would certainly not have desired a pilgrimage in his honour), and David Brown’s ‘genuine fakes’ are a crucial part of the mix, in that the monastery which Cuthbert entered was Old Melrose, not Melrose where the beautiful ruined abbey is a twelfth century Cistercian foundation.44 The St Cuthbert’s Way trail provides the walker with both real and manufactured encounters with the saint. As with all major trails in Britain it is clearly waymarked, and the symbol chosen was the saint’s famous gold and garnet pectoral cross.45 The official guide to the walk acknowledges sights and attractions, some more and some less connected to the historical Cuthbert. After a steep climb from Melrose up into the Eildon Hills (stronghold of the Celtic Votadini, which now afford excellent views of Dere Street, the Roman road), walkers then reach the town of St Boswells, named for the Prior of Old Melrose, Cuthbert’s mentor Boisil. Further along the trail the village of Maxton “claims to be the birthplace of the medieval scholar John Duns Scotus, more often associated with the Berwickshire town of Duns which has become part of his name.”46 Yet, as Mary Low notes, genuine traces of the saint are often ignored; the medieval church of Maxton, a village near Newtown St Boswells, was first recorded as “St Cuthbert’s Church of Mackistun,” a fact that the guidebooks fail to mention.47 Given equal billing with the landscape and genuinely medieval sites are a multitude of other attractions. Upon reaching the Dryburgh footbridge across the River Tweed, Smith and Shaw offer the following suggestions: a short diversion from here across the river would enable you to visit Dryburgh Abbey … which dates back to 1150 … The abbey holds the grave of Sir Walter Scott and other members of his family, and also of Field Marshal Earl Haig, the army commander from World War I … through the village from the abbey [is] the large sandstone statue of William Wallace … 8 metres (25 feet) high with shield and huge sword 44

Brown, “Genuine Fakes,” 33-47. Noyce, The Complete Guide to St Cuthbert’s Way, 8. 46 Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, 17. 47 Mary Low, St Cuthbert’s Way: A Pilgrims’ Companion (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2000), 86. 45

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[which] was carved in 1814 by John Smith … Since the release of the film Braveheart about Wallace’s life, the statue has become much better-known and more popular with visitors.48

It is important to note the authors’ acknowledgement that sites with connections to contemporary popular culture will be more popular with tourists. Another site worthy of attention is the nearby folly known as the Temple of the Muses, a circular structure of Classical design that originally housed a statue of Apollo, but now contains a statue of three nude females, representing the Muses. This structure was erected in honour of the Border poet James Thompson (1700-1748) in 1817. The now little-read Thompson wrote The Seasons (1730), which is regarded as one of the finest nature poems in English, and also the patriotic lyrics of ‘Rule Britannia’.49 As with Christianity, the age of passionate interest in poetry is past, but modern people can still engage with poets – as with saints – through the touristic lens. St Cuthbert’s Way usually takes four days, and the landscape becomes significantly more medieval and charged with the presence of the saint after leaving Kirk Yetholm, the mid-point of the walk. The two days from Kirk Yetholm to Holy Island involve walking through remote and largely uninhabited country, dotted with prehistoric monuments. The border crossing from Scotland into England is a short distance from Kirk Yetholm, and the walker now encounters major sites of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, two scholars who work on the medieval landscape, have mused that, “positing a Northumbrian horizon or a sense of Northumbria as a region, we … ask questions about place and time, about places in time.”50 Following Edward Casey, they distinguish between ‘empty’ space and ‘full’ place by positing that places ‘gather’ through human interactions with sites. They argue that, “the ‘gathering’ that constitutes place in this view also engages spatial and temporal dimensions, and clears, in one sense, a continuous space where we can think within and across centuries via the concept of place.”51 48

Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, 11-12. David Orkin, “The Tweed: Take a Trip on a River Flowing With History,” The Independent, April 21 2007, accessed June 16, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/the-tweed-take-a-trip-on-a-river-flowingwith-history-445500.html. 50 Lees and Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” 4. 51 Lees and Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” 5. 49

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Walking past the vast Iron Age hillfort of Yeavering Bell, in the shadow of which stood the expansive Northumbrian royal settlement of Yeavering (Ad Gefrin), the site of the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria by the missionary Paulinus in 627CE, I was momentarily nonplussed to realise that nothing of the Anglo-Saxon occupation of the site was visible to the walker. Where was the great hall in which the oftquoted ‘anonymous thegn’ compared the human life to a sparrow flitting through the king’s guest hall, briefly in the warmth and comfort, but returning to the cold and storm from whence it flew? Where was the temple, so shockingly profaned by the pagan high priest Coifi, when he declared for Christianity, saying to King Edwin: None of your followers has devoted himself more earnestly than I have to the worship of our gods, but nevertheless there are many who receive greater benefits and greater honour from you than I do and are more successful in all their undertakings. If the gods had any power they would have helped me more readily, seeing that I have always served them with greater zeal. So it follows that if, on examination, these new doctrines which have now been explained to us are found to be better and more effectual, let us accept them at once without any delay.52

As these topics formed part of my doctoral thesis, perhaps significantly awarded in 1996, the year St Cuthbert’s Way opened for walkers, I knew that archaeologists habitually backfill sites, and that the palace was still there, although hidden.53 With Lees and Overing, I was sure that although Yeavering lay buried, I had nevertheless “developed a pervasive awareness of the presence” of that particular place.54

52

Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 183. 53 Brian Hope-Taylor, Yeavering An Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria (London: Department of the Environment Archaeological Reports No. 7, 1977). 54 Lees and Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” 12.

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Image 2: The Pilgrim’s Path (image courtesy of Don Barrett)

Spiritual Tourism, Secular Pilgrimage? Heritage Walks and Personal Identity Throughout the second half of the Way I was drawn further into an emotional reverie concerning the landscape and the trail. During that time it seemed we were almost entirely removed from modern life. On the third and fourth days there are no villages on the trail, the only substantial settlement being Wooler, the overnight stop on the third day. This sense of isolation from contemporary society plunged me deeper into my remembered doctoral studies, which focused on the conversion to Christianity of the Pagan Germanic peoples of the early Middle Ages.55 On the final day of walking, from Wooler to Holy Island, the most evocative site was St Cuthbert’s Cave, a large natural cave located in a dense wood, at which the monks of Lindisfarne stopped on their journey bearing the exhumed body of Cuthbert in 875CE. Smith and Shaw describe it as “a wonderfully evocative place … you can imagine the 55 Carole M. Cusack, Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (London: Cassell, 1998).

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monks laying down their precious burden to shelter there after the traumatic events of the previous days.”56 Imagination is key to the experience of many of the sites along St Cuthbert’s Way; Yeavering has already been mentioned, but neighbouring Tom Tallon’s Grave, a huge Bronze Age cairn that was destroyed by farmers in 1859 (so that they could use the stone to build drystone walls) is another place where presence is more profoundly signalled by absence. Lees and Overing view such sites as filled with opportunity; offering “new possibilities for storytelling, of continuing the story of the past into the present.”57 In his groundbreaking analysis, Dean MacCannell posited that what tourists sought, above all else, was to experience authenticity. He argued that the post-industrial West resulted in alienation for individuals from everyday life. The leisure activity of travel allows alienated individuals “to … quest for authentic experiences, perceptions and insights” that are unavailable in his or her profane life.58 Travel and the ‘otherness’ experienced as a tourist are coded as sacred, as ritual and practice that may afford self-transformation. Lees and Overing argue that Lindisfarne is a “visual paradox. It remains both center and margin … [It] is regularly packed with tourists ... Many of these modern visitors make the journey to Lindisfarne, as we did, in order to understand its isolation, to experience what it’s like to be there.”59 Arriving at Lindisfarne both sharpens and dulls the sense of engagement with Anglo-Saxon England. The walk has been lonely and silent, and the island monastery, connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, should strike the walker as the holy destination of the pilgrimage, as it is a site of sanctity specifically connected with Saint Cuthbert. Thus, Bede tells how a young boy who was possessed by demons was healed by the application of “soil that was mixed with water once used to bathe Cuthbert’s body.”60 Yet walkers pass by World War II concrete defences (pillboxes and tank traps) and have to cross a major railway line in order to reach the causeway, and the majority of people walk across on the roadway alongside the cars, because the sands of the old Pilgrims’ Path “are covered by water for a much longer 56

Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, 48. Lees and Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” 2. 58 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), 105. 59 Lees and Overing, “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape,” 17-18. 60 Nicholas Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 181. 57

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period than the causeway.”61 The pilgrim-tourist arrives on Lindisfarne and wanders in the ruins of the Priory, briefly elated by the joy of having finished St Cuthbert’s Way. The likely postscript is a visit to one of the tiny island’s two noisy and convivial pubs, filled with tourists who arrived by car and on coach trips, and utterly unlike the haunted landscape of the past four days.62

Conclusion The appeal of St Cuthbert for contemporary walkers is not easy to explain. Britain is a nominally Christian nation but church attendance is low, secularisation is evident, and unsurprisingly, knowledge of the great Christian saints of the early Middle Ages is severely limited. Roger Smith and Ron Shaw are frank about both the difficulties and opportunities of ‘marketing’ St Cuthbert in the late twentieth century: What can we find in Cuthbert’s life that is relevant to us today? His faith was without question, but it was a faith based on a deep knowledge and understanding of the natural world. He was never afraid of phenomena such as storms or winter snows, seeing them as part of the seasonal round. He loved all wild creatures and befriended them. It is clear from accounts of his life that Cuthbert found great solace and true refreshment in walking. Travelling at a natural pace on foot allows time for contemplation, and for cares and worries that surround us daily to be forgotten, for a while at least. Walking St Cuthbert’s Way can thus be enjoyed as a modern pilgrimage. There is still plenty of wildlife, and you may well experience variations of weather that would test a saint!63

This acknowledgement of the spiritual benefits intrinsic to the secular activity of walking and the appreciation of nature would seem to indicate that, for Smith and Shaw, the ‘pilgrimage’ of which they speak is a decidedly secular activity. However, Mary Low has argued that St Cuthbert’s Way is “not just for religious people … it is also for seekers and searchers” and that modern Christian pilgrims “are interested in more that just ‘churchy’ subjects and in outlooks and religions other than their own.”64 61

Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, 56. The incongruity of the bustling, sociable island was intensified by the fact that my partner and I had seen only one elderly couple (on two separate occasions) on the trail since the morning we left Kirk Yetholm. 63 Smith and Shaw, St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide, xv. 64 Low, St Cuthbert’s Way: A Pilgrims’ Companion, 16. 62

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History, Authenticity, and Tourism

The experience of walking St Cuthbert’s Way will be understood as simply walking, spiritual tourism, secular pilgrimage or religious pilgrimage depending on the level of personal religiosity of the walker. It is not too rash to speculate that the majority of walkers are not religious in a traditional Christian sense. After all, the Way is not an actual medieval pilgrim route, but rather a modern ‘take’ on journeys attributed to the Anglo-Saxon Cuthbert. Studies of Christian pilgrimages that have survived to (or been revived in) modernity, such as the Camino de Santiago, reveal that the typical ‘pilgrim’ is not traditionally ‘religious’ though he or she may well self-identify as ‘spiritual’ or be dealing with significant changes in life. Alex Norman has termed these people “spiritual tourists.”65 Yet an encounter with the formerly Christian landscape may well afford even the most secular walker an experience of the past, complete with its unquestioning faith in the Catholic Church and the Christian God. Paul Chambers has noted how the landscape of Britain is dotted with redundant Christian religious institutions, and makes the insightful observation that if identity is bound up with materiality, with things, “as those artefacts decay and become redundant or are given over to other uses, identities may well be revised in the light of these material changes.”66 St Cuthbert’s Way combines the medieval past with the contemporary pastime of cross-country walking on heritage trails. The lens of medievalism, which views the contemporary secular West as an inauthentic mode of existence, posits that a truer, more intense and more authentic life was experienced by people in the distant past, and that their religion (whether objectively true or not) conferred meaning and depth in ways that shallow materialism and self-obsession cannot.67 This discourse dovetails with the marketing of leisure as sacred in contemporary society; leisure is defined in opposition to the alienation of work in a post-industrial economy. This identification results in the mutual imbrication of tourism and religion/spirituality, and encourages pilgrims, tourists, and travellers to understand their embodied journeying through both the landscape and the built environment as a spiritual – or at least an identity-conferring – process. The secularised environment of the contemporary West situates 65

Norman, Spiritual Tourism, passim. Paul Chambers, “Sacred Landscapes, Redundant Chapels and Carpet Warehouses: The Religious Heritage of South West Wales,” in Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual, eds Elisabeth Arweck and William Keenan (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 26. 67 Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 1-29. 66

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the project of the self at the core of post-Christian spiritual practices. Walking in the silent and largely deserted landscape of Northumbria and the Scottish Borders, while immersed in the life and activities of the Anglo-Saxon Saint Cuthbert, affords at the very least a four or five day restorative absence from the present, and, in the case of those (such as myself) with deep knowledge of the historical sources and the archaeological record, the possibility to, as Clare Lees and Gillian Overing put it, ‘meet’ Anglo-Saxon England, if not on its own terms, then at least on terms that are not my own, which is a rare and precious experience.

Bibliography Bailey, Richard N. “St Cuthbert’s Relics: Some Neglected Evidence,” in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, edited by Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe, 231-246. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989. Baker, William J. Playing With God: Religion and Modern Sport. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. — “Life of Cuthbert.” In The Age of Bede, edited by D. H. Farmer, translated by J.F. Webb, revised edition, 39-102. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Brown, David. “Genuine Fakes.” In The Tourist Image: Myths and MythMaking in Tourism, edited by Tom Selwyn, 33-47. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996. Brown, G. Baldwin and Mrs Archibald Christie. “S. Cuthbert’s Stole and Maniple in Durham.” The Burlington Magazine 23, no. 121 (1913): 3. Brown, Michelle P. “The Lindisfarne Scriptorium from the Late Seventh to the Early Ninth Centuries.” In St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, edited by Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe, 151-164. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989. Bruce-Mitford, Rupert. “The Lindisfarne Gospels in the Middle Ages and After.” The British Museum Quarterly 29, nos 3-4 (1965): 98-100. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. York: Alcuin Academic, 2005. Carrette, Jeremy and Richard King. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Chambers, Paul. “Sacred Landscapes, Redundant Chapels and Carpet Warehouses: The Religious Heritage of South West Wales.” In

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Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual, edited by Elisabeth Arweck and William Keenan, 21-31. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Cohen, Erik. “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Sociology 13 (1979): 179-201 Coleman, Simon. “Meanings of Movement, Place and Home at Walsingham.” Culture and Religion 1, no. 2 (2000): 153-169. Crook, John. The Architectural Setting of the Cult of the Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300-1200. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Cusack, Carole M. Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples. London: Cassell, 1998. Digance, Justine. “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent with Meaning.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen. J. Timothy and Daniel. H. Olsen, 36-48. London: Routledge, 2006. Farmer, D.H. “Introduction.” In The Age of Bede, edited by D. H. Farmer, translated by J.F. Webb, revised edition, 9-38. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Gardner, Rex. “Miracles of Healing in Anglo-Celtic Northumbria as Recorded by the Venerable Bede and His Contemporaries: A Reappraisal in the Light of Twentieth Century Experience.” British Medical Journal 287, no. 6409 (1983): 1927-1933. Gretsch, Mechthild. Ælfric and the Cult of the Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hall, D. J. English Medieval Pilgrimage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. Heimann, Mary. Catholic Devotion in Victorian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Higgett, John. “The Iconography of St Peter in Anglo-Saxon England and St Cuthbert’s Coffin.” In St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, edited by Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe, 267-286. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989. Hope-Taylor, Brian. Yeavering An Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria. London: Department of the Environment Archaeological Reports No. 7, 1977. Howe, Nicholas. Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Kim, Hyounggon and Tazim Jamal. “Touristic Quest for Existential Authenticity.” Annals of Tourism Research 34, no. 1 (2007): 181-201.

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Lees, Clare A. and Gillian R. Overing. “Anglo-Saxon Horizons: Places of the Mind in the Northumbrian Landscape.” In A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, 1-26. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Low, Mary. St Cuthbert’s Way: A Pilgrims’ Companion. Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2000. Lyon, David. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times. Oxford: Polity, 2002. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999. Norman, Alex. Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. Noyce, Roger. The Complete Guide to St Cuthbert’s Way: Melrose to Holy Island and Holy Island to Melrose. Wilmslow: Sigma Leisure, 1999. Orkin, David. “The Tweed: Take a Trip on a River Flowing With History.” The Independent, April 21, 2007. Accessed June 16, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/the-tweed-take-a-trip-on-ariver-flowing-with-history-445500.html. Rinschede, Gisbert. “Forms of Religious Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no.1 (1992): 51-67. Sharma, K.K. Tourism and Socio-Cultural Development. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1994. Slavin, Sean. “Walking as Spiritual Practice: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.” Body and Society 9 (2003): 1-18. Smith, Roger and Ron Shaw. St Cuthbert’s Way: Official Trail Guide. Edinburgh: The Stationery Office, 1997. Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edition. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967[1947]. Thacker, Alan. “Lindisfarne and the Origins of the Cult of St Cuthbert.” In St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200, edited by Gerald Bonner, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe, 103-122. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Weightman, M. Scott. Holy Island. Seahouses: Weightman, 1987.

CHAPTER TWO IDENTITY, MEANING AND TOURISM ON THE KOKODA TRAIL ROBERT SAUNDERS

“You get to change people’s lives.” (A Kokoda Trail guide relating what he likes about his job)

Introduction1 Over the past decade, walking the Kokoda Trail2 in Papua New Guinea has become a popular tourism activity, with the annual number of trekkers increasing from less than 100 in 2001 to more than 5,600 in 2008.3 At the same time, a growing interest in the history of the Kokoda Campaign of World War II is evident in the publication of more than a dozen books presenting a range of perspectives on the subject.4 While most Kokoda trekkers are attracted by the physical challenge of the trail, learning about 1

The author owes a debt of gratitude to his supervisors, Dr Jennifer Laing of Monash University and Professor Betty Weiler of Southern Cross University, for their unfailing support for his research and comments on an early draft of this chapter. Comments and suggestions from participants in the 2011 SSLA Conference, particularly Annabel Carr, Dr Justine Digance and Dr Chris McConville were encouraging, stimulating and thought provoking. Referees comments were also very constructive and are gratefully acknowledged. 2 The term ‘Kokoda Trail’ is used in this chapter as it is the name officially adopted by the Papua New Guinea Department of Lands; Bill James, Field Guide to the Kokoda Track, revised edition (Lane Cove: Kokoda Press, 2006), 35. The term ‘Kokoda Track’ is also commonly used. 3 Kokoda Track Authority, “Newsletter Issue No. 5,” Kokoda Historical September 2009, accessed October 14, 2011, http://www.kokodahistorical.com/UserFiles/File/KTA_Newsletters/KTA_September09.pdf. 4 Kokoda Historical, “Book Reviews,” Kokoda Historical, accessed January 22, 2013, http://www.kokodahistorical.com/index/index.php/about/book-reviews.

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Australian history and a desire for personal development also rate highly as reasons to visit.5 The arduous and extended nature of the trek is well known, however interviews with walkers suggest that additional layers of meaning emerge during the trek, and that the experience can have enduring, ‘life-changing’ effects on participants. Transformative travel is an under-researched field, with relatively few empirical studies and a tendency to focus on young people engaged in backpacking, cross-cultural, and volunteer tourism. Research focusing on long-term changes to attitudes and behaviours is particularly limited.6 Distinctive qualities of the Kokoda Trail have been revealed in a broader study into transformative experiences among adults on long-distance walks. The broader study is a qualitative, phenomenological investigation into the processes and outcomes of transformative tourism, which is being undertaken by the author using multiple sources and methods. One focus of this research is on ways in which the experience itself, and meanings associated with the experience, contribute to the transformative effects of a tour. The broader study involves in-depth interviews with long-distance walkers, guides and operators from a variety of iconic walks of three or more days’ duration, in Australia and nearby regions. Recruitment of interviewees has been undertaken through walking clubs, websites of popular tracks, and snowball sampling; selecting adults who feel they have had ‘personally significant experiences’ on walks they nominate. While the broader study is concerned with exploring personal transformation through long-distance walking in a variety of contexts and settings, a particular focus on the Kokoda Trail is warranted because of its uniqueness, recent growth in popularity, and the relative lack of experiential research in this area. Eight interviews out of twenty five to date have focused on the Kokoda Trail, with some participants reinterviewed after two years in order to obtain longitudinal data. Additional data sources include, where available, participants’ journals, blogs and testimonials, operator websites, and other published and unpublished materials which serve to complement the limited number of perspectives on the Kokoda experience obtained through in-depth interviews. The uniqueness of the Kokoda Trail as a combination of adventure tourism and battlefield tourism generates both challenges and opportunities for 5

Simone Grabowski, “Ecotrekking: A Viable Development Alternative for the Kokoda Track?,” unpublished Bachelor of Management (Honours) in Tourism thesis (University of Technology Sydney, 2007), 70. 6 Garth L. Lean, “Transformative Travel: Inspiring Sustainability,” in Wellness Tourism: Mind, Body, Spirit, Place, eds Robyn Bushell and Pauline J. Sheldon (New York: Cognizant Publisher, 2009), 191-205.

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analysis, and has led the author to adopt a more hermeneutic7 approach in some of the analysis. This chapter presents a preliminary report which seeks to provide insights into the Kokoda Trail experience and its transformative effects on participants. It begins by describing a typical walker’s experience before, during and after the trek. The impact of the lived experience of walking the Trail is then investigated by considering the applicability of five intense positive experiences associated with related activities. Broad interpretive meanings associated with pilgrimage, nationhood and battlefield tourism are then assessed in relation to the perspectives revealed in interviews. Finally, a critical incident is used to illustrate how transformative outcomes may be associated with more specific meanings and individual interpretations of events. This highlights the subtle but influential role of guides, such as the one quoted above.

Walking the Kokoda Trail Most people who walk the Kokoda Trail take between seven and ten days, each day involving many hours of trekking through steep, rugged terrain. For safety reasons, use of a tour operator is encouraged, although it is not mandatory. Operator websites almost invariably recommend prospective Kokoda trekkers train for the extended, physically demanding undertaking, building their fitness and endurance over several months before attempting the walk. This training also generates a sense of anticipation, and sets the scene for what Roger Abrahams calls “an experience.”8 Comments about the walk from interviewees, and writers of blogs and testimonials, emphasise the physical challenge: “harder than I expected, even though I trained for it” is a typical comment. In addition to the image of the Trail as physically tough, there is a sense of danger associated with the walk, highlighted by the number of Kokoda trekkers who have died from natural causes in recent years,

7 Hermeneutic phenomenology “addresses experience from the perspective of meanings, understandings and interpretations.” See Tomas Pernecky and Tazim Jamal, “(Hermeneutic) Phenomenology in Tourism Studies,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 4 (2010): 1056. 8 Roger D. Abrahams, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience,” in The Anthropology of Experience, eds Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 45-72.

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including four in 2009.9 The challenge and difficulty of the walking experience also becomes a mental test, and after a while begins to act as a symbol of the hardships faced by the soldiers during World War II. Interviewees say things like “it was really tough – and we weren’t even being shot at…” A Kokoda Trail guide explains how the physical challenge of the walk affects the way he operates with clients, and the way the dynamics of the experience usually unfolds on his trips: The first couple of days I basically leave people alone except for encouragement, because they’re full of self-doubt: ‘am I going to make it; am I ready; am I fit enough?’ Normally by day three or day four I’ll start telling a few stories and I start taking it to, I guess, to another level, but I find it’s wasted doing that the first, probably three days.

The Trail can be walked in either, equally demanding direction. The geography of the Trail means that each trek retraces the route of one phase in the Kokoda Campaign. Walking south from the remote settlement of Kokoda over the Owen Stanley Ranges to Owers Corner near Port Moresby follows the path of the battle from its first engagement, and emphasises the Australian resistance and gradual withdrawal as the Japanese advanced along the Trail between late July and early September 1942. Those who trek in the opposite direction begin at Owers Corner, and their route more readily follows the story of the Japanese retreat north as the Australians eventually pushed back along the Trail. The south-north trek finishes at Kokoda Station, although the Campaign itself continued to the coast.10 Treks in both directions generally pause at key sites, where guides describe events and their significance in the overall Campaign. On the Trail, guides use a variety of techniques to interpret the Kokoda Campaign, and to impart a sense of reverence for the Australian soldiers and empathy for the indigenous people who helped them. Storytelling is used to highlight the special significance of certain places, and to explain the dynamics of the six-month Kokoda Campaign. At least one guide recites poems and is openly demonstrative of emotion at key locations. Several guides describe certain locations as ‘sacred sites’: places where heroic actions took place or where the remains of soldiers are thought still to be buried; and some guides use protocols and rituals within their groups

9

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Another Australian dies on Kokoda Track,” Online News, October 5, 2009, accessed October 10, 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/05/2704507.htm. 10 James, Field Guide to the Kokoda Track.

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to pay respect at these significant places. Dawn ceremonies at the Isurava Monument are common.11 Most interviewees ascribe a strong sense of authenticity to the Kokoda Trail. Almost all are surprised by the immediacy that comes from finding overgrown stockpiles of bombs and hand grenades in the jungle; seeing evidence of trenches, pits, graves and other battle scars; and meeting an elderly ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel’, one of the last surviving indigenous veterans of the war. The Kokoda Trail experience clearly means different things to different people, and this can affect its emotional impact. In part this relates to whether a participant has family connections with the Kokoda Campaign, but it can also be affected by meanings people attach to particular experiences, and how these are mediated by guides. For example, a thunderstorm at Isurava was interpreted by one interviewee as a kind of ‘sound and light show’: We went down just on dusk to watch the sun set and then this amazing lightning storm. And you’re sitting there thinking this could be the war recreated, the guns going off and the muzzles of the rifles… All of us, twenty of us just sat there. A few of the porters came down and it was surreal, absolutely surreal, as if it was meant to be a show put on for us, about this war. ‘Just pretend yourselves the Japs are down the road there and all this happening in the sky’. It was utterly amazing. And then next morning was the dawn ceremony.

Interviewees speak of their physical struggle with sections of the walk, and all mention moments of doubt regarding their ability to complete the trek. Almost inevitably, successfully completing the ninety-six kilometre walk through steep, muddy jungle is seen as a substantial personal achievement, intensified by the hot and humid conditions, torrential rainfall during the wet season, and risks associated with river crossings and tropical diseases. Ultimately there is a strong sense of satisfaction from reaching the end: Coming up to the last rise, to Owers Corner where you see the marker and the monuments and stuff… Big, big emotional experience hitting that. The satisfaction of completing it, and getting it done. Yeah.

11

Three of the five stages of “site sacralisation” outlined by Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (California: University of California Press, 1999), are evident here: naming, framing and elevation, and enshrinement.

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After the trek there is an obvious interest among interviewees to read or re-read books about the Kokoda Campaign. Some also demonstrate a process of narrative construction that can include an overt awareness of their role as a story-teller about their walk: I’ve been asked many, many times what it was like? How was it? Because everyone’s heard about Kokoda but no one really knows much about it… I had to break down everything that has happened in that amazing trip that I did, you know… it was such an amazing experience that you could talk for hours about elements of it, but to try and boil it down for people who want, you know, a three minute [description] before they rush off, I had to boil it down.

Based on the author’s in-depth interviews, it seems that expectations of the Kokoda Trail being challenging and adventurous are usually met or exceeded, and walkers typically feel a significant sense of achievement on completing the trek. However, many interviewees report an unexpected, emergent quality of the Kokoda Trail experience, which warrants further examination. One aspect of this emergent quality is the intense emotion associated with certain places and specific incidents. Another is the way such a difficult and at times unpleasant activity is generally interpreted afterward as a positive, rewarding experience. Most intriguingly for the author, there is an implication that the experience of walking the Kokoda Trail stimulates an ‘inner journey’ that can impact on the way some participants comprehend the world and their place in it, their relationships with others who walk the Trail with them, and how they set goals for the future. This can lead to enduring attitudinal and behavioural changes.

Characterising the Kokoda Experience A range of intense, positive, rewarding experiences seem to fit aspects of the experiences described by Kokoda Trail participants. This section reviews five concepts considered by the author to be most helpful in understanding the Kokoda experience and its impact on participants: absorption, flow, peak experience, numinous experience and extraordinary experience. These will be referred to later, in the analysis of the critical incident. Gene Quarrick describes absorption as a distinctive state of consciousness where “there is a complete break with self and reality. The absorbed individual is in a trance, completely unmindful of his normal self and the

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surrounding world.”12 According to Quarrick, absorption is separate from our everyday ‘business of living’ consciousness and can be stimulated by many common external influences, including watching TV or reading a book. Quarrick contends that the absorbed state of consciousness is characteristic of recreational diversions, and that it has the capacity to enhance our experiences. Importantly, absorption is not simply a state of intense concentration13 as it depends on a relaxed mental state where evaluative thinking and critical cognitive faculties are suspended. However, emotional arousal is possible in the absorbed state, as that occurs reflexively. Absorption is evident in many accounts of trekking the Kokoda Trail. While Quarrick’s examples of watching TV or reading a book suggest absorption can occur with relatively superficial and short-term involvement, a deeper longer-term fascination with the subject matter of the Kokoda Trail is demonstrated by almost all interviewees reading or rereading at least one book about the Trail after their return. Where absorption is seen as a trance-like state, flow requires active involvement in a challenging task. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi found that flow is experienced most often in play, and consists of an optimal state of mind where the demands of a situation are exactly met by the skill level of the participant.14 As a result they are neither bored nor anxious. Flow is an intrinsically rewarding experience characterised by clear goals and rapid feedback, a strong focus of concentration in which all attention is taken up by the task at hand, the merging of action and awareness associated with a task, loss of attentiveness to everyday pressures resulting in a sense of relief, absence of self-consciousness, and altered perceptions of time, where minutes can feel like they last for hours but hours can also feel like short moments. Flow can be distinguished from absorption by its focus of concentration, and by active involvement with an absence of self-consciousness. Flow experiences were suggested in the accounts of some interviewees, particularly in situations where they found themselves walking in solitude, out of sight of other trekkers; or were encouraged by their guide to experience a particular site or environment alone:

12 Gene Quarrick, Our Sweetest Hours: Recreation and the Mental State of Absorption (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1989), 9. 13 Quarrick, Our Sweetest Hours, 24-27. 14 Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).

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Identity, Meaning and Tourism on the Kokoda Trail There was one place called the Moss Garden… which was absolutely stunning, you go in for about half an hour, three-quarters of an hour and see this magnificent moss area and fungi… Our guide said: ‘look go through one by one so you get the solitude, you get the quietness’, and we did, and I went through by myself. Oh – and it was just beautiful.

Flow has previously been recorded as a common and frequent experience of solo long-distance walkers in a nature-based context,15 and it seems likely that it would also occur for many Kokoda Trail trekkers. Recent research indicates that flow also occurs in social situations, and that ‘co-active social flow’ (flow experienced as part of a group), and ‘interactive social flow’ (e.g. flow experienced during an in-depth conversation) are likely to be more enjoyable than solitary flow.16 Csikszentmihalyi also states that collective ritual is a common trigger for flow.17 Where flow is an intrinsically rewarding state of consciousness, peak experience is described by Abraham Maslow18 as an intense and highly valued moment which becomes the complete focus of an individual’s attention. Often, it is an experience during which the world is perceived as a unified whole, or the person feels part of something bigger. Maslow was the first to frame these experiences within a context of human needs, as moments of self-actualisation that stand above our day to day needs but which are universally available, in contrast with religious and mystical experiences, which may otherwise be similar.19 Moments of peak experience are typically evaluated as some of the most important and valuable in a person’s life, and people feel fortunate to have had such an experience. Profound experiences such as these have the power to “transform or shape people’s lives.”20 Several interviewees described experiences with impacts similar to this on the Kokoda Trail. For some, 15

Allan S. Mills and Thomas S. Butler, “Flow Experience Among Appalachian Trail Thru-hikers,” in Proceedings of the 2005 Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium, eds John G. Peden and Rudy M. Schuster (Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Research Station, 2006), 366-370. 16 Charles J. Walker, “Experiencing Flow: Is Doing It Together Better Than Doing It Alone?,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 5, no. 1 (2010): 3-11. 17 Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, 37. 18 Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences, 2nd edition (New York: Penguin, 1994). 19 Liam Smith “A Qualitative Analysis of Profound Wildlife Encounters,” Journal of Dissertation 1, no. 1 (2007): 24. 20 Smith “A Qualitative Analysis of Profound Wildlife Encounters,” 41.

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the experience was directly associated with a particular incident or a moment of solitude and inner reflection, while others referred to their assessment of the entire trek, saying things like: “it is one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had, doing that walk.” Gayle Privette, in her comparative analysis of positive human experiences, highlights that peak experiences are “not dependent on particular types of behaviour, for example, interpersonal interactions.”21 For one interviewee, an incident which had a profound personal impact was experienced as a negative at the time, but was later re-interpreted in a positive light. She had suffered dysentery for much of the walk, and was unable to eat for several days. Looking back on the experience almost three years later, she saw the incident as a defining moment in her life: I still remember hitting rock bottom: sitting down, having a little cry, and getting up and keeping on going. So it is a constant benchmark for me about how I reached my mental limit, but in reality it wasn’t… I could still keep going. And it’s now a benchmark, in that often in endurance events I want to sit down and cry but I don’t – but at Kokoda I did. So it’s that benchmark, it’s the hardest thing – today it’s still the hardest thing I’ve done.

Since walking the Kokoda Trail this interviewee has completed several marathons on different continents, including some in extreme settings and conditions. She sees her Kokoda experience as instrumental in enabling her to set new and more challenging goals in life. While the crisis aspects of her Kokoda Trail incident are potentially more suggestive of the related concept of peak performance22 rather than peak experience, highlighting the difficulty of accurately characterising specific examples of these experiences, it is clearly a moment of self-actualisation that stands out above day to day experiences, and has helped shape her subsequent life. The empathy expressed by Kokoda Trail trekkers regarding the soldiers of World War II is evocative of numinous experience, which Catherine Cameron and John Gatewood describe as an ‘impulse’ or motivation for people to visit heritage sites, “seeking to make a connection to the people and spirit of an earlier time.”23 In the case of Kokoda participants, this aspect of the experience is evidently not an initial 21

Gayle Privette, “Peak Experience, Peak Performance, and Flow: A Comparative Analysis of Positive Human Experiences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (1983): 1361. 22 Privette, “Peak Experience, Peak Performance, and Flow,” 1362-64. 23 Catherine M. Cameron and John B. Gatewood, “Seeking Numinous Experiences in the Unremembered Past,” Ethnology 42, no. 1 (2003): 55.

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motivation, but seems to be an emergent understanding that is related to the embodied experience of walking the Trail. The physical difficulty of the walk acts as a powerful symbol of the hardships faced by the soldiers, giving the trek a personal sense of re-enactment. The process of empathising with the soldiers as a result of walking the Kokoda Trail is illustrated by one interviewee who begins a sentence talking about himself, but ends it with an observation about the diggers: “I knew I was going to see a place where our soldiers fought and they did it hard but I – they had no idea. Absolutely no idea.” For another interviewee, perhaps a little less nationalistic or influenced differently by a different guide, empathising embraces both sides of the conflict: You know at moments along the track, maybe because I was fatigued and sick, but I could just visualise, if I closed my eyes, I could visualise dead bodies, all along the length of the trek… Japanese and Australian.

Some guides mediate this numinous aspect of the Kokoda experience by actively encouraging personal reflection and identification with the soldiers: How I guess I try and bring it on… every trip I carry dog tags from diggers who fought on the track, and after about two to three days I might, if someone’s struggling, I might ask them ‘would you like to wear this dog tag?’ And suddenly someone who was close to finishing will go ‘wow, I can keep going’.

Rudolph Otto, who introduced the term ‘numinous’ into religious philosophy,24 describes it as a religious emotion or experience stimulated by the perception of something holy. Cameron and Gatewood’s usage has a more secular nuance suggestive of deep emotional connection. As none of the Kokoda Trail interviewees referred to their experiences in spiritual terms, the author has not explored Otto’s interpretation, or other mystical or religious experiences such as those described by William James.25 Some trekkers however, following the lead of their guides, used the term ‘sacred site’ in reference to certain locations on the Trail. In this context the term ‘sacred’ is taken to mean “regarded with reverence.”26 24

Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 2nd edition (New York: The Modern Library, 1929). 26 Susan Butler, ed., Macquarie Dictionary, 5th edition (Sydney: Macquarie Dictionary Publishers, 2009). 25

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The final type of experience considered here is extraordinary experience, which is described in a seminal, multi-method study of extended white-water rafting trips on the Colorado River, by Eric Arnould and Linda Price.27 Characteristics of extraordinary experiences include that they are absorbing, social (based around interactions between the participant and the guide, and within and between groups), feel spontaneous and unrehearsed, are emergent across the time frame of the experience, can be intensely emotional, and are used by participants afterwards to “give agency and coherence to their stories about the self.”28 Arnould and Price also found that initial motivations about these trips were vague, and largely focused on the physical nature of the adventure activity. As a suite of characteristics, this description of extraordinary experience comes close to an accurate rendering of the distinctive experiential qualities of walking the Kokoda Trail. Importantly, Arnould and Price point to “the subtle role of the guide in orchestrating delivery of an extraordinary experience,”29 and suggest that process elements including affect, narrative and ritual understandings are central to the successful delivery of extraordinary experiences. These process elements will be explored later through the consideration of a powerful and illustrative incident.

Finding Meaning: Pilgrimage and Nationhood Visits to historic battlefields are often described in terms of pilgrimage; however it is rare that the archetype of pilgrimage as an extended and arduous journey on foot also applies to these journeys.30 For Australians, the Kokoda Trail is unique in this sense, and the extended physical challenge of the trek clearly differentiates it from visits to other battle grounds. The Trail is also distinctive in being located within the region of Australia, and the Kokoda Campaign is commonly represented as the first and only conflict during which the Australian mainland was under threat of direct invasion. Battlefield tourism in the Australian context is unusual 27

Eric J. Arnould and Linda L. Price, “River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter,” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (1993): 2444. 28 Arnould and Price, “River Magic,” 26. 29 Arnould and Price, “River Magic,” 41. 30 See for example Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Garrie Hutchinson, Pilgrimage: A Traveller’s Guide to Australia’s Battlefields (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2002).

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in that the vast majority of recognised sites are on the other side of the world: the most highly venerated locations of the two world wars being at Gallipoli in Turkey, and on the Western Front in France and Belgium. These days, the arduousness of the journey to such sites has more to do with the time spent cramped in an aircraft or tourist coach than any physical effort on the part of the visitor. A sense of pilgrimage is acknowledged by many trekkers, and some elaborate on what this means to them. One interviewee expressed her notion of pilgrimage simply as “walking in the same footsteps” as the soldiers of the Kokoda Campaign. Others share this perspective, and the effort of the trek is often compared with the adversities of the soldiers. Many trekkers comment on the similarity of the present-day Trail and well-known war-time photographs such as those of war cameraman Damien Parer, whose film Kokoda Front Line won an Oscar in 1943. Additional elements traditionally associated with pilgrimage31 that are implied in some interviews and on-line testimonials include rites of passage, which can have an almost initiatory character; and rites of intensification,32 which build emotional links between people who have a common cultural orientation. Shared performance and ‘communitas’ can also be seen in some accounts, and guides often encourage the development of emotional connections within groups: Day six night, we were sitting around talking about the best thing about the trek and a few people said, you know, ‘the challenge’, and ‘the experience’, and ‘sharing the history of the track’ and all those kinds of things. And one of the guys, the father of the son, said: ‘Doing this trek with my son’. And we’re all going like ‘oh that’s so beautiful’ and we’re all in tears (laughs). And then the son said: ‘Yeah – what dad said’.

For another interviewee, the term pilgrimage stimulated memories of meeting one of the original ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’, and expressing his gratitude: He’s dressed with all his medals across here, with his soldier’s hat on, Australian soldier hat on. And it was incredible. We had the opportunity individually to go up and shake his hand, and look him in the eye and say ‘thank you for what you did for the Australian soldiers’.

31

Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithica NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). 32 Alexander Moore, “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Centre,” Anthropology Quarterly 53 (1980): 207-218.

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There is no doubt that, after walking the Kokoda Trail, many trekkers perceive it as a kind of pilgrimage. The definition of pilgrimage that resonates most strongly here is Justine Digance’s term “a journey redolent with meaning.”33 The extent to which a search for meaning was present before the trek is hard to gauge, but it is clear that meanings emerge and are developed and intensified by the experience. The significance of the Kokoda Trail to Australians is noted by most interviewees, who express strong feelings regarding the sacrifices and achievements of the inexperienced young soldiers. These feelings seem to be reinforced by pride in their own completion of the trek. While walking the Kokoda Trail stimulates an interest in national identity, interviewees conveyed an understated, if deeply felt identification with their country and its history. Some parallels can be drawn with the meaning of visiting Gallipoli, site of the original and arguably the strongest of the nation-building myths of Australia. Peter Slade explores interpretations of the pilgrimage to Gallipoli and concludes that motivations for visiting that iconic site are largely associated with nationhood.34 In his analysis, Slade rejects the notion that such visits can be seen as thanatourism (travel motivated by interest in an actual or symbolic encounter with death35), arguing that while Australians visiting Gallipoli “have feelings about the dead… very few have feelings for the dead.”36 Recent quantitative research by Kenneth Hyde and Serhat Harman into the motives of different Gallipoli visitor segments indicates that visitors’ age, country of origin, place of residence and distance travelled are important variables in relation to motivation.37 Hyde and Harman infer that different preconceptions are brought to the site by different groups, influencing their experience. Interestingly, Hyde and Harman found that “nationalistic and family pilgrimage motives recorded for these visitors are unique to secular pilgrimage, and unlike the motives of the religious pilgrim.”38 33

Justine Digance, “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent With Meaning,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (New York: Routledge, 2006), 36-48. 34 Peter Slade, “Gallipoli Thanatourism: The Meaning of ANZAC,” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 4 (2003): 779-794. 35 A. V. Seaton, “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies vol. 2, no. 4 (1996): 234-244. 36 Slade, “Gallipoli Thanatourism,” 792. 37 Kenneth F. Hyde and Serhat Harman, “Motives For a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields,” Tourism Management 32, no. 6 (2011): 1343-1351. 38 Hyde and Harman, “Motives For a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields,” 1349.

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Image 1: Artist’s impression of the proposed Kokoda Memorial Terrace, Dandenong Ranges National Park (image courtesy of Antarctica and Michael Smith and Associates)

Another important difference between Gallipoli and Kokoda is simply the time that has elapsed since they were battlefields. There are now no living Australian veterans of the Great War, but there are still a few survivors of the Kokoda Campaign. Two consequences are apparent: firstly, as the meeting with a ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel’ highlights, it is still possible to make a direct connection with a Kokoda veteran, and to have feelings for that person. Secondly, the process of sacralisation is likely to be less advanced, and perhaps as a consequence more dynamic, for the more recent Kokoda Campaign. The burgeoning number of new books about the Kokoda Trail can be seen as part of this process: a form of ‘mechanical reproduction’ of the battlefield.39 MacCannell’s ultimate form of sacralisation, social reproduction,40 is also evident in the current 39 40

MacCannell, The Tourist, 45. MacCannell, The Tourist, 45.

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redevelopment of a Kokoda memorial trail in the Dandenong Ranges National Park near Melbourne. However, even a relatively early stage of sacralisation, that of framing and elevation, is still evolving on the Trail itself, as the following case study illustrates.

Perspectives on a Critical Incident The incident presented in this section was recounted to the author separately by two participants: a walker on the trip (pseudonym ‘Andrew’), and the guide. The incident occurred at Brigade Hill, the site of one of the most horrific battles of the Kokoda Campaign, where sixty-two Australian soldiers died. While many bodies were removed from their original graves along the Kokoda Trail and re-interred at Bomana Cemetery near Port Moresby in 1944, ten men from the battle of Brigade Hill are not recorded among the burials at Bomana War Cemetery, and some tour operators and guides believe there is strong evidence they are still buried at Brigade Hill. What follows is Andrew’s description of an incident on his walk: It was just a cleared patch on the top of a hill in the middle of the jungle, and we got up there and our leader said ‘look can you drop you packs back here, leave your packs here – we’re going to go up here and this is our sacred site because there are still remains of our soldiers buried on this site where you’re going now’. And so we all went up there and our leader started to tell us a bit of a story. And another trekking group came in, only about seven or eight of them, and plonked their bloody packs right on what we called a sacred site, and one of them even got out a tent and erected the tent, to try and dry it out or something, and put it right on top of where… And she didn’t know there were graves, but our leader had said ‘if you look over there you can see the mounds where the remains, where the graves are’ so she puts a tent right on top of this. So our leader went across respectfully and said ‘look, you probably don’t realise but where you put your tent is on top of… It’s a sacred site, there are remains of Australian soldiers – there are bodies underneath your tent. Would you mind taking it just over to the edge?’ And she said ‘Oh, how the f…ing hell am I meant to know this is a sacred site?’ And she left it there… And so two of our crew went across and got the tent and took it over to the edge. Didn’t say anything, took it over. And there could have been a mighty blue because… It was just an example of you know a sacred site with our soldiers… Our young kids you know, fought and died there. Obviously this other crew didn’t know. And the feeling that we’re standing there listening to a story about this horrific battle that took place right where we were, and then you see this other mob. So there was a whole lot of emotions mixed up in that little incident.

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In a separate interview, the guide involved in the incident recalled it clearly, and explained what happened from his perspective: In that particular instance I wasn’t going to go any further with the [other] group... I’d suggested they may like to move their tents because of what was there, and they were pretty abrupt at telling me where to go, so I just kept doing the briefing… and I really ran into deeply what was there. What happened I think I expected to happen, a couple of more robust guys thought ‘this is wrong, those tents shouldn’t be there’ and went and did something about it… I guess I describe myself as being slightly interventionist. I can’t just walk the track and hope that things happen… I’m trying to create situations and a scenario where things will happen… I was virtually cheering inside… Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was happening and I thought ‘Yes…’ Because, had I gone and done it, it could’ve been construed as an egotistical trek leader trying to tell another group what to do, but all I did was tell them what was there, hoping they might do something.

This is an example of what Arnould and Price refer to as the subtle role of the guide, orchestrating an experience.41 Situations are managed to help elicit intended outcomes. The subtlety lies in the fact that the guide is aware he is facilitating a kind of performance; but if he is skilful, participants are not conscious of his role.

Analysing the Brigade Hill Incident Edward Bruner describes how certain actions help to set apart special occasions and events from the day to day, in Bruner’s term ‘framing’ them.42 From an etic perspective, it is easy to see the training and preparation as framing the entire trek; and to read the actions of the guide in asking people to drop their packs and walk up slowly to a ‘sacred site’, as rituals which act to frame the experience of Brigade Hill. Participants are unlikely to read the Brigade Hill experience that way, if only because they are absorbed, and as Quarrick points out, their evaluative thinking and critical cognitive faculties are suspended.43

41

Arnould and Price, “River Magic,” 41. Edward M. Bruner, “Ethnography as Narrative,” in The Anthropology of Experience, eds Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 139-155. 43 Quarrick, Our Sweetest Hours, 31. 42

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The Brigade Hill incident illustrates many of the process elements which Arnould and Price identify in relation to extraordinary experience.44 There is ritual involved in the group protocols; a ritual that can also be interpreted as a form of sacralisation. The experience impacts powerfully on participants’ emotions, and this serves to make the event memorable. As the guide stated in his interview, “they will forget what I said, they will forget what I did… but they will never forget how I made them feel.” Perhaps most powerfully of all, trekkers become actors in a performance, adopting roles that reinforce group norms and attitudes, and further contribute to the elevation of the site for those present. Unusually as a purposeful intervention by a guide, these process elements include cognitive, affective and behavioural components, which according to some theories of attitude formation,45 make the incident more likely to stimulate attitudinal change. Ultimately, the story of such incidents becomes part of each person’s narrative of their Kokoda Trail experience, and is likely to be shared with many of their close friends on their return. The elements of emotional intensity and self-directed action inherent in the Brigade Hill incident highlight the transformative goal of the guide. As Abrahams points out, “we expect the more intense occasions to have a point, even to carry a message… our native theory of action carries the expectation that we will be transformed in some way, simply because of the intensity of the experience itself.”46 For many of its participants, this incident is likely to have been experienced as flow: as noted previously, collective ritual is a common trigger for flow. For some in Andrew’s group, the Brigade Hill incident may have been a peak experience, causing them to feel part of something bigger. Some may have found themselves adopting a role within the group that took them outside their normal role identity. These experiences may well be transformative. The meanings implicit in the Brigade Hill incident can be analysed further, although these interpretations are inherently subjective. At a broad cultural level, the process of sacralisation and even the evocation of emotion can be interpreted as part of a process of myth-making47 around the Kokoda Campaign, linked to contemporary discourses concerning Australia’s nationhood, independence, and the significance of World War II in relation to other national myths. Although there is a relative lack of 44

Arnould and Price, “River Magic,” 26-27. William J. McGuire, “Attitudes and Attitude Change,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 3rd edition, eds G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, (New York: Random House, 1985), 233-346. 46 Abrahams, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience,” 62. 47 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973). 45

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myth-making in relation to Australia’s roles in World War II, this perspective is encapsulated in an extract of a speech by Prime Minister Paul Keating at Kokoda, on 26 April 1992.48 Even though we fought in many conflicts where we felt pangs of loyalty to what was then known as the ‘Mother Country’, to Britain and to the Empire, and we fought at Gallipoli with heroism and in Belgium, in Flanders, in France and in other places, this was the first and only time we’ve fought against an enemy to prevent the invasion of Australia, to secure the way of life we had built for ourselves... This was the place where I believe the depth and soul of the Australian nation was confirmed. If it was founded at Gallipoli it was certainly confirmed in the defence of our homeland here.

This is almost the language of civil religion, a “non-sectarian faith that has as its sacred symbols those of the polity and national history.”49 Often used to reinforce or reinvigorate other myths; as Demerath and Williams point out, there is a risk that this kind of discourse can be used by social movements to promote their own normative moral vision of the nation. In this case the active role of guides and operators in the myth-making process on the Kokoda Trail seems to have as its objective a greater recognition of the Kokoda Trail as an iconic site of the Pacific War, and in some cases recognition and support for its indigenous inhabitants. Advocacy is limited and subtle, and the communication tools in use are largely those of facilitation rather than overt persuasion. For example, personal reflection is encouraged by the guide quoted previously: About half way through the trek I start asking people: ‘What’s your most significant moment so far?’ And if they give me an answer I say ‘well how would that apply to your life… do you think there’s something you might take from this trek into your own life’ and I’m just prompting questions there to get them to take it to the next level.

A final, interpretive and perhaps more speculative perspective on this incident is suggested by the observation of Arnould and Price, citing Abrahams, that “although individuals articulate extraordinary experience as unique and ineffable, at an etic level these experiences exemplify 48 Paul Keating, Major Speeches of the First Year (Canberra: Australian Labor Party, 1993), 59. 49 N. J. Demerath III and Rhys H. Williams, “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480 (1985): 154.

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culturally embedded rituals that are played out across generations.”50 Bruner refers to the stories behind these culturally embedded rituals as ‘narrative structures’, and argues that these shape our interpretations of events by influencing the way we identify what is important.51 A narrative structure that can be referred to as the ‘forgotten hero’ appears to resonate with Andrew: When I came back I went and saw my mother. Now my mother’s ninety four, still alive. I said ‘mum you lived through the Second World War – did you at all understand how close, how close we were to being invaded by the Japs? Did you have any idea, inkling?’ She said ‘Na… no idea’ and it’s understandable because the Australian government suppressed all that information.

Andrew’s late father was stationed in Darwin during the war, but “he never talked about the war” and refused to attend Anzac Day parades. Andrew is also a baby-boomer, and lived through the Vietnam War. He is very familiar with the idea of returning soldiers not being recognised for their service. It seems reasonable to construe the Brigade Hill incident as exemplifying the idea of the forgotten hero, and erecting a tent on a gravesite as a symbol of that lack of recognition and respect. When Andrew returned from the Kokoda Trail, he sought out and now regularly visits Kokoda veterans who live in nursing homes, and has begun to attend Anzac Day marches. He has joined one of the Kokoda Battalions as an associate member and attends all their dinners. These are tangible behavioural changes which express Andrew’s new-found sense of connection, and are consistent with a decision to take action around the cultural script of the forgotten hero.

Conclusion A distinctive characteristic of the experience of walking the Kokoda Trail appears to be the prevalence of images and expectations relating to adventure prior to the trek, followed by the delivery of a rich, emotionally involving experience of secular pilgrimage. Interviews carried out by the author suggest that initial motivations for the Kokoda trek relate mostly to its challenge and adventure, while aspects of national pride and honouring the war dead tend to emerge and deepen during the trek. The Kokoda experience may include absorption, flow, and peak experiences; and 50 51

Arnould and Price, “River Magic,” 27. Bruner, “Ethnography as Narrative,” 142-143.

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through the agency of some guides, it can also be an extraordinary experience. A numinous sense of connection with the soldiers of the Kokoda Campaign was found to be an emergent experience for many interviewees, linked to the physical challenge of the walk and its interpretation as a kind of re-enactment. Quantitative research would be needed to determine the extent of this experience on the Kokoda Trail, and its relationship with motivations of ‘numen-seeking’ previously observed amongst visitors to historic sites. Some trail guides use innovative interpretive techniques to engage, motivate and deeply move people, promoting a strong sense of connection with the soldiers of the Kokoda Campaign, and the Papua New Guinea nationals. While most interviewees expect to learn about the war history of the Trail, the richness and intensity of meanings emerging over the course of the trek surprise many. Logically one would expect experience to come first and meanings to follow. However the extended nature of the trek, with its opportunities for reflection and processing of lived experiences mediated by guides, seems to compound this process. Preconceived values and beliefs, however subtle and hidden, may also be important in shaping individual outcomes. The overt expression of attitudes and values through interaction with other group members, and critical incidents such as that described above, serves to intensify the experience and to reinforce and develop the sense of meaning. Moments of revelation can resonate with existing narrative structures and developing mythologies, as individuals construct their own narratives by interweaving stories from the Trail and their own inner journeys and personal transformations. For many, trekking Kokoda becomes an enriching experience that touches on issues of self and national identity. For some, enduring changes to attitudes and behaviours are evident years after their walk. Within the interview sample, the main enduring changes observed are the setting of new goals and a demonstrated commitment to working towards achieving them. The intense impact of the experience on interviewees seems to contribute to motivating personal change. The direction of change: the way individuals choose to express their sense of transformation, may depend more on individual meanings they find within the experience. Better understanding of the cultural scripts underlying Kokoda Trail experiences may help guides facilitate meaning making with a wider range of participants. A selective approach to recruitment was used in this investigation in order to identify people who felt they had undergone a personally significant experience. Together with the qualitative approach to the overall study, this precludes any measurement of the frequency of

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transformative impacts. However, the content of operator website testimonials suggests that substantial personal transformations are not common even on the Kokoda Trail, although deeply felt experiences and a major sense of achievement following completion of the trek are widespread. It is tempting to interpret the transformative character of trekking Kokoda as an emerging element of its myth; however the limitations of this study suggest further research into the occurrence of transformation is required. The experience of walking the Kokoda Trail exhibits qualities which touch on issues of travel philosophy, meaning and identity. The experience is actively facilitated by guides, some of whom bring philosophies of their own, and contribute to processes of site sacralisation and myth-making. But the Trail also seems to appeal to visitors who are not content to travel simply to look at things: these people want to do, and to experience something. It is perhaps this openness to the intensity of the experience, as well as the subtlety of its mediation by guides, which is at the heart of the transformative potential of trekking Kokoda.

Bibliography Abrahams, Roger D. “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 45-72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Arnould, Eric J. and Linda L. Price. “River Magic: Extraordinary Experience and the Extended Service Encounter.” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (1993): 24-44. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. London: Paladin, 1973. Bruner, Edward M. “Ethnography as Narrative.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 139155. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Butler, Susan, ed. Macquarie Dictionary, 5th edition. Sydney: Macquarie Dictionary Publishers, 2009. Cameron, Catherine M. and John B. Gatewood. “Seeking Numinous Experiences in the Unremembered Past.” Ethnology 42, no. 1 (2003): 55-71. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. Demerath, N. J. and Rhys H. Williams. “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480 (1985): 154-166.

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Digance, Justine. “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent With Meaning.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, 36-48 (New York: Routledge, 2006). Grabowski, Simone. “Ecotrekking: A Viable Development Alternative for the Kokoda Track?.” Unpublished Bachelor of Management in Tourism (Honours) thesis. University of Technology Sydney, 2007. Hutchinson, Garrie. Pilgrimage: A Traveller’s Guide to Australia’s Battlefields. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2002. Hyde, Kenneth F. and Serhat Harman. “Motives For a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields.” Tourism Management 32, no. 6 (2011): 1343-1351. James, Bill. Field Guide to the Kokoda Track, revised edition. Lane Cove: Kokoda Press, 2006. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 2nd edition. New York: The Modern Library, 1929. Keating, Paul. Major Speeches of the First Year. Canberra: Australian Labor Party, 1993. Lean, Garth L. “Transformative Travel: Inspiring Sustainability.” In Wellness Tourism: Mind, Body, Spirit, Place, edited by Robyn Bushell and Pauline J. Sheldon, 191-205. (New York: Cognizant Publisher, 2009). MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. California: University of California Press, 1999. Maslow, Abraham H. Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences, 2nd edition. New York: Penguin, 1994. McGuire, William J. “Attitudes and Attitude Change.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, volume 2, 3rd edition, edited by G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, 233-346. New York: Random House, 1985. Mills, Allan S. and Thomas S. Butler. “Flow Experience Among Appalachian Trail Thru-hikers.” In Proceedings of the 2005 Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium, edited by John G. Peden and Rudy M. Schuster, 366-370. (Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Research Station, 2006). Moore, Alexander. “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Centre.” Anthropology Quarterly 53 (1980): 207218. Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

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Pernecky, Tomas and Tazim Jamal. “(Hermeneutic) Phenomenology in Tourism Studies.” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 4 (2010): 10551075. Privette, Gayle. “Peak Experience, Peak Performance, and Flow: A Comparative Analysis of Positive Human Experiences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (1983): 1361-1368. Quarrick, Gene. Our Sweetest Hours: Recreation and the Mental State of Absorption. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1989. Scates, Bruce. Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War. Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Seaton, A. V. “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): 234-244. Slade, Peter. “Gallipoli Thanatourism: The Meaning of ANZAC.” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 4 (2003): 779-794. Smith, Liam. “A Qualitative Analysis of Profound Wildlife Encounters.” Journal of Dissertation 1, no. 1 (2007). Turner, Victor W. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. Walker, Charles J. “Experiencing Flow: Is Doing It Together Better Than Doing It Alone?.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 5, no. 1 (2010): 3-11.



CHAPTER THREE SEEKING A PAGAN CATHEDRAL: THE PAGAN TRAIL IN SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND MORANDIR ARMSON

Introduction In recent years, a network of informal travel routes has organically developed in the United Kingdom, involving historical and archaeological sites of interest to members of the contemporary Pagan community. These sites include Neolithic, Iron Age, Romano-British and Mediaeval monuments, as well as sites of ‘crop circles’. These routes appear to a) form a definite and examinable ‘Pagan Trail’ and b) be the focus of contemporary Pagan devotion and connection. The existence of this Pagan Trail is best understood using the paradigm of ‘fuzzy-set theory’, where evidence for its existence can be drawn from documented observations, travel recommendations by religious groups and tailor made tours aimed at contemporary Pagans. Travel to these sites has been encouraged by contemporary Pagan websites and a number of small tour companies have begun to specialise in travel to these areas, with the contemporary Pagan traveller in mind. However, although these sites along the ‘Pagan Trail’ are often described as ‘pilgrimage’ sites and travellers on this trail as ‘pilgrims’, this chapter will postulate that the Pagan Trail and the sites thereon are not, in fact pilgrim sites, but rather serve to carry out three major functions; the creation of a spiritual experience, the creation of external validity, and the creation of a Pagan ‘cathedral’. In turn, all three functions serve as a locative actualisation of deity, where a permanent and tangible location for one’s deity can be accomplished and the traveller’s deity or deities can be physically experienced.



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Seeking a Pagan Cathedral: The Pagan Trail in South-West England

The Pagan Trail - A Description of Terminology During the 1970s, the term ‘Hippy Trail’ was coined to describe the phenomena of drifter tourists who travelled as cheaply as possible across Europe, Southern Asia and North Africa.1 The usefulness of this term lies in its ability to collectivise a phenomenon which is best described in terms of a fuzzy set; this being a set whose membership may have some, but not all, of the set’s features and which has flexible boundaries.2 In the ‘Hippy Trail’ case, the phenomenon which is collectivised involves a group of tourists who adhered to a loose set of principles and behaviours, despite great variety and difference in their exact travel locations, reasons for travelling, sequencing of destinations and length of travel time across individuals. Similarly, it has been argued that backpacking is a tourism phenomenon that can be (while not easily) defined as separate from mainstream tourism with its own ideology and culture and, as such, there is a usefulness in using the term ‘Backpacking Trail’ to encapsulate this phenomenon as different to other tourist activities.3 In this tradition, the current chapter uses the term ‘Pagan Trail’ to describe the contemporary Pagan spiritual tourism to places associated with ancient Britain or fictional depictions thereof. Thus, the term ‘Pagan Trail’ becomes a useful term to collectivise the phenomenon of contemporary Pagan tourism to specific spiritually significant sites, despite the boundaries of this set being loose and the membership expressing great variety in the sites visited, the length of time travelled, and the associated ephemera.

Sites Associated With The Pagan Trail Specific sites can be identified along the Pagan Trail from a wide range of types and historical periods, all of which have particular contemporary Pagan or New Age spiritual significance. Many of these sites are wellknown Neolithic monuments. Henges are classic Neolithic monuments; these being a flat, round or oval area with a bank and a ditch surrounding it. Tellingly, the essential characteristic of a henge is that the ditch lies

 1

Erik Cohen, “Nomads From Affluence: Notes on Phenomenon of Drifter Tourism,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 14, no. 1-2 (1973): 89103. See also Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (London: Penguin Books, 1975), which was also key in creating the mystique of the Hippy Trail. 2 Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1-5. 3 Paris Cody Morris, “The Virtualization of Backpacking Culture,” Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 1 (2009): 25-35.



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inside the bank rather than outside,4 thus suggesting a purpose other than fortification or defence.5 Stonehenge is one such Neolithic henge, which has a great many standing stones still extant and is probably the most famous Neolithic monument in the world. Indeed, Stonehenge has been an iconic part of English culture since the medieval period, and continues to be deeply buried in the British spiritual psyche. Stonehenge appears to be the central focus of a wide area of Neolithic earthworks and structures. Indeed, it would seem that this site is the most consistent feature across the membership of the Pagan trail set, where these contemporary Pagans join over hundreds of thousands of tourists who are believed to visit the site annually. Woodhenge is also a Neolithic henge, however as there is no evidence of any standing stone on the ground, it is to the general public a less impressive, and therefore less visited, monument. Woodhenge was discovered accidentally from the air as the outlines of the crop and soil marks from the decayed wooden posts, which once stood on the site, are only visible from a height. It is thought that there were never any stones at Woodhenge, which may indicate that Woodhenge was an earlier ritual site than Stonehenge, or it may mean that Woodhenge was always a different sort of ritual site to Stonehenge. This second hypothesis has been strengthened in recent years, since another, similar all-wood henge has been discovered very close to Stonehenge.6 Currently, Woodhenge has small, concrete markers to indicate where each of the wooden posts once stood so the visitors on the ground may understand the henge. A secondary aspect of the henge that is gaining its own popularity amongst the Pagan Trail community is the existence of a burial in the centre of the circle. Another Neolithic monument, the Avebury henge, has many stillextant standing stones and is the largest henge in Britain. Indeed, it is so large that the village of Avebury is built inside it. Unfortunately, the Avebury henge has suffered over the years, more than most henges, as many of the stones were broken up for building stone for the local villages.7 Therefore, many of its monolithic stones have now vanished. Avebury also differs from Stonehenge as one is permitted to wander freely

 4

T. P. G. Bahn, ed., The Penguin Archaeological Guide (London: Penguin, 2001). Geoffrey Wainright, Henge Monuments: Ceremony and Society in Prehistoric Britain (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). 6 Jane O’Brian, “Woodhenge Discovered Near Stonehenge,” BBC News Online Network, accessed December 19, 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/434821.stm. 7 Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 47-49. 5



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Seeking a Pagan Cathedral: The Pagan Trail in South-West England

amongst the stones, physically touch them and ‘commune’ with the stones if desired. A third Neolithic site on the Pagan Trail, is Windmill Hill which is a causewayed enclosure, near Avebury. Causewayed enclosures are a kind of pre-historic earthwork, very common in early Neolithic sites.8 Causewayed enclosures are generally hilltop earthworks, surrounded by concentric banks and ditches, which are crossed by causeways. These appeared to be culture centres and perhaps even ritual sites. Windmill Hill is also unusual, since it, like Woodhenge, has revealed several burials of children within the site. Another Neolithic site is the West Kennett Long Barrow, which is a long barrow-type tomb, made of piled sarsen stones and once covered by a mound of earth. The long barrow consists of a central gallery open to the east, with a small burial cell at the western end and two further burial cells off each side of the central gallery. Across the road from the West Kennett barrow is Silbury Hill, which is a large artificial hill with a system of earth banks and ditches around it. The exact meaning or significance of this Neolithic monument is still unknown, although contrary to popular belief it is not a burial mound.9 Lastly, among the Neolithic sites on the Pagan Trail, is Wayland’s Smithy. This is a Neolithic barrow and mortuary house, extensively reconstructed in the 1930s. This reconstruction is unfortunate, however, as it possibly has shaped the mortuary house and barrow into something other than its original construction.10 Just a few kilometres walk from Wayland’s Smithy is the Uffington White Horse.11 This hill figure in Oxfordshire is a later site that is frequently included in the Pagan Trail. The Uffington White Horse is a Bronze Age hill figure showing a huge white horse that stretches across a hillside and is visible for kilometres. The White Horse was probably devised and built to serve as a symbolic marker for a kingdom, designed so that outsiders could see and appreciate the power of the local ruler.12

 8

James Dyer, Ancient Britain (London: Routledge, 2003), 34-36. Michael Dames, The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). 10 Frances Lynch, Megalithic Tombs and Long Barrows in Britain (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 2004). 11 David Miles et al., Uffington White Horse and its Landscape: Investigations at White Horse Hill, Uffington, 1989–95 and Tower Hill, Ashbury, 1993–4 (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2003), see also Stuart Piggott, “The Uffington White Horse,” Antiquity 5, no. 17 (1931): 37-46. 12 Kerrie McCaw, “A Reaffirmation of the Embodied Experience of the Visual,” in Mapping Minds, ed. Monika Raesch (Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2010), 1089



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Another popular site on the Pagan Trail, this time from the Roman and High mediaeval periods, is Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, which was originally made popular via Wordsworth’s romantic poetry,13 but has also been made known by Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,14 and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon15 series. Tintagel Castle is a Romano-British building which was possibly a fortress or a high-status dwelling that was later turned into a castle in the thirteenth century. This site has led to the general area being transformed into something of a King Arthur monument, via the medium of a multitude of themed pubs, bookshops and souvenir stands.16 It can be seen that Tintagel Castle has definitely becomes a major stop-over on the Pagan Trail. Chalice Well in Glastonbury is another site along the Pagan Trail.17 Chalice Well was an early Christian sacred site and holy well, and is strongly associated with the Grail legends. It is currently a centre for Pagan, Druidic and esoteric-Christian worship, and as such, combines with Glastonbury Tor to provide a high incentive for Pagan travellers. The nearby Glastonbury Tor was the site of a mediaeval abbey and has been the focus for alternative travellers since the 1960s.18 Another mediaeval site on the Pagan Trail is Tower Hill, which is contained within the Tower of London and is revered by contemporary druids.19 This is one of the few

 109. 13 William Wordsworth, “The Egyptian Maid or the Romance of The Water-Lily,” Yarrow Revisited; And Other Poems (Memphis, TN: General Books LLC, 2010). 14 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15 Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 2000). The series has been continued through various prequels and sequels, including The Forest House (1995), The Lady of Avalon (1997) and Priestess of Avalon (2000). The books have continued after Marion Zimmer Bradley’s death with Diana L. Paxson taking over authorship. These titles include; Ancestors of Avalon (2004), Ravens of Avalon (2007) and Sword of Avalon (2009). 16 Chantal Laws and Susan Stuart, “Myth, Magic and the Marketplace: The Preservation and Interpretation of Cornwall’s Arthurian Heritage within a Spiritual Tourism Context,” proceedings of conference, Things That Move: The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel, Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan Museum, 2007). 17 Frances Howard-Gordon Glastonbury: Maker of Myths, 2nd edition. (Glastonbury: Gothic Image, 1996). 18 Lesley and Roy Adkins, A Field Guide to Somerset Archaeology (Wimborne: Dovecote Press, 1992). 19 Edward Impey and Geoffery Parnell, The Tower of London: The Official Illustrated History (London: Merrell Publishers, 2003). See also Seán Mac



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sites on the Pagan Trail that is easily accessible for those who are visiting London briefly, rather than having the luxury to meander through the farming communities of south-west Britain in search of other sites. In addition, the Pagan interest in earth gods and goddesses has led to sites of ‘crop circles’ becoming included in the Pagan Trail. It must be noted that the area surrounding Avebury, Stonehenge, Woodhenge and the West Kennet Long Barrow is particularly fruitful in the realm of crop circle appearance. This crossing of the Pagan and the crop circle interest groups has meant that the Pagan Trail has also sometimes included interest in the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group (WCCSG)20 and similar crop circle phenomena research groups. These sites from the ancient Stonehenge to the modern, transient crop circle phenomena are the focus of intense contemporary Pagan interest and comprise the locative destination that has been collectively termed the Pagan Trail. Therefore, it can be seen that the Pagan Trail covers a broad spectrum of archaeological, historical and, in the case of crop circles, transient sites.

Evidence for the Existence of the Pagan Trail Realistically, many tourists, Pagans or not, visit these sites without engaging in the full experience which characterises the Pagan trail, and without these sites taking on a spiritual meaning. Therefore, the question arises of what evidence confirms that Pagans do actually specifically seek out these sites for a spiritual purpose that lies beyond simple tourism. The most abundant area of evidence for this assertion lies in direct observation. Academics and laypersons alike have repeatedly observed and documented significant Pagan activity at sites that have been collectivised into the Pagan Trail.21 Indeed, the Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights Project

 Mathúna, “London’s Sacred Sites,” accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/pagan_london.htm. 20 The Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group (WCCSG), are a research group, based in Devizes. They have links to the contemporary Pagan community and often host contemporary Pagan and crop circle themed events at Marlborough College, Marlborough, in Wiltshire. 21 Kathryn Rountree, “Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites,” Body and Society 12, no. 4 (2006): 95-115. See also Jenny Blain and Robert J. Wallis, “Sites, Sacredness, and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism,” Folklore 114, no. 3 (2003): 307-329; Blain and Wallis, “From Respect to Reburial: Negotiating Pagan Interest in Prehistoric Human Remains in Britain, Through the Avebury Consultation,” Public Archaeology 10, no. 1 (2011): 23-45; Blain, “Neo-Shamanism: Pagan and



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specifically examined the number of Pagans at various sites along the Pagan Trail and documented the individuals’ interactions with these archaeological and historical sites.22 This project found that not only did a significant number of contemporary Pagans did indeed visit these sites, but that they spend a substantial amount of effort and time in their interactions with the sites. Additionally, lay persons have increasingly been recording, on blogs, digital media and journal records, their direct experiences of contemporary Pagans interacting with sites along the Pagan Trail, especially at times of festival (such as the Winter and Summer solstices, Beltane, Samhain).23 A second stream of evidence for the assertion that contemporary Pagans actually do visit the sites along the Pagan Trail comes from the explicit recommendations from Pagan networks for their members to visit sites along the Pagan Trail for spiritual purposes. These suggestions are often explicit in their discussion on the spiritual benefits that may be gained from visiting these sites, as well as the most sacred times to do so. Pagan organisations often publish these recommendations on their websites, suggesting that contemporary Pagans may wish to visit due to the inherent spiritual quality of these sites.24 Often these websites lead by example, where an individual will travel along the Pagan Trail and then describe in detail their spiritual experience. Furthermore, a third line of evidence can be taken from specific tour companies that have designed tours along the Pagan Trail explicitly aimed at individuals wishing for a spiritual experience. A glance at the itinerary

 ‘Neo-Shamanic’ Interactions with Archaeology,” in Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, ed. T. Insoll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 22 Jenny Blain and Robert J. Wallis, “Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/ Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past,” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 3 (2004): 237-261. 23 For example, this footage of Stonehenge at the Winter solstice in 2011, Stonehengetours, “Stonehenge at Winter Solstice 2011,” accessed December 24, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMbEa0UtoAc. See also, “Not Always Lost: Adventures of a Modern Pagan,” a personal blog about visiting a contemporary Pagan visiting British Neolithic sites, accessed December 19, 2011, http://pagan-wanderings.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/in-footsteps-of-builders-ofstonehenge.html; Damian Hall, “Stonehenge, Avebury: Pagan shrines or ancient calendars?,” TNT Magazine, September 26, 2011, accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.tntmagazine.com/news/travel/stonehenge-avebury-pagan-shrines-orancient-calendars. 24 “UK Pagan Links,” accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.ukpaganlinks. co.uk.



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of these tours reads like a list of the sites that make up the Pagan Trail. For example, Secret Landscape Tours organise tours to Glastonbury, Avebury, and Cornwall, aiming to “facilitate authentic experiences of the earth mysteries” taking their tourists to “little-known rather more hidden holy areas.”25 Similarly, Celtic Spirit Journeys tour company provide tours described as “sacred journeys, spiritual quests, (and) pilgrimages of the soul”26 which, in the United Kingdom, travel to Stonehenge, Avebury, Tintagel, Glastonbury Tor, Silbury Hill, and Chalice Well among other destinations. Another tour company, Dragon Eye Tours, invite their tourists to travel along the Pagan Trail, in this case guided by a high priestess, a spiritual teacher, and leading authorities on Paganism and magic, in order to “meditate and experience the power and energy of the special places.”27 Thus, there is significant evidence to suggest that not only do contemporary Pagans specifically visit the sites along the Pagan Trail, but they interact with these sites in a manner different to simple tourism. The purpose of these journeys still requires examination.

The Pagan Trail as ‘Pilgrimage’ The most common assertions of the function of Pagan spiritual travel, such as experienced along the Pagan Trail, use the word ‘pilgrimage’.28 This is

 25

“Secret Landscape Tours,” accessed December 19, 2011, www.secretlandscapetours.com. See also Paula Jean West, “Interest in Pagan Travel Explodes as Pagan Population Grows Exponentially,” Examiner.com, March 2, 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/article/interest-pagan-travel-explodes-aspagan-population-grows-exponentially; “The Isle of Avalon: The Life, Atmosphere, People and Traditions of Glastonbury,” a commercial website which sells tours, psychic workshops, tarot workshops, healing trips to Chalice Well and other New Age and contemporary Pagan-themed travel, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/. 26 Celtic Spirit Journeys is an United States-based travel company which provides tours to Stonehenge, Avebury, Tintagel, Glastonbury Tor, Silbury Hill, Chalice Well among others, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.celtic-spiritjourneys.com/. 27 Dragon’s Eye Tours: A Journey to Enchantment is a Queensland-based company who organise trips to sacred sites in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including to the Druidic ceremonies at Stonehenge, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.dragonseyetours.com/. 28 Anrita Melchizedek, “Sacred Pilgrimage to Glastonbury, Avebury and Stonehenge,” Merlin News, April 29, 2006, accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.merliannews.com/artman/publish/article_641.shtml; Chris Irvine,



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true of the news media, of bloggers, the authors of websites29 and of academics who study non-traditional religions.30 For example, Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys (2006) make the claim that essentially all examples of travel undertaken for religious or spiritual motives, including trips to sites of natural or manmade disaster, places of nationalistic value, memorials and cemeteries, celebrity homes, and New Age or Pagan sacred landmarks, can be considered to be pilgrimages.31 It appears that, to the blogger, the professional journalist and the academic alike, the word ‘pilgrimage’ and the phrases ‘spiritual travel’ and ‘religious tourism’ have become almost exact synonyms. However, when the term ‘pilgrimage’ is examined carefully, it can be seen to describe a form of spiritual or religious travel that includes some concept of a contractual arrangement with numinous or supernatural forces. In this way, traditional pilgrimages usually involve the idea of reward or reciprocity. The pilgrim travels across some distance, encountering adversity and hardship to arrive at the pilgrimage site. It must be noted that in this endeavour, the effort and struggle that occurs during is in the nature of a gift to the deity, saint or being that the pilgrimage is dedicated to. The journey may involve many kinds of pain, including the pain of being separated from one’s family and loved ones, the struggle of leaving one’s life (including work and other commitments), physical pain and discomfort, hunger and thirst, and the psychological pain of losing one’s individuality (as is the case in the Hajj). Furthermore, one may experience the pain of humiliation and of having to suppress one’s

 “King Arthur evicted from Stonehenge,” The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), April 27, 2009, accessed December 19, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5232178/King-Arthur-evicted-from-Stonehenge.html; “Druids and Stonehenge,” The Ancient World in London, Presented by Heritage Key, accessed December 19, 2011, http://heritage-key.com/britain/druids-andstonehenge; Rountree, “Performing the Divine.” 29 Patti Wigington, “Stonehenge: The Ultimate Altar,” accessed November 27, 2011, http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/lithathesummersolstice-/ig/Litha-AltarPhoto-Gallery/Stonehenge.htm. 30 Kathryn Rountree, “Performing the Divine.” See also Kathryn Rountree, “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body Through Sacred Travel,” Sociology of Religion 63, no. 4 (2002): 475-496, and Laurel Zwissler, “Pagan Pilgrimage: New Religious Movements Research on Sacred Travel within Pagan and New Age Communities,” Religion Compass 5, no. 7 (2011): 326-342. 31 Daniel H. Olsen and Dallen J. Timothy, “Tourism and Religious Journeys,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Daniel H. Olsen and Dallen J. Timothy (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 3-5.



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ego because of physical hardship and/or financial burden as the expense of these journeys is considerable. This suffering is the pilgrim’s part of the reciprocal process. The meaning of the pain to the specific deity or supernatural force is different for each pilgrimage. In some, the pain itself is an act of mortification and therefore, serves as a kind of ‘spiritual bouquet’, while in others the pilgrimage serves as a spiritual re-enactment of another’s epic journey. It seems that a general statement can be made; pain, discomfort, and difficulty are experiences human beings are fundamentally averse to and usually attempt to minimise. Therefore, to voluntarily choose to go through these things demonstrates the importance with which the person holds the deity or supernatural force and the travail and its attendant pain become a gift for the divine. In return, the numinous forces are expected to guarantee that the pilgrim receives spiritual or temporal gifts, such as Divine wisdom, healing, absolution or remission of sins,32 spiritual advancement, spiritual enlightenment, full membership of the faith group, freedom from sin or karma or some other, often non-physical gift. In some cases, as with the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes, the gift is not guaranteed; rather it is, to use a quotidian analogy, similar to a lottery: if the pilgrimage is completed properly one is guaranteed a ‘ticket’ in said lottery. This arrangement can be considered to be ‘economic’ as it involves a method of exchange, which is essentially a form of barter. Thus, it can be seen that the pilgrim is involved in a contractual, reciprocal, and economic relationship with numinous forces, whereby, as they complete the pilgrimage, they will be rewarded with spiritual gifts.33

The Pagan Trail - Devotion and Connection Superficially, the Pagan Trail does appear to be a pilgrimage, as it involves a journey to a spiritual site, a journey during which there may be pain, travail and hardship, and an encounter with the divine. However, deeper analysis would actually suggest that it does not have the reciprocal quality that is essential for a journey to be considered a true pilgrimage. Instead, analysis of the Pagan Trail identifies two major processes, these being devotion and connection. The first main process of engaging in the Pagan Trail is devotion, meaning the veneration of the site’s spiritual elements or history

 32

Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale, “The Medieval Pilgrimage Business,” Enterprise and Society 12, no. 3 (2011): 601-627. 33 Bell and Dale, “The Medieval Pilgrimage Business,” 603-605.



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(regardless of whether this history is factual or not) and the presentation of tangible gifts. The significant number of contemporary Pagans leaving devotional objects at these sites demonstrates this. Visitors to the Avebury stones will frequently leave freshly cut flowers, crystals, small items of jewellery, shamanic bags, plates of fruit or cake, or other small objects of spiritual significance.34 Similarly, inside the central chamber of the West Kennett Long Barrow, arrayed along the walls of the tomb, are vases of flowers, small plates of bread or cake, crystals, and miscellaneous and sometimes unusual offerings, such as dolls, woven straw work, and woven grass chaplets.35 It should be noted that the frequent presence of lit tealight candles within the tomb argues for a high level of devotional contact with the site. It is not unusual for the traveller to find the barrow to be lit with candles when they arrive and for fresh flowers and fruit to be laid on the stone floor.36 Travellers to Windmill Hill and Woodhenge sometimes leave offerings clearly to the individuals buried there,37 such as wine, food, children’s toys, or flowers. These devotional gifts appear to be more focused towards the spirits of the people buried there, rather than to the spirit of the place. At Chalice Well, in Glastonbury, the well itself is nearly always lit up with devotional candles. Therefore, it is clear that devotion is one of the predominant processes engaged in by contemporary Pagans when visiting these sites.

 34

Personal observation and inquiry by author, May-June 2008. Jon Cannon, “The Sleep Project II: the Long Barrow,” Extollagy accessed November 19, 2011, http://joncannon.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/the-sleepproject-ii-the-long-barrow/. Jon Cannon is an author, TV presenter, and lecturer at University of Bristol and Marlborough College. 36 “West Kennet Long Barrow,” Sacred Destinations: Photos, accessed November 19, 2011, http://www.sacred-destinations.com/england/west-kennet-long-barrowpictures/slides/eos2_222.htm. 37 Personal observation and inquiry by author, May-June, 2008. See also a video of the Winter Solstice celebrations of 2009, showing offerings being poured out at Windmill Hill, Winter Solstice at Windmill Hill, accessed November 27, 2011, http://wn.com/Winter_Solstice_at_Windmill_Hill. 35



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Image: An offering of flowers left near Wayland’s Smithy (image courtesy of Don Barrett)

Connection is the second main process common amongst contemporary Pagans when engaging with the sites along the Pagan Trail. This is the process of attempting to connect more deeply than sensory experience by ‘communing’ with the spiritual elements of the site. This connection process will often appear as an individual sitting or lying with closed eyes near to a part of the site that they wish to commune with. For example, contemporary Pagans are often seen holding or leaning with closed eyes against the Avebury stones.38 This practice used to also occur with the stones at Stonehenge until the monument was fenced off from the



38 See, for example, the tour company, The Avebury Experience, who specialise in tours to Avebury and run a special “communing tour,” “The Avebury Experience: Tours, Courses and Books on Earth Energies and Ley Lines,” accessed November 19, 2011, http://www.theaveburyexperience.co.uk/earthdivination.html. See also photographic records of communing at Avebury: “Celine Communing With the Stones,” accessed November 19, 2011, http://blog.travelpod.com/travelphoto/foothills_bears/1/1183220558/celine-communing-with-thestones.jpg/tpod.html; “Communing with the Warm Stones at Avebury,” accessed November 19, 2011, http://people.tribe.net/191db45a-1aaa-4fdb-b70cc517d0a9fb16/photos/773a5c9d-defe-453d-bc4d-86b3870cfe5f.



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public and still carried on when permission is given to touch the stones.39 Contemporary Pagans are also found sitting or lying within Woodhenge,40 in crop circles, near the Uffington White Horse and on Glastonbury Tor,41 again attempting to contact a deeper spirituality within the site. Indeed, it has become something of a minor fashion amongst committed contemporary Pagans to organise a ‘sleep-out’ in the main chamber of the West Kennett Long Barrow and to spend the night within the tomb. This practice may have started in imitation of Jon Cannon, a journalist, television presenter and academic, who has been sleeping in the barrow, and blogging about the experience, for some years.42 Thus, the two main processes that contemporary Pagans seem to engage in when visiting the sites along the Pagan Trail are firstly, leaving devotional offerings and secondly, communing with the spirit of the place or those buried there. These activities can be seen to be unidirectional in nature: they are about mutual connection or about veneration, rather than expectation. They are not the kind of reciprocal, bartering activities that are seen to underpin a true pilgrimage. Furthermore, the Pagan ‘pilgrim’ does not bring the gift of travail. While it may well be true that it is a financial hardship to get to these sites and that, depending on the site, it may be physically uncomfortable to walk there, the pain here is not the focus on the journey. In the case of the Pagan Trail, the travail is a sideeffect of the journey, often within the context of a holiday or outing. Indeed, the pain of deprivation, humiliation and mortification of the flesh is conspicuously absent. Thus, it can be seen that the Pagan Trail does not follow the rules of a typical pilgrimage, leaving the question of what kind of purpose does it indeed serve.

The Pagan Trail - Locative Actualisation of Deity Deeper analysis of the two processes underpinning the activities along the Pagan Trail, devotion and connection, suggests that this journey serves

 39

For example, see this photograph on Flickr of touching and “communing” with the stones at Stonehenge, by Michael Ashley, “Stonehenge: Communing with the Stones,” accessed November 19, 2011, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeisnotstill/4724860704/in/photostream/. 40 Personal observation by author, May-June, 2008. 41 Personal observation by author, May-June, 2008. 42 See Jon Cannon, Extollagy, for details. The practice of the West Kennett sleepover does not seem to predate Jon Cannon’s blog, although this has yet to be conclusively proven.



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three functions; experiential, validity, and creation of a ‘cathedral’. These three functions seem to be the core purpose of the Pagan Trail. Firstly, there is a significant experiential function of visiting the sites along the Pagan Trail. These sites are typically ancient monuments or structures, with all of the sensory grandeur expected of such places. Stonehenge is a startling structure standing upon a wind-blasted plain, Avebury is a vast henge dotted over the landscape, the White horse of Uffington is a striking figure laid across a hill, West Kennett Barrow is a dark tomb standing on the top of a hill surrounded by fields of grass, both Silbury Hill and Glastonbury Tor can be seen for kilometres, and Tintagel crests a rocky, sea-sprayed cliff. The sensory experience of these places is impressive to ordinary tourists and Pagans alike, and can evoke a transcendent sensation. These sacred spaces can be touched, smelt, listened to, tasted, and felt tangibly all around one. Furthermore, a space that has been sacred or important to peoples for an immense breadth of time tends to accrue spiritual value. When one’s senses are immersed in the atmosphere of an ancient place it can inspire a self-reflexive moment, connecting the individual to the past and their ancestors, while positioning them in the present, as a contemporary manifestation of what once was. In these ways, the Pagan Trail provides an important spiritual experiential function for the contemporary Pagan. The second function that the Pagan Trail fulfils is to invite external validation. This is particularly important as being modern reconstructed religions, many contemporary Pagan faiths do not have places or objects that have externally recognised historical validity. For example, while Judaism has the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and Islam has Mecca and Medina, modern Wiccans or Druids do not have such a validated ancient, holy place. Indeed, in contemporary Paganism often the sacrality of an object or place is simply in the eye of the beholder, and is held in reverence or awe by others. For example, Pagan ceremonial tools and symbols such the athamé, the cup, the pentacle, and the wand are usually self-created, purchased by, or given to the practitioner, and are ‘charged’ with potency, deliberately imbuing them with spiritual importance.43 To any external individual, these objects are merely a cup, a stick or some other mundane object, devoid of any specialness. Even in such cases in which the practitioner has used ‘shamanic attraction’ and found an object which they believe resonates with them on a spiritual level, the object is

 43

The athamé (a ceremonial knife), cup, pentacle, and wand represent the elements of fire, water, earth, and air respectively. See Vikki Bramshaw, Craft of the Wise: A Practical Guide to Paganism and Witchcraft, (Ropley Hants: O Books, 2009), 46-95



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sacred only to the individual who experiences the attraction. Thus, these objects do not have a historical, and therefore external, recognition of their importance. Additionally, other sacred objects may also be identified in contemporary Pagan ritual such as a grove of trees, a body of water, or even a flame. However, as with self-created ritual objects, it is the individual which personally invests the object with meaning and power, rather than there being an external acknowledgement and recognition of the object’s meaning. Thus, another function that these sacred Pagan sites serve is to provide an irrefutably important space which receives external acknowledgement of its specialness. Atheists and contemporary Pagans alike stand in awe of the standing stones at Stonehenge. Similarly, Silbury Hill, the Uffington White Horse and the Avebury stones draw interest, respect and awe from people other than Pagans, and are thus recognised by all as being special, unique and important. Indeed, most of these sites are heritage listed with the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England.44 Therefore, as contemporary Pagans immerse themselves in the spiritual experience of one of the sites along the Pagan Trail, the awe of the normal tourists provides an external validation that these places are indeed special, and a religion associated with them, is valid. In this way, a contemporary Pagan person may stand outside the enclosure at Stonehenge, aware of the impression this monument leaves on the ordinary tourist, and be proud to feel part of the same ongoing tradition. The third function is to provide a ‘cathedral’ for contemporary Pagans. When the term ‘cathedral’ is used in this context, it means a tangible and permanent place where the divine is made to feel almost manifest.45 In much contemporary Pagan ritual, the sacred space is created anew each time a ritual is performed and cannot be seen as having any permanent, sacral quality. This means that there is no stable, physical ‘church’ within which to connect with the divine. Thus, it can be hypothesised that the sites that are venerated along the Pagan Trail serve this function of a kind of Pagan ‘cathedral’. To the contemporary Pagan, standing in the chamber

 44

The online listing of all ancient monuments protected by the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England can be found at “English Heritage Monuments Record,” accessed March 19, 2012, http://www.english-heritage .org.uk/professional/archives-and-collections/nmr/. 45 Michael Winter and Ruth Gasson, “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Cathedral Visiting in Contemporary England,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 3 (1996): 172-182. See also Leslie J. Francis et al., “Understanding Cathedral Visitors: Psychological Type and Individual Differences in Experience and Appreciation,” Tourism Analysis 13, no 1 (2008): 71-80.



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of the West Kennett Long Barrow, staring out over the sea at Tintagel, at the Heel Stone at Stonehenge or within the circle at Woodhenge, is not just standing in an archaeological site, rather it involves directly experiencing a sacred space of great holiness.46 In this way, the experience of such a contemporary Pagan traveller is virtually identical to the experience of a Christian standing in Canterbury Cathedral or Notre Dame de Paris, described by Richard Voase as romantic, affective, emotional, and reflexive.47 The mere action of standing in a cathedral does not perceptibly bestow any kind of doctrinal wisdom or spiritual knowledge to a Christian, nor does it grant spiritual gifts, as occurs in a pilgrimage. Rather, the experiencer apprehends, via music, lighting, quietude, air pressure and so on, an ineffable feeling of profound spiritual awakening, a feeling of gnosis, which can be discerned even by the non-religious. In support of this idea, Justine Digance characterises contemporary Pagans and New Agers generally as emphasising transformation of the self, with an emphasis on the experiential and looking inward for spiritual truths.48 Indeed, the current chapter is hypothesizing that the traveller on the Pagan Trail is there for a spiritual experience: an experiential contact with the numinous. This does not involve any kind of trade with supernatural forces or seeking after supernatural healing or other gifts. Rather, it can be seen that these seekers who travel on the Pagan Trail are seeking after the ‘Pagan Cathedral’; a place where the numinous can be directly encountered. The physical sites of their journey provide both this deeply meaningful experience while also externally validating the individual with a stable, tangible space of worship ‘Pagan Cathedral’. Together these functions may be considered to provide a locative actualisation, meaning that instead of the sacred being internal, selfproclaimed and transient, that there is a tangible, externally recognised place which is acknowledged as sacred and important where the contemporary Pagan can commune and connect with their deity or supernatural force. Finally, such legitimising activities provide a ‘making real’ function for contemporary Paganism. This chapter has discussed the Pagan Trail, thus far, as though it is simply a collection of physical sites, however the reality is that there is a great deal of ephemera that can also be considered to be the ‘glue’ that

 46

Jenny Blain and Robert J. Wallis, “Sites, Sacredness, and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism,” Folklore 114, no.3 (2003): 307-329. 47 Richard Voase, “Visiting a Cathedral: The Consumer Psychology of a ‘Rich Experience’,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 13, no. 1 (2007): 50. 48 Justine Digance, “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent with Meaning,” in, Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, 38.



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holds the Pagan Trail together. The Pagan Trail is not simply a collection of locative points; rather it includes such diverse items as preferred guidebooks, websites, souvenir shops, hotels, and semi-organised interest groups. Furthermore, these places, people, and journeys are knitted together with stories and folklore, passed on from one traveller to another. It must be noted that this formation was not a deliberate creation. Rather, the Pagan Trail has organically formed, growing out of already established businesses, the preservation and awareness campaigns of the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England English Heritage, and the critical mass of contemporary Pagans who have deliberately moved to the areas so as to be closer to the sites that they love. For example, The Henge Shop in Avebury is a gift shop and bookshop, including a variety of occult texts on topics ranging from chaos magic to ceremonial magic, a range of Pagan ritual equipment, crystals and other associated Pagan requirements. It should be noted that this shop is externally identical to every other gift shop seen attached to historical sites in the rest of England. When one enters the Henge Shop however, the shop’s emphasis on contemporary Paganism is clear. Another example is the Barge Inn, in Pewsey, Wiltshire, a canal-side hotel which describes itself as ‘Crop Circle Central’, hosts occult and crop circle themed events, offers current and past crop circle information over the bar, as well as selling the works of local esoteric artists and sculptors who specialise in contemporary Pagan-themed works. Despite the fact that the main tourist boards and large businesses have not yet attached themselves to the Pagan Trail, some smaller businesses have become symbiotic with it and, as such, enhance the richness of the trail itself. Individuals also play a major role in keeping the Pagan Trail alive and growing, through their blogs, community talks, discussion groups, and volunteering. These places and the other associated ephemera, while not the sites themselves, unify to form the Pagan Trail and, hence, become part of a greater experience, that is constantly growing and evolving.

Conclusion It can be seen that the postulated Pagan Trail, as examined in this chapter, can best be proven to exist and its features examined, by use of the paradigm of fuzzy-set theory. Evidence for the Pagan Trail’s existence can be drawn from travel recommendations by contemporary Pagan groups, by the existence of tailor-made tours aimed at contemporary Pagans and, most of all, by documented observations of contemporary Pagans at these sites.



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The movement, referred to in this chapter as the ‘Pagan Trail’, would seem to represent an attempt on the part of contemporary Pagans at locative actualisation, in which the traveller seeks to either discover or create, a Pagan ‘cathedral’; a place where the divine can be physically experienced and where the experiencer can feel a ‘oneness’ with the numinous of both the past and present. Travel to these sites has been encouraged by contemporary Pagan websites and a number of small tour companies have begun to specialise in travel to these areas, with the contemporary Pagan traveller in mind. As has been demonstrated, many traditional pilgrimages contain, within their framework, a strong element of retributive logic; an economic arrangement, wherein, if the pilgrim completes the pilgrimage, they will receive some ‘payment’, usually something of an intangible, spiritual nature. As one example of the reciprocal core of pilgrimage, many of those who tread the Way of St James or El Camino de Santiago seek the forgiveness of sins, whilst those who complete the Hajj are undertaking a religious obligation, which will enable them to be known by the honourable title Hajji (ϲ˷ΠΤϟ΍), a title which essentially guarantees a certain level of respect and deference amongst the Muslim community. The Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, which draws more than ten million pilgrims, offers moksha - freedom from the wheel of death and rebirth, as the reward for the completion of the pilgrimage. Because of these elements of contractual or retributive pacts with numinous forces, present in the concept of these pilgrimages, it can be seen that, for any kind of spiritual travel to be considered to be ‘pilgrimage’, it should feature at least some element of this kind of retributive logic in its conceptual framing. It can be seen that the ‘Pagan Trail’ and the sites thereon, although often described as a ‘pilgrimage’ are better understood as serving to carry out three major functions; the creation of a spiritual experience, the creation of external validity, and the creation of a Pagan ‘cathedral’. In their turn, all three of these functions serve to create a locative actualisation of deity, where a permanent and tangible location for the numinous can be created and the contemporary Pagan travellers’ deity or deities can be experienced physically.

Bibliography Adkins, Lesley and Roy Adkins. A Field Guide to Somerset Archaeology. Wimborne: Dovecote Press, 1992. Bahn, T. P. G., ed. The Penguin Archaeological Guide. London: Penguin, 2001.



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Bramshaw, Vikki. Craft of the Wise: A Practical Guide to Paganism and Witchcraft. Ropley Hants: O Books, 2009. Bell, Adrian R. and Richard S. Dale. “The Medieval Pilgrimage Business.” Enterprise and Society 12, no. 3 (2011): 601-627. Blain, Jenny. “Neo-Shamanism: Pagan and ‘Neo-Shamanic’ Interactions with Archaeology.” In Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, edited by Tim Insoll, 1017-1031. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Blain, Jenny and Robert J. Wallis. “Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/ Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past.” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 3 (2004): 237-261. —. “Sites, Sacredness, and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism.” Folklore 114, no. 3 (2003): 307-329. Burl, Aubrey. Prehistoric Avebury. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Cohen, Erik. “Nomads From Affluence: Notes on Phenomenon of Drifter Tourism.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 14, no. 1-2 (1973): 89-103. Dames, Michael. The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Digance, Justine. “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent with Meaning.” In, Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Daniel H. Olsen and Dallen J. Timothy, 36-48. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2006. Dyer, James. Ancient Britain. London: Routledge, 2003. Francis, Leslie J., Emyr Williams, Jennie Annis and Mandy Robbins. “Understanding Cathedral Visitors: Psychological Type and Individual Differences in Experience and Appreciation.” Tourism Analysis 13, no 1 (2008): 71-80. Howard-Gordon, Frances. Glastonbury: Maker of Myths, 2nd edition. Glastonbury: Gothic Image, 1996. Laws, Chantal and Susan Stuart. “Myth, Magic and the Marketplace: The Preservation and Interpretation of Cornwall’s Arthurian Heritage within a Spiritual Tourism Context.” In Things That Move: The Material Worlds of Tourism and Travel Conference Proceedings. Leeds: Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, 2007. Lynch, Frances. Megalithic Tombs and Long Barrows in Britain. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 2004. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. McCaw, Kerrie. “A Reaffirmation of the Embodied Experience of the



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Visual.” In Mapping Minds, edited by Monika Raesch, 107-114. Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2010. Miles, David, Simon Palmer, Gary Lock, Chris Gosden and Anne Marie Cromarty. Uffington White Horse and its Landscape: Investigations at White Horse Hill, Uffington, 1989–95 and Tower Hill, Ashbury, 1993– 4. Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2003. Moura, Ann. Green Witchcraft: Folk Magic, Fairy Lore and Herb Craft. St Paul MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1999. Olsen, Daniel H. and Dallen J. Timothy. “Tourism and Religious Journeys.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Daniel H. Olsen and Dallen J. Timothy, 1-22. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Paris, Cody Morris. “The Virtualization of Backpacking Culture.” Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 1 (2009): 25-35. Paxson, Diana L. Ancestors of Avalon. London: Penguin, 2004. —. Ravens of Avalon. London: Penguin: 2007. —. Sword of Avalon. London: Penguin, 2009. Piggott, Stuart. “The Uffington White Horse.” Antiquity 5, no. 17 (1931): 37-46. Ragin, Charles C. Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Rountree, Kathryn. “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body Through Sacred Travel.” Sociology of Religion 63, no. 4 (2002): 475496. —. “Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites.” Body and Society 12, no. 4 (2006): 95-115. Theroux, Paul. The Great Railway Bazaar. London: Penguin Books, 1975. Voase, Richard. “Visiting a Cathedral: The Consumer Psychology of a ‘Rich Experience’.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 13, no. 1 (2007): 41-55. Wainright, Geoffrey. Henge Monuments: Ceremony and Society in Prehistoric Britain. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Wallis, Robert J. and Jenny Blain. “From Respect to Reburial: Negotiating Pagan Interest in Prehistoric Human Remains in Britain, Through the Avebury Consultation.” Public Archaeology 10, no. 1 (2011): 23-45. Winter, Michael and Ruth Gasson. “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Cathedral Visiting in Contemporary England.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 3 (1996): 172-182. Wordsworth, William. “The Egyptian Maid or the Romance of The WaterLily.” Yarrow Revisited; And Other Poems. Memphis, TN: General



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Books LLC, 2010. Zimmer Bradley, Marion. The Forest House. New York: Viking Press, 1995. —. The Lady of Avalon. New York: Viking Press, 1997. —. The Mists of Avalon. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine, 2000. —. Priestess of Avalon. New York: Voyager Press, 2000. Zwissler, Laurel. “Pagan Pilgrimage: New Religious Movements Research on Sacred Travel within Pagan and New Age Communities.” Religion Compass 5, no. 7 (2011): 326-342.



CHAPTER FOUR THE LOCATION OF THE SACRED: METHODOLOGICAL RECONSIDERATIONS OF THE SACREDNESS OF PLACE SARAH K. BALSTRUP

Introduction In the cross-cultural study of sacred sites in the Western academic context, it is generally accepted that a place becomes ‘sacred’ as the result of socially constructed beliefs that are projected upon a site, rather than qualities that are inherent to the place itself. Investigating the implications of this premise, this chapter evaluates the appropriateness of a methodological approach that adopts a ‘universal’ definition of sacredness, and physical/spiritual dualism in the study of cultural groups who do not necessarily subscribe to these Western paradigms. Comparing Keith Basso’s ethnography of the Western Apache of Cibecue,1 with David L. Carmichael’s description of Apache cosmology2 it becomes apparent that Carmichael’s use of Western concepts obscures the nature of his observations, while Basso’s approach, that avoids defining the sacred, is able to provide a far more revealing account of the relationship that the Apache share with place. Importantly, Basso’s work does not isolate sacred sites as points of significance, but rather, develops a picture of the overall sacrality of place in Apache culture. Given that the ‘sacredness’ of a place has a bearing on whether or not indigenous peoples in postcolonial 1

Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). 2 David L. Carmichael, “Mescalero Apache Sacred Sites and Sensitive Areas,” in Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, eds David L. Carmichael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves and Audhild Schanche (London: Routledge, 1994), 89-97.

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societies can lay claim to a site (in a legal, or socially recognised sense), the way in which sacred places are defined becomes a matter of both academic and political importance. As a point of contrast, Kathryn Rountree’s study of Goddess pilgrims from New Zealand and America travelling to international sacred sites3 will be considered as an example of a cultural group who does subscribe to a worldview where sacredness is a universal quality. Rountree’s descriptions highlight the socially constructed nature of the Goddess pilgrim’s experience, serving to emphasise the culturally specific origin of Western academic approaches to the study of sacred sites. Most importantly the idea that individuals and societies project beliefs upon the landscape reveals the psychologisation of the sacred, where the physical world remains detached from the meaning-making processes of the mind. Although the Apache and Goddess pilgrims are a part of contemporary Western culture, Goddess pilgrims are affected by similar cultural influences to Western academics, where the notion of projection is applicable in a social context governed by individualism and the view that religious beliefs are a matter of personal choice. The Apache, on the other hand, are a relatively closed community that has endeavored to maintain particular traditions, and to avoid exposure to wider influences. Providing an alternative to the Western paradigm that this chapter critiques, Basso’s Heideggerian approach demonstrates the advantages of avoiding a psychologised view of the sacred that would render physicality and lived experience to be less valid than ideas about the spiritual.

Western Concepts of the Sacred In the comparative study of religion, early theorists sought to define sacredness, not as something that was limited to Judeo-Christian ritual, but as a common element of religion and human behaviour. Studies of religious ritual formed the basis for thinking about sacred places, yet preexisting notions about the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ from Western culture also infused these investigations. According to Emile Durkheim4 and Mircea Eliade, that which is sacred can be defined insofar as it can be delineated from that which is non-sacred. Additionally, sacredness was 3

Kathryn Rountree, “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body through Sacred Travel,” Sociology of Religion 63, no. 4 (2002): 475-496. 4 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Florida: Harcourt, 1957).

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associated with the temporal aspects of religious ritual. In his adaptation of Arnold van Gennup’s work on initiatory rites, Victor Turner developed his theory of religious pilgrimage, where the pilgrim moves from the structured home environment into a ‘liminal’ space of antistructure, before returning home altered by his or her experience.5 The idea that the sacred is bounded or delineated refers to conceptual thresholds more than physical ones,6 so that physical aspects provide the symbolic impetus for an inner journey. At all points the Western definition of the sacred rests upon the understanding that sacredness is distinct from everyday life and that experiences of the sacred are either related to a non-physical plane of existence, or to (non-physical) states of mind. The underlying presumption of Western scholarship is that the physical environment constitutes an objective reality, while cultures develop particular ways of thinking about places which they project upon the environment in order to give it meaning. Such an approach locates the creation of meaning in the mind of the individual, so that projected meanings are disconnected from the physical site itself. 7 Accordingly, sacredness cannot be deemed to be inherent, sites cannot exert agency over people, and beliefs regarding sacredness can only be conceptual or psychological in nature. Since the mid-1980s, however, Western scholarship has applied new ways of thinking about physical environments. 8 Scholars of the ‘spatial 5

Victor Turner, “The Centre out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191-230. 6 Similarly, Gaston Bachelard’s theorisation of space is primarily concerned with the significance of thresholds. Although he does not write specifically on sacred spaces, his work on intimate or ‘really inhabited’ space is representative of the Western tendency to view the physical environment symbolically and through a psychological lens. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994). 7 Edward Casey explains this tendency, citing James F. Weiner’s 1991 ethnography of the Foi of Papua New Guinea, The Empty Place: “A society’s place names schematically image a people’s intentional transformation of their habitat from a sheer physical terrain into a pattern of historically experienced and constituted space and time ... The bestowing of place names constitutes Foi existential space out of a blank environment.” See Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, eds Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe NM: School of American Research, 1996), 14. 8 Kim Knott, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (London: Equinox, 2005), 1-2.

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turn’ have challenged Cartesian-Newtonian concepts of ‘space’ by arguing that one does not begin with emptiness and then fill it with things, rather, one comes to know reality from the position of embodied and emplaced experience, so that space is in fact a secondary and intellectualised abstraction. As one of the most prominent and influential theorists on the subject of ‘place’,9 Martin Heidegger posits that place consists of three elements; building, dwelling and thinking, which are absolutely inseparable and co-arising. 10 Dwelling, 11 according to Heidegger, involves the simultaneous shaping of the individual by the encultured physicality of place, and the shaping of place by the individuals who make up that culture. If this is indeed the case, the social production of place must be understood to be an organic and unending process wherein the ‘social aspects’ can never be divorced from the place itself. Despite the deeply entrenched individualism of Western culture, Heidegger’s concept of dwelling highlights that no individual exists out of place, nor can they operate independently of shared place-based existence.

Keith Basso: Wisdom Sits in Places Working with the Apache for over forty years, anthropologist Keith Basso reports that he still experiences Cibecue from the point of view of an outsider because he recognises the fundamental difference between the Apache experience of place and his own. 12 That difference, he concludes, is semiotic.13 Exploring place-based relationships through a linguistic lens in his celebrated study Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Basso demonstrates that place does not simply function symbolically, but rather, place is inextricably blended into all aspects of Apache culture and daily life. Noting Heidegger as an influence on his work,14 Basso makes observations about Apache culture and behaviour without reference to Western concepts of sacredness or the 9 The term ‘place’ is used by spatial theorists to refer to the embodied and emplaced experiences of daily life (and their socio-cultural significance), as opposed to the disembodied and abstract position suggested by the term ‘space’. 10 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from Being and Time 1927 to The Task of Thinking 1964, ed. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1977), 347-363. 11 ‘Dwelling’ is used to refer to the three aspects: thinking, building and dwelling. 12 Basso, Places, 109. 13 Basso, Places, 39. 14 Basso, Places, xvi.

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dualism between material and physical worlds. This approach ensures that a unique picture of Apache experience is able to emerge, rather than one that slots easily into existing Western paradigms. While Basso’s study is concerned with the relationship between people and place, his analysis is focused upon the role that language plays in this relation. According to Basso’s informants, place-names were attributed by their ancestors to describe the appearance of a location so that the name could bring forth a picture in the mind. For example, places like Green Rocks Side By Side Jut Down Into Water, and Circular Clearing With Slender Cottonwood Trees look exactly as the names suggest. 15 Such names were attributed when the ancestors first discovered these places, but other places were named after events such as, They Are Grateful For Water and She Carries Her Brother On Her Back. As written accounts of Apache history are a modern development, Apache recollections of events do not conform to Western modes of ordering and remembering. While the Western concept of ‘history’ is concerned with chronology, identity, and locative data, the Apache have little interest in the temporal features of events, and can only make sense of an account if they know where it occurred.16 Place enables the past to be reconstructed, and those telling stories about place: speak the past into being ... summon it with words and give it dramatic form, to produce experience ... the place-maker often speaks as a witness on the scene, describing ancestral events ‘as they are occurring’ and creating in the process a vivid sense that what happened long ago – right here, on this very spot – could be happening now.17

Uttering place names in Apache is something that is done with respect, as it is understood that one is literally quoting their ancestor’s words, verbatim. These names can also be used to enforce moral behaviour, as each place has a particular story associated with it, and each story encodes advice about the right way to conduct oneself. As the Apache often use indirect methods of communication such as sustained silence and avoidance in order to gradually develop familiarity, 18 or teasing very 15

In some cases, where a site no longer resembles its name, this anomaly tells the story of the changes that have taken place there. Basso, Places, 19. 16 Basso, Places, 31. 17 Basso, Places, 33. 18 Keith H. Basso, “To Give up on Words: Silence in Western Apache Culture,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (1970 ): 213-230.

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young children to promote modesty and self-regulation,19 place-names can be used in public settings in order to say something to a specific person. This type of storytelling is likened to shooting someone with an arrow, as the person to whom it is directed will pick up on the encoded reference and take this sometimes quite confronting advice on board. Such stories begin with the phrase “It happened at ... (a particular place);” a fairly short anecdote elaborates what occurred, and the story concludes with its opening line. The place itself then acts as a constant reminder to the person who has been ‘shot’ that they should correct their behaviour.20 The Apache also use place-names as a means of communicating complex ideas. Although the English translation of Apache place-names may seem cumbersome, they are quite compact in their original form. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso recounts a conversation that consists almost entirely of place-names; interspersed with long silences, and laughter. To an outsider, the conversation is incomprehensible. For instance, Louise says “My younger brother…” and Lola replies “It happened at Line Of White Rocks Extends Up and Out, at this very place!” followed by a thirty-fourty second pause and Emily’s comment: “Yes. It happened at Whiteness Spreads Out Descending To Water, at this very place!”21 This type of communication, which the Apache call ‘Speaking with Names’ is explained by Lola: We gave her clear pictures with place-names. So her mind went to those places, standing in front of them as our ancestors did long ago. She could hear stories in her mind, perhaps hear our ancestors speaking...22

It is evident from these examples that place-names are rich with significance, yet it is also vital to recognise the function of physical places in Apache culture. As Basso concludes, place is essential to the Apache as “geographical features have served the people for centuries as indispensable mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of their history.”23

19

Eleanor M. Nevins, “Learning to Listen: Confronting Two Meanings of Language Loss in the Contemporary White Mountain Apache Speech Community,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, no. 2 (2004): 278. 20 Basso, Places, 56-61. 21 Basso, Places, 79. 22 Basso, Places, 82-83. 23 Basso, Places, 62.

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Sacred Places and Apache Culture While Basso’s study is not directly concerned with notions of sacred place, David L. Carmichael has written on the function of ‘power places’ in Apache culture. In his description of Apache cosmology, Carmichael claims that: the physical and spiritual worlds are identified as two parallel dimensions of existence. The interface between them can be conceived as a mirror; the physical, material world is merely a reflection or shadow of the real world, the spiritual dimension behind the mirror.

He then goes on to explain that: People in the material world come into contact with the real world mainly under two kinds of conditions: by visiting places where the two dimensions intersect, or by undergoing a transformation. Intersections are where the structure of the cosmos and physical geography coincide…24

Carmichael’s description of Apache beliefs replicates the standard criteria for a sacred site under the Western model. Although the characteristics he puts forward may have their basis in Apache thought, the manner in which they are presented suggests that they are the most fundamental beliefs governing the Apache experience of sacred places. As this leaves no room for the unique and complex relationship between people and place that is described by Basso, I would suggest that the interpretation and emphasis evident in Carmichael’s account bears the influence of preexisting academic definitions of sacred sites. Applying a Western dualism, Carmichael establishes that the physical world is meaningless, and that the spiritual world is ‘real’. What is omitted is the function of the physical environment in the Apache belief system. If the material world is “merely a reflection or shadow,” 25 then all physical places are devalued. Although Carmichael allows sacred sites significance, these isolated points are conceived as gateways enabling access to the spiritual world. That is, that the sacred is ‘spiritual’ as opposed to physical in nature. 26 Carmichael also uses the general term ‘people’ instead of 24

Carmichael, “Sacred Sites,” 91. Carmichael, “Sacred Sites,” 91. 26 Eleanor Rosch argues that this concept is of a Judeo-Christian origin, and that it has determined the definition of the sacred ever since. Veikko Anttonen, “What Is It That We Call ‘Religion’? Analysing the Epistemological Status of the Sacred as 25

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‘Apache’ in his description of these points of intersection, which suggests that sacred sites are not exclusive, and that outsiders could potentially experience something of these ‘power places’. Such subtle misrepresentations may appear harmless, yet they contribute to the distorted view that the physical world is somehow separable from lived experience and culture. In popular usage, the term ‘sacred’ can be used to mean ‘important’, or ‘worthy of respect’, so that those places that are not specifically marked out as ‘sacred’ may be assumed to be profane spaces that can be substituted or replaced.

Kathryn Rountree: “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists” Unlike the Apache, who are a community that live in a particular place, the subjects of Rountree’s case study are individuals from a range of Western countries such as New Zealand and America, who self-identify as Goddess feminists, or Goddess pilgrims. These individuals feel a strong connection with the spiritual figure of the Goddess, who is believed to be immanent, but who also manifests in different forms in different cultures. Predominantly of middle-class origin, and able to travel for personal interest, these pilgrims identify the places they will visit through research on the internet, reading books and hearing about certain places through word of mouth. They are able to connect with the sites they are going to visit through accessible images before they leave, and can anticipate what such places might be like based upon others’ accounts, or from their own personal experiences of the Goddess. As Goddess pilgrims sometimes travel alone, pilgrimage routes can be self-created, yet many prefer to travel with a group, in which case routes are by tourist organisations like Carol Christ’s ‘Ariadne Institute’. 27 According to Rountree, the Goddess pilgrim’s journey is an intensely embodied experience, as the site is identified both with the body of the Goddess and the pilgrim’s own body. Pilgrims commonly engage in one or more of the following activities: pouring libations, meditating, chanting, dancing, or lying down and curving their body into undulations of the a Scholarly Category in the Study of Religion,” in Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Adjunct Proceedings of the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Mexico City, 1995, eds Armin W. Geertz and Russell T. McCutcheon (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2000), 198. 27 Carol Christ, The Ariadne Institute, accessed April 10, 2011, http://www.goddessariadne.org/goddesspilgrimage.htm.

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temple wall where voluptuous statues of Goddesses once stood. 28 This embodied connection with numinous forces is contrasted with the supposedly disembodied rituals of Christianity. 29 In the most general sense, this ‘return to the body’ is related to the motivations for ‘the spatial turn’. In both cases, the subject is engaged in a meaningful and physical way with their environment, and the focus is on embodied experience. Yet in the case of Goddess pilgrims, the desire to forge a connection between body and place, does not free them from the basic structure and predicates of the Western conceptual paradigm. As Goddess pilgrims are engaging with the numinous presence of the Goddess in their visits to foreign sacred sites, their belief in the universality of the Goddess implies that all people from all places can have the same type of experience if they present themselves at such locations. The Heideggerian concept of dwelling that forms the basis of placebased thinking is most comfortably applied to case studies that are located firmly in one place. Considering the experience of Goddess pilgrims, as international travelers, it can almost appear as if they do not ‘dwell’ at all. As place manifests gradually, anthropologists have often noted that entering unfamiliar territories can be intensely disorientating, and that it is as if one cannot comprehend what surrounds them.30 Over time, and often by observing the locals, one comes to understand how a place works, and by learning to operate according to its structure one becomes able to read its signs and notice its subtleties. Turner’s focus on liminality in pilgrimage journeys engages with the sense of disorientation triggered by unfamiliar environments in the anthropologist’s experience. However, ‘liminality’ does not do much to describe the significance and particularity of sacred places. If sacred sites function symbolically, as Turner suggests,31 then the symbolic language that is being applied is from the Goddess pilgrim’s home culture, and not from the culture of the site’s location. In a manner typical of the Western paradigm, the Goddess pilgrim projects the symbolic frameworks of her home culture onto the physical environment. Given that Goddess pilgrims do not immerse themselves in the cultures that they visit in the same way that an anthropologist would, their goal, as pilgrims, is to forge a personally significant bond with international sites. 28

Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 487-489. Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 478. 30 Martina Tyrrell, “From Placelessness to Place: An Ethnographer’s Experience of Growing to Know Places at Sea,” Worldviews 10, no. 2 (2006): 220-238. 31 Turner, “Pilgrim’s Goal,” 204, 214, 221, 226. 29

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Describing this type of approach as “intuitive”32 Rountree also notes that these women share the underlying belief that “religions are bigger than cultures and [sites] are not the specific property of specific cultures.” 33 For the Goddess pilgrim, the Goddess is immanent. Different cultures may offer variations of her essential form, but ultimately, these representations are one.34 Similarly, New Age pilgrims often feel that sacred sites speak to them directly, so that connections are of cosmic relevance in the journey of the individual soul.35 Often, these connections are explained as residual memories from past lives, or forms of initiation into the mysteries of the universe. For Goddess pilgrims, access to the site is uniquely granted to them because they are female and in this sense, identity is believed to transcend culture. While Apache culture places a greater focus on tribal affiliation and the maintenance of tradition, the secularised West has come to value individual choice as being more authentic than socially sanctioned (or culturally determined) customs. In the Apache case, place is inextricably bound up with the culture and communication systems of the social group, the instinctual bond that Goddess pilgrims forge is related to a personal narrative. Adopting a conceptual framework that delineates the sacred from the profane, Goddess pilgrims view sacred sites as places capable of offering a type of experience not possible in their home environment. Like Carmichael’s depiction of ‘power places’, Goddess sites are imagined as profound points of connection; as points where the one can access a “liminal otherworld”36 that is not manifest in the general terrain. In terms of New Age pilgrimage, the Harmonic Convergence of August 1987, saw New Age pilgrims collected at sacred sites across the world to share in collective prayer in an effort to heal the earth and usher in a new age of 32

Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 489. Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 479. 34 Wouter Hanegraaff, “The New Age Movement and the Esoteric Tradition,” in Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times, eds Wouter Hanegraaff and Roelof van den Broek (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 371-374. 35 As Adrian Ivakhiv points out, the New Age ‘self’ is often understood to be comprised of many different aspects bearing the influence of Jungian psychological perspectives. The multiplicity of the self can be further complicated by cross-cultural reincarnation which again feeds into universal ideals. See Adrian Ivakhiv, “Nature and Self in New Age Pilgrimage,” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1 (2003): 96. 36 Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 487. 33

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harmony and peace 37 Envisioning the earth as such, the essential homeliness of the planet could be represented by these sites, as these places constituted ruptures of inner truth on the surface of a world hampered by ‘white rationality’. This kind of broad-brush view of the world’s sacred sites should be understood to be a conceptualisation of place that is specific to the Western New Age, and the perspective of Goddess feminists in Rountree’s study builds upon this through an additional focus on gender, ritual and embodiment.38 Rather than presenting so-called sacred sites as places that convey their true essence to any individual who visits them, the bond that Goddess pilgrims forge with these sites comes as the result of abstract thinking. Their approach is not that of the free individual, but of an individual that is the product of Western cultural influences. Further, their experience of foreign sacred sites is not akin to that of local inhabitants, as a high level of imaginative investment is required in order to render foreign locations familiar in such intimate terms. Importantly, Heidegger’s concept of dwelling does not involve self-generated projection. Rather, the unending process of thinking, building and dwelling shapes place, while place shapes the community that dwells there. Individuals, therefore, are shaped as much by place as by their personal choices. As Goddess pilgrims are a subculture of Western society that is closely related to the New Age, notions of individual agency and the project of the self are of central importance. However, it must be recognised that while individualism is at the heart of Western thinking, this is not necessarily the case for all cultural groups. Following Heidegger in his assertion that it is not abstract thought that comes first but the embodied experience of place, if Western abstractions are applied to non-Western case studies the result will always be distorted in favour of existing intellectual paradigms, like that of sacred sites. As place-based thinking is particular and contextual, it stands in contrast to essentialist views; especially the concept of universalism. Modernity, globalisation, travel, and climate change have all contributed to a shift toward universalising thought, yet one can find this tendency occurring much earlier. As the grand narrative of Western culture, Christianity is both a monotheist and proselytising religion propounding the idea that humankind is a single group, and the earth a single place. The 37

Ivakhiv, “New Age Pilgrimage,” 96. Kathleen McPhillips, “Feminist Spirituality and the Power of Ritual,” in Practicing the Witch’s Craft: Real Magic Under a Southern Sky, ed. Douglas Ezzy (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003): 70-88. 38

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only place that is ‘elsewhere’ is the spiritual realm that, in everyday life, is clearly delineated from the profane material world. Despite secularisation, the Christian concept of a singular Truth has survived in the postEnlightenment belief in ‘objective’ and empirically observable reality.39 Likewise, the immanence of spiritual Truth has been maintained in Western thought through a variety of channels. In the study of religious culture, early theorists began to apply evolutionary concepts which saw all ‘primitive’ and ‘pagan’ cultures grouped together as the common root of the big five world religions.40 Psychologist Carl Jung, who had a profound influence on the New Age, similarly suggested that religions were essentially the same at their core, and that religious figures were archetypes that served an important psychological function for the individual. 41 The cross-cultural eclecticism of Theosophy, and later, the New Age, also contributed to a belief in essential Truth that could be accessed by any individual. Importantly, such influences are specific to Western culture, and are particularly strong in the New Age and related contexts such as that of Goddess feminism. Regardless of their immersion in a specific cultural context, individuals of the contemporary West are often imagined to act as free agents who choose their own beliefs, and abide by their own personal sense of truth. This focus on personal truth reveals the way in which human experience has come to be psychologised in the modern world.42 The individual may be guided by their own truth, yet where there is a confluence of divergent perspectives, rather than a consensus, about the nature and meaning of a physical location, this anomaly is accounted for by attributing all meaningmaking activities to the mind of the individual. The assumption is not that there are multiple realities, but multiple perspectives on the one empirical reality. This tendency to divorce the individual’s beliefs from the blank or objective place to which such beliefs refer, ensures that certain ideas can be isolated from contact with the resilient concept of Truth. While the quest for empirical Truth remains a work in progress, and immanent Truth may manifest in many forms, these concepts easily survive. It is, however, imperative that those aspects of Western culture that are taken for granted 39

Benton Johnson, “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth,” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 4 (1977): 370. 40 For instance, E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). 41 Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (New York: Brill, 1996), 216. 42 Albert G. A. Balz, “Dualism and Early Modern Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 15, no. 8 (1918): 225-241.

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as being true, are not presented as ultimate truth in the academic study of sacredness and place-based relationships. Western concepts of space and place are in fact culturally specific, and highly abstract, rather than selfevident.

Place and the Psychological Symbology of the West A good example of a highly abstracted and culturally specific paradigm for conceptualisng space and place can be found in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.43 In this study, Bachelard argues that intimate space forms the foundation of all experiences in the outside world. The structure of intimate space is embodied in the House, a symbolic collection of thresholds and spaces that are pregnant with meaning. As Bachelard argues, the primary place-based experience of Western culture 44 is the house in which one was born as it is “physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.”45 In this sense, the House “augments the values of reality…[and so]…it is not enough to consider the house an ‘object’ on which we can make our judgments and daydreams react.”46 It is for this reason that the abstract symbolic language of Western culture has the House as its predicate,47 and he elaborates that it is “reasonable to say that we ‘read a house’, or ‘read a room’, since both a room and a house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy.” 48 Effectively, the internalised House is mapped onto all unfamiliar places so that significance can be read immediately. The most important threshold is that of inside/outside which separates intimate space from the rest of the universe. Although each part of the archetypical House49 is symbolically rich, Bachelard grants particular attention to the

43

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Bachelard does not specifically refer to the West, and uses indistinct terms like ‘mankind’, yet his context and audience are undeniably Western in character. 45 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 14. 46 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5. 47 Bachelard claims that the House is the foundational structure at the core of human experience. However, my subsequent use of the short term ‘House’ refers to the foundational structures of Western thought, whether or not Bachelard is correct in his proposition. 48 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 38. 49 That is, the House includes standard features, like a cellar and an attic, and is internalised as such, even if one has never lived in a house with a cellar or an attic. 44

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attic, which is imagined to be the realm of higher logic, and the cellar that typifies the irrational realm of the subconscious.50 This split between conscious and subconscious is critical in terms of New Age and Goddess pilgrimage. According to Western symbolism, the unconscious is associated with darkness, chaos, formlessness, femininity, irrationality, the moon, instinctual behavior, and so on. For New Age pilgrims, opening themselves to the experience of sacred places is something that can occur on a subconscious level. It is thought that the conscious faculties engaged in ordinary life can be put aside so that the site can speak to the True Self, directly affecting the subtle body. In this way, Bachelard’s cellar becomes a cave in Carole Christ’s description of the Goddess pilgrim’s experience: we seek to connect to ancient women, to a time and place where women were at home in their bodies, honoured and revered, subordinate to none... the ancient stones speak. Descending into caves we feel grounded in Mother Earth and in the sure knowledge of the power of our female bodies. We seek to heal the wounds of patriarchy, violence and war.51

Entering this subconscious realm, it is imagined that one is subverting patriarchy. As patriarchy is understood to be linguistically, symbolically and culturally encoded in Western society, these feminists are trying to escape Heidegger’s threefold experience of dwelling that operates in their home environment. Identifying sacred sites with the subconscious, Goddess pilgrims are able to connect with place in instinctual ways, forging relationships with foreign sites in a way that would not be possible in the postcolonial context of their homeland, where the ethics of ownership are more apparent. The Goddess pilgrims mentioned in Rountree’s study come from postcolonial societies, and the postcolonial experience of place has become a pressing issue where individuals wish to move beyond a private and interior experience of the sacred which does not engage with place or the body. As David Tacey puts it: “when a society transplants itself from the old to the new world, the delicate and carefully maintained balance between the two psychic systems, between consciousness and the unconscious, is disturbed.” 52 This is at once a longing for a spiritually 50

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 17-18. Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 485. 52 David Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia (Victoria: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995), 35. 51

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embedded experience of the earth, and also a sacralised experience of the body. Insofar as place is psychologised, and Goddess feminists have a political agenda, sacred sites are thought to enable the; radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine...providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined and re-experienced through symbolic activity and ritual.53

Here, the foreign symbolic language of the site supposedly becomes a tool for such transformation, despite the fact that internalized Western paradigms have already determined the site’s function. While a Goddess pilgrim may believe that “[t]he peaceful and matrifocal people of ancient Malta left us their temples and symbolic language”54 this is simply not the case. It may seem as though Goddess pilgrims are using the symbolic system of other cultures, yet what they are really doing is incorporating new images into their existing symbolic system and transforming them accordingly.

Conclusion When the Apache say “This earth is part of us! We are of this place, Juniper Stands Alone”55 and Goddess pilgrims attest “we feel grounded in Mother Earth and in the sure knowledge of the power of our female bodies”56 the embodied and culturally inscribed link between person and place is evident. Yet there is a fundamental difference. In the Apache case, the location is specific and cannot be substituted. Goddess pilgrims, on the other hand, see the earth as one universal whole and female-kind as a cross-cultural collective. For the Apache, Juniper Stands Alone holds ultimate relevance in this example, yet for Goddess pilgrims, the Goddess can be found anywhere on the globe, and the most sacred site of all is the female body itself. The fact that intimate and as Bachelard puts it “really inhabited space”57 is represented by a built, portable structure like a house is deeply significant. What is suggested here is that the individual is both portable 53

Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 475. Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 489-490. 55 Basso, Places, 21. 56 Carol Christ quoted in Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 485. 57 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5. 54

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and essentially divorced from place, so that like the Christian religion, the structure of the individual can be relocated anywhere, unaffected by place. As Basso’s study demonstrates; place builds identity and culture. The symbiosis at work between place, language and people is so apparent, that the concept of relocation threatens all of these. If the Apache “hang the moral teachings of their history” 58 upon particular places, then what influence does place exert over the Goddess pilgrims? As this study suggests, for the pilgrim, the highly abstract and architectural notion of portability, means that the House can be written onto any place. However, the ability to employ such thinking is possible mostly because these travelers experience foreign sacred sites transiently. As the mobile Western individual is believed to act utilising the values of freedom and personal choice, this focus upon the uniqueness of the individual obscures the deep influence of the place and culture that they are born into. The thresholds of sacred and profane, home and liminal, conscious and subconscious; are understood to be primarily symbolic and a part of the individual’s interior experience. In the academic study of sacredness and place, where the concept of objective reality is applied in an unqualified manner, it is easy for universalising aspects of Western thinking to isolate place-based experience into the psychological realm of either the individual or the cultural group, who are viewed to project their beliefs onto surrounding terrain. As Rountree’s study revealed, Goddess pilgrims have the specific psychological skills to navigate unfamiliar places and to forge a bond of sacredness anywhere on the globe. Basso’s study, however, demonstrated that the Apache have not been adequately exposed to such cultural influences, and have a radically different set of psychological skills that sees place become inextricable from language and daily life. Notably, those individuals who are most fascinated by indigenous cultures and who feel a sympathetic bond in terms of land rights are often those very same people who misinterpret the true nature of the indigenous link with place. Goddess pilgrims who grant themselves access to the deities of world cultures and scholars like Carmichael explicitly profess their desire to respect and honour indigenous cultures and their sacred sites.59 If such individuals are criticised for their ‘colonialism’, it is clear that their ethical decisions are made based on their personal understanding of the nature of people, place, and the sacred. Unsurprisingly, this personal understanding is based upon Western concepts, and is likely to diverge 58 59

Basso, Places, 62. Carmichael, “Sacred Sites,” 96; Rountree, “Sacred Travel,” 479-480.

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from indigenous perspectives. It is for this reason that Goddess pilgrims and indigenous communities continue to operate as if they are speaking the same language – the language of ‘sacred sites’ – when in fact they are not. By studying only those aspects of culture that are easy to translate into existing Western frameworks, not only does one misrepresent these cultural groups, but the frameworks themselves cease to effectively define the phenomena they seek to analyse.

Bibliography Anttonen, Veikko. “What Is It That We Call ‘Religion’? Analysing the Epistemological Status of the Sacred as a Scholarly Category in the Study of Religion.” In Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Adjunct Proceedings of the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Mexico City, 1995, edited by Armin W. Geertz and Russell T. McCutcheon, 195206. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2000. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Balz, Albert G. A. “Dualism and Early Modern Philosophy.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 15, no. 8 (1918): 245-251. Basso, Keith H. “To Give up on Words: Silence in Western Apache Culture.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (1970 ): 213-230. —. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Carmichael, David L. “Mescalero Apache Sacred Sites and Sensitive Areas.” In Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, edited by David L. Carmichael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves and Audhild Schanche, 89-97. London: Routledge, 1994. Casey, Edward S. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 13-52. Santa Fe NM: School of American Research, 1996. Christ, Carol. The Ariadne Institute. Accessed April 10, 2011. http://www.goddessariadne.org/goddesspilgrimage.htm. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Florida: Harcourt, 1957. Hanegraaff, Wouter. “The New Age Movement and the Esoteric Tradition.” In Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern

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Times, edited by Wouter Hanegraaff and Roelof van den Broek, 359382. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Hanegraaff, Wouter. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. New York: Brill, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from Being and Time 1927 to The Task of Thinking 1964, edited by D.F. Krell, 319-340. London: Routledge, 1977. Ivakhiv, Adrian. “Nature and Self in New Age Pilgrimage.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4, no. 1 (2003): 93-118. Johnson, Benton. “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth.” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 4 (1977): 368-388. Knott, Kim. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London: Equinox, 2005. McPhillips, Kathleen. “Feminist Spirituality and the Power of Ritual.” In Practicing the Witch’s Craft: Real Magic Under a Southern Sky, edited by Douglas Ezzy, 70-88. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Nevins, Eleanor M. “Learning to Listen: Confronting Two Meanings of Language Loss in the Contemporary White Mountain Apache Speech Community.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, no. 2 (2004): 269-288. Rountree, Kathryn. “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body through Sacred Travel.” Sociology of Religion 63, no. 4 (2002): 475496. Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. Victoria: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. Turner, Victor. “The Centre out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191-230. Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1958. Tyrrell, Martina. “From Placelessness to Place: An Ethnographer’s Experience of Growing to Know Places at Sea.” Worldviews 10, no. 2 (2006): 220-238.

CHAPTER FIVE THE BEGINNING THAT IS ALREADY AN END: FINDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABYRINTHINE TRAVEL RENÉE KÖHLER-RYAN

Introduction In recent years, there has been a renaissance of interest in the ancient symbol of the labyrinth. Labyrinth societies have sprung up throughout the western world, books and theories about labyrinths abound, and labyrinths are being built and replicated, and used in various spiritual and therapeutic capacities. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth is not a puzzle to be solved. Instead, it is a pattern which, when followed, will take the traveller inward to its centre, and then out again, in a long and circuitous path. Here specifically, I would like to call into question some of the presuppositions of the labyrinth theorists and practitioners who literally de-contextualize the labyrinth pattern found in Chartres cathedral. Copying the pattern, they replicate it in either a makeshift or a more permanent form, and offer it as a means for personal retreat and meditation. Doing this, I propose, risks overlooking some of the insights that the medieval practice of labyrinthwalking might have to offer. Instead of rejecting this particular pattern of medieval labyrinth-walking as a source of meaning, I will argue that at least attempting to understand it on its own terms can lead to greater insight into the nature of pilgrimage. Seen as a substitute pilgrimage, walking the labyrinth has the advantage of stripping away some of the trappings of travel, to reveal what is most essential about the journey, its destination, and the pilgrim’s return. It is undoubtedly necessary to proceed with a degree of caution, for it is in fact difficult to establish with absolute authority what precisely the medieval architects of Chartres had in mind when they built the labyrinth into the floor of the nave of the cathedral. Nonetheless, the strong

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suggestion that the centre of the labyrinth, symbolic of the end-point of the pilgrimage, represents Jerusalem provides a vital clue. If walking the labyrinth within Chartres was taken to mean going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then one can form quite a vivid picture of how the medieval labyrinth walker experienced and understood following the labyrinthine path while being within the cathedral. This chapter will be based on the notion that the labyrinth walk in the cathedral of Chartres was, in its original use, a model of a “traditional religious journey.”1 While contemporary journeying to sacred sites (including cathedrals) can in some instances be considered mere tourism2 and in others religious pilgrimage proper, with varying stages in-between, the labyrinth walk will be taken to be a spiritual exercise with a the definite purpose of praying God and becoming closer to God and the members of the community of believers. The method of interpretation used will be that of looking at an external phenomenon in order to discern the inner experience of the traditional pilgrim, in comparison to the inner experience described by the contemporary labyrinth walker who decontextualizes the labyrinth. The following descriptive analysis will for these purposes employ the lens of studies in the history of art, architecture and cartography, so as to attempt to define an experience of labyrinths in the medieval cathedral of Chartres. These delineations will give credence to the possibility of a Christian worldview and experience in order to make as much sense as possible of the artefact under consideration, in its specific context of the Chartres cathedral. The following reflections are broken into four parts. The first will give some of the main characteristics of the cathedral. The second will outline some of the more contemporary analyses of the nature and significance of the labyrinth. The third will give a historiographical overview of the type of labyrinth being considered, so that discussion of walking through the labyrinth as a substitute pilgrimage can be properly oriented. The fourth 1

N. Collins-Kreiner, “The Geography of Pilgrimage and Tourism: Transformations and Implications for Applied Geography,” Applied Geography 30 (2010): 153-164; 153. In contemporary pilgrimage research there are some perceived problems with the idea of a traditional religious pilgrim. See N. Collins-Kreiner, “Research and Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations,” Annals of Tourism Research 37, no. 2 (2010): 440-456. However, the ‘act of faith’ needed for the traditional medieval pilgrim taken to be the labyrinth walker in medieval Chartres is essential to appreciating the context of the labyrinth itself. 2 With the ‘mere tourist’ I have in mind the traveller as consumer analysed in Dean MacCannall, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).

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will discuss the labyrinth as a space of interiority – of inner journey – still connected to the exterior world. The one who follows the labyrinth’s path learns from repetition and from the ability to follow a course already laid out ahead and afterwards. To enter into the medieval cathedral labyrinth is not precisely to enter a liminal state in Victor Turner’s sense of the term.3 The pilgrim on this path remains secure within the world that makes the most sense to him or her. Rather than departing in order to return with a greater knowledge mostly of self, when the medieval labyrinth pilgrim makes the final exit out of the labyrinth they have recalled their place within the order of the world, in relation to God and to the others that form, with them, a community of believers. The medieval labyrinth walker is not stepping out of community in order to enter into it as a full member; they are instead articulating and reflecting upon their membership in a different way.

The Context of the Cathedral The frame of reference for the medieval labyrinth is best understood initially as that of the general enterprise of Gothic cathedral-building, as well as in terms of the specific purpose for which Chartres formed a centre of pilgrimage and Christian worship. Concentrating on the vision that Chartres embodied architecturally provides a key to knowing the meaning of the labyrinth there. In keeping with the inception of the Gothic in Abbot Suger’s Abbey Church of St Denis, Chartres cathedral presented a heaven on earth. In the words of Otto Von Simson, for the medieval person, “[a]rchitecture was designed and experienced as a representation of an ultimate reality.”4 Abbot Suger thought of the Gothic church as an “image of heaven.”5 Such an image is possible because in the medieval worldview, the truth of the invisible is found in and through the visible. Any image is true, that is, only inasmuch as it represents the intelligible reality toward which each person, in the medieval Christian understanding, ultimately tends. The Gothic cathedral, then, had a specifically religious function, in that it drew those who entered it toward a vision of what it is to be in the company of God and his people.

3

See in particular Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” chapter 3 of The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway: Transaction, 1995). 4 Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), xx. 5 Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, xx.

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More specifically still, medieval cathedrals were often points on the paths of pilgrims; or else they served as the end-points of particular pilgrimages. In France, Chartres cathedral was significant as a pilgrimage site in that it held the relic of Mary’s tunic, believed then to be that which she wore when giving birth to Jesus Christ. The Sacred Tunic, which survived the great fire of 1194, after which the cathedral was rebuilt in its Gothic incarnation, may have been “venerated ‘by almost the entire Latin world’,” but the importance of Chartres extended further back in time to even before the birth of Mary: Divine Providence, it was believed, had called Chartres as the first of the churches of Gaul to the knowledge of the mystery of the Incarnation. Indeed, the [original] sanctuary itself was said to have been built more than a century before the birth of Mary, in response to the oracles of prophets and sybils about the Virgo paritura ... The basilica of Chartres was ... the centre of the cult of Mary in France, if not in western Europe.6

This focus on Mary, and in particular on the moment when she gives birth to Jesus, especially emphasises Jesus’ incarnation, and it is this aspect that both Georges Duby7 and Robert A. Scott8 argue is one of the major aspects of cathedral building in France in the Middle Ages. That the medieval cathedral under consideration emphasised the incarnation has a twofold significance. The incarnation means that the world of creation has significance because Christ took on human flesh and dwelt in the created world in which humans live; and he chose to die and rise from the dead in Jerusalem, which then becomes the holiest of places on earth in the medieval imagination. The prominence of the earthly Jerusalem is matched and exceeded by that of the heavenly Jerusalem, another term for the celestial and eternal city that is the home of Christ and the saints and the goal of every pilgrim in the world. The labyrinth within the cathedral accentuates these points even further. As we will see, there is strong evidence to suggest that the centre of its labyrinth represents the city of Jerusalem. Christ travelled toward the earthly Jerusalem to die and rise from the dead. The pilgrim within the labyrinth travels imaginatively in his footsteps, making the ultimate pilgrimage in a space that echoes in more 6

Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, 160. Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Duby argues that the building of Gothic cathedrals was a response to the defeat of the Albigensian heresy. 8 Robert A. Scott, The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 68. 7

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than one aspect (as will be seen below) the goal toward which every Christian pilgrim is ultimately called. Taking into account these very general points, it can already be ascertained that travelling through the labyrinth in medieval times was arguably very different from common understandings of labyrinths today. Examining the context of the medieval labyrinth reveals that for the medieval pilgrim, walking the labyrinth was not a journey of “empowerment” – a term that one finds, for instance, on the website of the international and growing Labyrinth Society.9 This being said, it is unfortunate that no first-hand accounts exist of the meaning of walking the cathedral labyrinth for the medieval person. Even the use to which the labyrinth was put liturgically is a matter of speculation and dispute.10 The inner experience of the medieval pilgrim must in this absence be surmised from the meaning of the cathedral itself and from the position in which the labyrinth is placed – in the nave and just inside the entrance. The cathedral tells the story of creation, redemption and salvation through its stained glass windows. In its soaring heights, it simultaneously emphasises the grounding of that story in the world, while at the same time pointing upwards, toward the heavenly Jerusalem. The space of the cathedral, then, indicates that the religiously oriented pilgrim who follows the labyrinth is not so much invested in subjective empowerment as in a further appreciation of the meaning that the story of salvation carries specifically for him or her, within a broader community on earth as well as in heaven.

9

“Empowerment” is identified as one of the core values of the Labyrinth Society, and is defined in part as “enabl[ing] each other to be our authentic selves.” John W. Rhodes, “The Labyrinth Society Guiding Principles,” The Labyrinth Society: About the Labyrinth Society, accessed November 28, 2011, http://labyrinthsociety.org/about-tls/3165-the-labyrinth-society-guiding-principles. 10 There is only one medieval text that deals with the use of a pavement labyrinth within a church, and it dates to far later than the period we are looking at here, to 1396. This text speaks of a “peculiar, para-liturgical ritual: on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, the Dean and canons of the chapter of Auxerre cathedral gathered on the labyrinth pavement to dance, jump, and toss a leather ball ... back and forth, all the while singing the Victimae paschal laudes.” In Daniel K. Connolly, “At the Centre of the World: The Labyrinth Pavement of Chartres Cathedral,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, vol. 1, eds Sarah Blicke and Rita Tekeppe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 292. See also Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 129-158.

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Contemporary Interpretations Howard Kern, in his seminal work on labyrinths, writes that in ancient times, labyrinths were to be found only in what he calls “secular” buildings. He goes on to stipulate: “In contrast, no evidence has been found of labyrinths having been depicted as or in secular buildings in the Christian Middle Ages, the height of church labyrinths.”11 An example of a secular structure would be a government building, for instance. Kern seems to have a very simple notion of the “secular” here, whereby secular buildings are simply those that are not set-aside for specifically religious purposes.12 It should be said that, taking his lead, this chapter will address questions of the sacred and of religion not “theoretically” and “inclusively” as is suggested by sociologists N. J. Demerath and Terry Schmitt, but rather philosophically, “theologically,” and “exclusively.”13 That is, in order to put the labyrinth into its context, it will be necessary to stipulate the theological claims set out in the space of Chartres cathedral. This will entail suspending a discussion of Demerath’s assertion that there can be no clear-cut distinction between the sacred and the secular.14 Kern’s point is that at a time when temples were in existence alongside other buildings for public use, only the latter included labyrinths. The shift that Kern identifies is all the more fascinating when we take into account Randolfo Lanciani’s claim that even the name “labyrinth” began to fall away in the high middle ages. Instead, rues de Jerusalem became the common term for this unique symbolic pattern and structure.15 This transformation is again 11

Hermann Kern, Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings Over 5000 Years (New York: Prestel, 2000), 143. 12 Similarly, David Willis McCullough claims: “A key distinction – besides the design of the labyrinth pathway – between the Roman and medieval Italian labyrinths is their location: none of the Roman ones was placed in a temple or a sacred site. All of the medieval ones are in or on a place of worship.” In David Willis McCullough, The Unending Mystery: A Journey Through Labyrinths and Mazes (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 66. 13 N. J. Demerath and Terry Schmitt, “Transcending Sacred and Secular: Mutual Benefits in Analyzing Religious and Nonreligious Organizations,” in Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, eds N. J. Demerath et al. (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 14 See for instance N. J. Demerath, “Secularization Extended: From Religious Myth to Cultural Commonplace,” in Companion to the Sociology of Religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn (Oxford: Blackwell: 2000). 15 Randolfo Lanciani, Pagan and Christian Rome (New York: Benjamin Bloom Inc., 1967), 31.

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emphasised by the fact that while it was not unusual for labyrinths in the high middle ages explicitly to refer to the symbol’s mythical origins, these were changed to convey the narrative specific to Christianity. In the centre there would be depictions of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, but this time as a symbol of Christ defeating Satan, having descended down to Hell in the time between his death and resurrection.16 These religious connotations, though, and even the labyrinth’s mythological origins and significance, gradually began to recede from common understanding, so that, as Lanciani says, labyrinths became “a pastime for idlers and children.”17 Such a lackadaisical attitude is decidedly missing among contemporary labyrinth walkers. Various forms of interpretation have been applied to the labyrinth today. One of the most prevalent is that of Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis.18 Another is adopted by various practitioners, who fasten on to the labyrinth as a medium for self-discovery, healing and renewal. Thus, for instance, Eve Eschner Hogan will refer to the labyrinth as a means “to make simple shifts in the way we are living so as to better align our thoughts and actions with our most divine selves,”19 and Melissa Gayle West speaks of finding through the labyrinth: “Spirit, release from emotional or physical pain, a solution to a challenging problem or creative task, the unobstructed Self.”20 This unobstructed, divine Self is in this analysis the key to the labyrinth’s meaning, and it is the focus too of Lauren Artress,21 who is officially a Canon of the Episcopalian church. In what has become for the labyrinth movement a watershed moment, in 1991, Lauren Artress and a group of labyrinth enthusiasts entered Chartres cathedral, pulled away the chairs placed on top of what was to them the most important part of the nave, and started walking along the labyrinth’s path. Artress speaks of this occasion as one of personal fulfilment, of revival of the importance of the labyrinth, but also with an 16

See especially Kern, Through the Labyrinth, 146; and Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 7, 80-86. 17 Lanciani, Pagan and Christian Rome, 31. 18 For such interpretations, one of the best sources is Jacques Attali, The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom, trans. Joseph Rowe (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1999). 19 Eve Eschner Hogan, Way of the Winding Path: A Map for the Labyrinth of Life (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 2003), 5. 20 Melissa Gayle West, Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 6. 21 See especially Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 2006).

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attitude of proprietary authority.22 In Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice (2006) Artress documents her discovery of what she refers to as a sacred archetype. Drawing on Jungian theory, feminism and a philosophy very much resembling that of the religion of the New Age, she rejects the philosophical and theological resources of the West in seeking to understand the nature of the labyrinth.23 Surprisingly, she even claims that the West has no significant tradition of interiority, stating that we tend to think of God as “out there” rather than within.24 She further asserts that the West emphasises action, whereas the East is focussed on contemplation.25 However, as will be described below when examining the role of maps in the medieval world, as well as practices with labyrinths, in the time that the labyrinth of Chartres was being constructed, the tradition of a form of meditation focussed on the narrative of Christ’s Incarnation, of imagined journeys toward the earthly as well as the heavenly Jerusalem, were very much present. While Artress is mostly preoccupied with the Chartrian labyrinth pattern, she explicitly focuses on its meaning as self- rather than Godcentred. Revealingly, it is in this respect that she seems to pass wide of her mark, claiming that the institutional church, custodian of the original Chartrian labyrinth, finds the imagination to be dangerous, and so treats “mystical experience” as “superstition,” leading to a “fear and mistrust of

22

See Artress, Walking a Sacred Path, 4-6. The difficulties of defining New Age religion have been articulated in particular by Wouter Hanegraaff in New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Especially of interest here is that Hanegraaff characterises New Age religion as “psychologising religion” and “sacralising psychology.” This is taken to mean that as personal inner consciousness evolves, “a perfect gnosis or illumination [is achieved], in which Self-realization and God-realization are one and the same. In order to assist its own evolution, the mind creates ‘meaningful illusions’ which hold spiritual lessons.” In New Age Religion and Western Culture, 366. Artress’s description of coming to self-consciousness is in line with this characterization. 24 Artress, Walking a Sacred Path, 13-14. Her statement may be true for many today. Paul Heelas reports that “Surprisingly, a recent survey finds that 37 per cent of the British sample agree with the statement, “I believe that God is something within each person, rather than something out there.” In Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Oxford, Blackwell, 2008), 1. However, it would be a mischaracterisation to say that there has been no emphasis on a philosophy of interiority in Western civilization. 25 Artress, Walking a Sacred Path, 24. 23

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enlightening experiences.”26 Artress suggests that this might be the reason behind the custodians of the cathedral at Chartres not making the labyrinth available more than they do, for the public to walk its path. It is worthwhile, in this respect, to refer directly to a statement from Chartres cathedral, quoted by Artress. On the occasion of a labyrinth display in 1993, the following was issued: In any case, it [the labyrinth] cannot be a magical place where man pulls hidden forces from the earth. That would be (were one to do so) a perversion of the intention of the builders/creators of the labyrinth. For in doing so, one would substitute man in place of God. And God is the 27 ultimate end/final destination of our earthly pilgrimage.

This substitution is the fulcrum upon which interpretations of the labyrinth depend. I would like to propose that re-situating the Chartrian labyrinth back within the cathedral, which is to say within its original physical and religious context, is the only way in which we can reconcile the pilgrim’s path as being both God-centred and personally spiritually fulfilling. The two are not mutually exclusive options, but the custodians of Chartres cathedral appear to want to emphasise that this particular labyrinth in the cathedral can never be divorced from its explicit surroundings and still maintain its proper meaning. In short, only when the quest for God is of primary concern can self-discovery and proper conversion follow. Resituating the Chartrian labyrinth within its cathedral setting serves to emphasise its aspects as a substitute pilgrimage directed specifically toward Jerusalem. This further serves to provide a foundation to describe what kind of learning takes place when the pilgrim embarks upon the path of the labyrinth. It is worthwhile for a moment to consider the contemporary interpretation of walking the de-contextualized labyrinth of Chartres. In Grace Cathedral San Francisco, Artress placed first a canvas and then a tapestry replica of the Chartres labyrinth. Allegedly, the canvas labyrinth attracted hundreds of people at a time to walk it; the subsequent tapestry labyrinth was walked by “millions of people,” and this popularity has more recently led to the construction of a stone labyrinth outside of the

26

Artress, Walking a Sacred Path, 117. Artress, Walking a Sacred Path, 201 (note to 117). It is possible that the custodians of the cathedral were already wary of esoteric theories about the location of the sacred space, which have been discussed in, for instance, Gordon Strachan, Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2003).

27

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cathedral accessible to all.28 An experience of walking the woollen tapestry labyrinth in around the year 2000 is described by Craig Wright in his conclusion to The Maze and the Warrior (2001). Wright emphasises the multi-religious aspect of the walk – “these individuals,” he says, “sincerely seek spiritual guidance but do not rigidly follow the teachings of any established religion or church ... Their one article of faith is that this special geometric form can change one’s state of mind for the better.”29 Wright’s description serves to emphasise the somewhat eclectic religious experience of walking the labyrinth. Before walkers enter, usually around twilight, “a maze steward may offer [the walkers] an American Indian feather blessing ‘intended to smooth your energy field’ and to do honor to the individual who has chosen to engage the maze.”30 Non-intrusive music – New Age, Gregorian chant, and Taizé chant – is used as the path is followed; soothed by non-confrontational sound, each individual chooses how to experience the labyrinth.31 Any other symbols that could be readily identified with a particular religion have been erased from the labyrinth. As Wright notes, “[m]any would even claim that the cross stamped upon the Chartrian maze is not exclusively a Christian sign, since, like the maze itself, it predates Christianity.” 32 What we find, then, in this brief exploration, is that those who walk this particular labyrinth pattern without reference to its original meaning share little in the way of common orientation. Every person finds for him or herself something or nothing spiritual when performing the walk of the labyrinth. One can refer to Wright’s collection of an array of personal statements of those who have walked the labyrinth to see some responses and attitudes described.33 Some see its journey as a metaphor for selfdiscovery, of how we relate to one another, as a way of healing the self. A few claim that nothing happens to or within them at all on the labyrinthine path.

The Original Meaning of the Labyrinth in Chartres Taken out of context, then, it can be difficult to discern a coherent and consistent meaning attributable to walking the pattern of the Chartrian 28 Lauren Artress, “From Canvas to Tapestry to Stone,” accessed November 28, 2011, http://www.laurenartress.com/grace-cathedral/. 29 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 271. 30 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 272. 31 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 272. 32 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 272-273. 33 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior, 273-274.

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labyrinth. What might we find if we put the labyrinth back into its context, within the cathedral? In order to know this, it is crucial to discern some of the aspects of the medieval imagination at the time that Chartres was built. Daniel K. Connolly argues that this particular labyrinth “remains as integral to that building’s fabric and its spaces as any of its more renowned decorative ensembles.”34 Completed at the same time as the cathedral, it was no mere addition to but an integral part of the structure of the church. It is essential to consider, then, the nature of the importance of the labyrinth to its builders, given its literal centrality within the nave and what we have already touched upon as the significance of the cathedral itself. The labyrinth, I would argue, encapsulates in a symbol, which lends itself to performance and enactment, the meaning of pilgrimage toward earthly as well as heavenly Jerusalem. The pavement labyrinth in Chartres can be dated by the completion of construction of the nave in 1220. Unfortunately, we know little more than this about its actual construction. As David Connolly points out, “The size and placement of these pavements [in cathedrals] are radical developments for the history of ecclesiastical architecture, for which there has yet to be a full accounting.”35 What we do know is that, previously, labyrinths in the sense that we are speaking of them here had not existed. Instead, they had been mainly decorative.36 In contrast to mosaics on walls and so small that they could not be traversed, the Chartres pavement labyrinth is large and made of stones. The French medieval cathedral labyrinths are unique again in contrast to the Italian church labyrinths, in that they seem specifically there to be walked.37 Their sheer size begs that they be travelled. The path is “40 feet (12 m) in diameter and composed of eleven concentric rings 34

Daniel K. Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 288. Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 286. 36 See, for instance, W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (New York: Dover, 1970). 37 “Although these images carried their theological and metaphysical weight, there is rarely a sense that the medieval Italians took the labyrinth symbol as seriously as the French did in that circle of cathedrals around Paris. For the Italians, the labyrinth was an aid to devotion. Following the winding path – even with a finger – might help save one’s soul, but labyrinths were also wonderful visual ornaments to be enjoyed for their sheer beauty. They remained small, and like the paths on the mosaic Roman floors, were too small to walk. Even San Vitale’s labyrinth, the largest, is only about eleven and a half feet wide. Some are vertical, like pictures or Roman mosaic murals. In Italy, the labyrinth remained something to look at or maybe, however briefly, to touch. It was primarily a visual experience. In France, it became a pathway to walk, a sacred pathway.” In Scott, The Gothic Enterprise, 69-70. 35

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that trace out a path 858 feet (26 m) long.”38 Also, the pattern of the Chartres labyrinth is innovative in its design. It is, Daniel Connolly proposes, not at all coincidental that the labyrinth in the nave of Chartres was constructed so soon after the “recent loss of Jerusalem to Muslim forces in 1187.”39 Connolly argues robustly that those who copy the pattern of the Chartrian labyrinth to use it elsewhere neglect to understand that the labyrinth is “itself a kind of copy,” motivated by a longing for the city of Jerusalem.40 The labyrinth, that is, is symbolic of the journey that the pilgrim would take to reach the Holy City. Denied literal pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it is unsurprising that the aspiring medieval pilgrim would turn to a form of substitute pilgrimage in such a situation, given that for some time already, imaginary or substitute pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been a common practice among religious and laity. One way of imagining one’s way along the path of the pilgrim, and at the same time performing a pilgrimage in the Middle Ages was to contemplate a map leading toward or oriented around the destination. A complex instance of such is the “itinerary map.” The potential of these maps to help the pilgrim to perform a journey of imagination and spirit were realised in the complex works of cartographer Matthew Paris about the time that the construction of Chartres cathedral was coming to an end (ca. 1250). Matthew Paris’s maps again emphasise the significance of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem in the medieval imagination. The user of the map would journey toward Jerusalem, unfolding parts of a map according to the route he or she chose imaginatively to take.41 Matthew perfected the way that such maps could operate as sources of worldly information, while at the same time leading the reader of the map to consider the terrain of spiritual affairs. Reading such a map, one would proceed in a linear fashion, from the bottom of the page toward the top, proceeding in this way through the manuscript and at the same time 38 Philip Ball, Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind (London: The Bodley Head, 2008), 136. 39 Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 287. 40 Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 286. 41 See for instance Daniel K. Connolly, “Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (1999): 598-622; Daniel Connolly, “Copying Maps by Matthew Paris: Itineraries Fit for a King,” in The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700, ed. Palmira Brummet (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Michael Gaudio, “Paris and the Cartography of the Margins,” Gesta 39, no. 1 (2000): 50-57; Katharine Breen, “Returning Home from Jerusalem: Matthew Paris’s First Map of Britain in Its Manuscript Context,” Representations 89, no. 1 (2005): 59-93.

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through Europe toward Jerusalem.42 Furthermore, “added flaps ... allow the user to change the geographies and stories presented about their places.”43 Each stage on the journey was described in detail, with pictures and accompanying symbols, so that each specific geographical point had a literal, but also a spiritual significance. Connolly describes using these maps as a full-body experience: the itinerary maps (at least the Monastic version) were made by a man who did not take the journey, for a group of men who would themselves not take the journey. Made up of seven pages, Paris’s itinerary map is filled with pictures and texts that excite both visual and... aural senses. By creating multi-sensorial experiences of these pages, Matthew essentially created an experience of virtual travel for his fellow brethren. The pages thereby helped to create the devotional experience of an imagined or spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem.44

Another kind of medieval map that supports the medieval imagined understanding of the location of Jerusalem as well as of its role within communal and personal salvation is the medieval mappa mundi. The Hereford Map is one of the few extant instances of these, and it depicts Jerusalem as the centre of the world.45 From the thirteenth to the mid42 Daniel Connolly gives a wonderful description of the experience of reading these maps, including the following: “Matthew designed the map pages themselves as a way to keep the viewer’s body engaged in the journey. The journey depends on involving the reader’s body as a way to strengthen the credibility of the virtual experience. The routes always begin at the lower edge of the book, next to the reader’s body, and move up the page; the route then continues again in the lower right of the page and progresses again up the page, like a capital ‘N’. At the top right of the page, at a passage’s end, there is some natural feature, a river or a mountain range, and the turning of the page crosses that space. The manuscript thus works with the body of its user to incorporate or marry its spaces with the reader’s imagination, and so together they create the experience of virtual travel.” See “Copying Maps,” 170. 43 Connolly, “Copying Maps,” 167-168. 44 Connolly, “Copying Maps,” 168-170. 45 For an extended analysis and detailed description of the Hereford Map, see Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). See also: P. D. A. Harvey, ed., Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context. British Library Studies in the History of the Book (London: British Library, 2006); and P. D. A. Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map, British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). For a more general contextualization of mappae mundi in the history of cartography, see for

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fifteenth century, the custom of having Jerusalem at the centre was common,46 and it is enticing to think that again this might be because of the loss of Jerusalem as a pilgrim site to the Christians in the late twelfth century. Certainly, as David Woodward states, the Crusades “strengthen[ed] ... the idea of Jerusalem as the spiritual centre.”47 Furthermore, Connolly points out that the Hereford Map’s depiction of Jerusalem has features that can be found in basic medieval iconography of the ancient city: circular crenulated brick walls surrounding it, and an “inner organization [that] revolves around the intersection of the cardo maximus and the decumanus maximus – the two organizing avenues by which a Roman town was founded.”48 The Chartrian labyrinth has some of the same key features. It is formed into four quarters by a cross pattern, and its circular centre has a rosette shape similar to the crenulations of the walls surrounding Jerusalem. When considered as similar to a medieval mappa mundi, with Jerusalem at its centre and a winding path around it, the labyrinth can be thought as a symbol of the world, as a way to be followed toward ultimate meaning. The labyrinth in Chartres, then, can be taken as signifying the world whose ordering principle is Jerusalem, as well as the journey toward the heavenly Jerusalem that is the goal of every pilgrim’s life. Finally, Connolly proposes that the rosette motif at the centre of the labyrinth repeats a pattern that medieval pilgrims had observed on the table of the last supper in Jerusalem.49 Taken as a simple geometrical representation of Jerusalem as the centre of the world, the centre of the labyrinth reminds of the pattern’s cosmic significance. When considered in direct relationship to the Eucharist, the meaning more specific to medieval apprehension becomes clear. Jerusalem, every medieval Christian pilgrim would be well aware, was the historic place where Christ initiated the Eucharist, celebrated during Mass in the cathedral; as well as the city of Christ’s death and resurrection. Another way of saying this is that if the altar, the place of re-enactment of Christ’s last supper, as well as his instance Catherine D. Smith and Roger J. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); and John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers: The Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography – From Antiquity to the Space Age (London: Pimlico, 2000). 46 David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, no. 4 (1985): 510521; 515. 47 Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” 517. 48 Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 295. 49 Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 297-300.

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passion and death, were not in the cathedral, then the labyrinth would likewise be missing its true centre. The labyrinth makes no sense to the medieval pilgrim if he or she does not also understand the cathedral as the city of Jerusalem or, at the very least, as a site where something of the true nature of God and of personal salvation can be found and appreciated.

Setting the Labyrinth Back in its Place Keeping these clues from the historiographical research about the labyrinth in Chartres in mind, what might further be suggested about the experience of the medieval pilgrim walking through the labyrinth? Since we only have the tools of imaginative or substitute pilgrimage to examine, without extensive commentary from their makers and users, this requires more guesswork than one would like. The only text we have about the use of pavement labyrinths comes long after the labyrinth in Chartres was constructed. It seems a justified assumption, but an assumption nonetheless, that the Chartrian labyrinth is to be walked upon because of its size, its position within the cathedral, and from the fact that its entry and exit point faces the main entrance of the sacred space, inviting the entrant to the church to embark upon its long and winding path. There are no texts to tell us explicitly what liturgical context the labyrinth was used within when it was built.50 The only certain indications that we have derive from the setting of the labyrinth within the cathedral. I will now offer some reflections on the meaning of the labyrinth taken specifically from its situation within this sacred space. Specifically, what can the medieval pilgrim’s journey through the labyrinth tell us about the nature of travel? The first point is that walking the labyrinth within the cathedral means that one’s surroundings constantly remind of the goal of the journey, as well as pointing out why the quest is being undertaken. If we are to learn from the orientation of medieval world maps, the west is the direction of sin and death. The west is where the sun sets. Entering into the labyrinth from this direction means deliberately moving away from darkness, and from what one needs to leave behind, at least for the moment. However, it does not mean abandonment of the entire world, but instead trusting in something other than powers of the self. Upon entering the labyrinth, rather than fleeing the everyday, the pilgrim is forced to examine it more closely, by concentrating on every footstep, and by covering as much ground as he or she possibly can upon a shape that represents the world in 50

Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 291-292.

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which he or she lives. Referring again to the cartographic imagination of the medieval pilgrim might here be telling. While the medieval mappae mundi in particular do not conform to modern and contemporary maps in giving as exact as possible representations of geographical land and water masses, they offer a wealth of information that the pilgrim would have found both useful and imaginatively stimulating.51 Like the traveller, the pilgrim in the labyrinth can never, even if he or she wants to, escape from the world. After all, the place most preoccupying the pilgrim moving toward Jerusalem is in many respects the worldliest place possible: a city. One of the most insightful (albeit brief) descriptions of experiencing the labyrinth of Chartres specifically in relationship to its surroundings as well as the Hereford Map is given by David Willis McCullough.52 McCullough observes that upon entering the cathedral, the visitor is oriented exactly as one would be on the Hereford map – facing East and coming from the West, from where the rose window depicts the last judgment. The heavenly Jerusalem is off in the distance, toward the altar, while “In the middle distance is the centre of the labyrinth, the ciel, just as Jerusalem is at the centre of the map.”53 He then describes what it is like to walk the labyrinth surrounded by the cathedral: The walker entering the Chartres labyrinth moves first toward the ciel, then must turn left, the direction of the damned, then right, toward the saved, then left again, passing next to the great rounded petals that ring the inside of the centre. Then, just as quickly, the walker is thrust away from the goal and because of the labyrinth’s design seems to be headed farther and farther away from the centre.54

The walker sometimes faces the west, where the rose window carries depictions of Christ at the centre of a scene of the last judgment, displaying his wounds, and at other times East, toward the altar. However, McCullough points out that:

51

G. R. Crone, “New Light on the Hereford Map,” The Geographical Journal 131, no. 4 (1965): 447-458; Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps”; David Woodward, “Medieval Mappae Mundi,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. One: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286-370. 52 McCullough, The Unending Mystery, 85-87. 53 McCullough, The Unending Mystery, 85. 54 McCullough, The Unending Mystery, 86.

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more time is spent moving westward, through the sinful world of ordinary people. To the left and right, on windows donated by the medieval guilds, are scenes of everyday life, shoes being sold, horses being shod... if the labyrinth were indeed a medieval map of the world, the walker would visit and pass by every land, continent or island.55

Within the cathedral, the labyrinth walker is not asked to forget the world, but to incorporate that world’s meaning within cosmic and eternal significance. Here, every footfall counts. Here too, in a miniaturized version of the world, every place is condensed and intensified, allowing the walker to dwell in each moment. Thus, each moment has immanent and transcendent significance. Everyday life takes place not only outside, but also within the space of the cathedral. Treading the labyrinth inside the cathedral, the walker is enticed to contemplate such meaning. It is not that religious orientation demands completely turning away from mundane reality. Instead, the pilgrim is asked to focus on why such matters are ultimately important. Toward the end of the journey, Daniel Connolly observes that one’s entire being becomes focused on path and goal.56 The final answer is that the mundane already participates in the centre represented on the labyrinth as well as the map: the earthly Jerusalem that intimates much of the heavenly city to which the pilgrim is called. McCullough identifies the centre of the labyrinth with the heavenly, rather than the earthly Jerusalem, which is not quite consistent, given that his interpretation comes from looking at the medieval map, which explicitly represents the earthly Jerusalem at its focal point of meaning. This is a crucial observation, for it indicates an assumption about the medieval world-view that does not seem particularly adept at finding the significance of the labyrinth for understanding pilgrimage. Philip Ball expresses the same presupposition when he writes: “This is why the Gothic cathedrals are almost terrifying in their beauty: they encode a renunciation of our poor, drab and degenerate world and an exhortation to seek only knowledge of God.”57 Abbot Suger’s (and Abbot Suger was contemporaneous with the beginning of the Gothic, if not in fact its initiator58) interpretation of the Gothic, and especially of the anagogical, 55

McCullough, The Unending Mystery, 87. Connolly, “At the Centre of the World,” 310. 57 Ball, Universe of Stone, 57. 58 Robert G. Calkins, Monuments of Medieval Art (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 140; Richard Kieckhefer, Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 108; Erwin Panofsky, “Introduction,” in Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey 56

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counters such a claim. For him, it is precisely through the earthly that we come to know the heavenly, and this higher comprehension infuses the earthly with even more value. So, for instance, he has inscribed on the bronze door to the Abbey Church of St Denis an admonition to think of the door of the church as a manner of thinking about Christ as the Way, for “[i]n what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines / The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material / And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submission.”59 Through the material, the truth is attainable and, when such truth is found, matter is heightened and ennobled. To take these notions further, the heavenly Jerusalem, as ultimate and eternal end, is thought as a city because the earthly Jerusalem already exists as the place where Christ redeemed the cosmos, including every person who chooses to accept his or her salvation. The pilgrim walks the labyrinth toward a representation of the earthly Jerusalem because that city is the place in human time and space where God became man. Christ’s presence on earth is the vital key for the pilgrim to Jerusalem, whether he or she performs the walk literally or imaginatively. Without that historical significance neither the altar, nor the cathedral, nor the labyrinth would make sense. Those who walk the Chartres labyrinth pattern outside of the cathedral are, as it were, dislocated, in being off the map of meaning of its original instantiation. Graham Dann points out that among scholars of the postmodern condition there exists the possibility that pilgrimage as such is no longer possible.60 Yet, the desire to walk the labyrinth highlights a desire to journey in a spiritually significant way. Contemporary labyrinth walkers describe this experience. However, when they walk the labyrinth pattern of Chartres outside of its original framework of meaning, they demonstrate their lack of a sense of shared narrative. Wright’s description of walking the pattern outside of Grace Cathedral is pertinent in this respect. Almost everyone felt something when walking the labyrinth, but few could really explain what or why. Without any centre but the self, few could situate themselves within a greater narrative of meaning. This confusion is a crucial point, for anyone who travels forgets the value of his or her surroundings at their peril.

Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 1-37. 59 Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis, 49. 60 Graham M. S. Dann, “The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World,” in The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, ed. Graham M. S. Dann (Oxon: CABI Publishing, 2002), 1-18.

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Perhaps this was the real wisdom of placing the labyrinth within the cathedral in the first place: at no point could one’s sense of orientation toward both earthly and heavenly Jerusalem be completely forgotten. Within the labyrinth in the cathedral, the medieval pilgrim could meditate upon an entire world of meaning, upon spiritual realities, and an inner experience of physical space that connects him or her to a community of believers in this world as well as beyond. The contemporary use of labyrinths has led to a dissimilar sense of community, arguably because of a lack of shared context. The challenge, then, for each group of people walking the same labyrinth is to create a true community, rather than a collection of isolated subjects. The community needs to endure along – but also external to – the winding path of the labyrinth that holds them together for a duration of time. Jerusalem formed the centre of meaning for the medieval pilgrim in Chartres. If and when this meaning is gone, it is pertinent to ask: what is the most proper replacement for such a centre, and can any de-contextualized labyrinth adequately bear the weight of the task that many of its walkers place upon it?

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Lanciani, Randolfo. Pagan and Christian Rome. New York: Benjamin Bloom Inc., 1967. MacCannall, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Matthews, W. H. Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History & Development. New York: Dover, 1970. McCullough, David Willis. The Unending Mystery: A Journey Through Labyrinths and Mazes. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Panofsky, Erwin. “Introduction.” In Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd edition, 1-37. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946. Rhodes, John W. “The Labyrinth Society Guiding Principles.” The Labyrinth Society: About the Labyrinth Society. Accessed November 28, 2011, http://labyrinthsociety.org/about-tls/3165-the-labyrinthsociety-guiding-principles. Scott, Robert A. The Gothic Enterprise: A Guide to Understanding the Medieval Cathedral. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Smith, Catherine D. and Kain, Roger J. English Maps: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Strachan, Gordon. Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2003. Suger, Abbot. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, 2nd edition. Edited and translated by Erwin Panofsky. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway: Transaction, 1995. Von Simson, Otto. The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. West, Melissa Gayle. Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth. New York: Broadway Books, 2000. Westrem, Scott D. The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. Wilford, John Noble. The Mapmakers: The Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography – From Antiquity to the Space Age. London: Pimlico, 2000. Woodward, David. “Medieval Mappaemundi.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. One: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 286-370. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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—. “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75, no. 4 (1985): 510-521. Wright, Craig. The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER SIX JOURNEYS OF EMPOWERMENT: MEDIEVAL WOMEN AND PILGRIMAGE JOANNA KUJAWA

The literature on the impulse to travel in general and the various intentions associated with pilgrimage is vast if somewhat confusing. The primary focus of the discussion lies usually in the relationship between tourism and religion, and possible similarities and differences between a tourist and a pilgrim.1 However, the most important distinction between any form of travel and pilgrimage is the impulse for travel, which in the case of pilgrimage is an encounter with truth through contact with a sacred place. Liliane Voyé calls this impulse “a search to be givers of sense,” Graham Dann a search for an answer to the question of who we are in the context of the past, Justine Digance an encounter with the ‘other’, while Dean McCannell calls it “a quest for authenticity.”2 Often this quest was

1

Boris Vukoníc, Tourism and Religion (Oxford: Elsevier, 1996); Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, eds, Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys (London: Routledge, 2006); Antoni Jacowski, “Religious Tourism: Problems with Terminology,” in Peregrinus Cracoviensis, ed. Antoni Jacowski (Krakow: Uniwersytet Jagielonski, 2000); Nobutaka Inoue, “From Religious Conformity to Innovation: New Ideas of Religious Journeys and Holy Places,”in Social Campus 47, no. 3 (2000); Justine Digance, “Pilgrimage at Contested Sites,” in Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 1 (2003); Thomas S. Bremer, “Sacred Places and Tourist Places,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006). 2 Liliane Voyé, “Popular Religion and Pilgrimage in Western Europe,” in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, eds William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 123; Graham Dann, “There is No Business Like Old Business: Tourism, the Nostalgia Industry of the Future,” in Global Tourism, ed. William F. Theobald (Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 1998), 29-43;

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facilitated by the liminal space created by the journeying to a holy place where pilgrims experience things which they “may not expect while they are at home.”3 As useful as the above statements are, they should not be used to underestimate what Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen coin “as the multiplicity of motivations, attitudes and behavioural mindsets of pilgrims.”4 The multiplicity of motives as an impulse for pilgrimage has been discussed abundantly in the context of modern and postmodern travel studies, but less so in the case of medieval pilgrims. The intention of this chapter is to explore personal empowerment as one of the main motives for medieval women to undertake pilgrimages. It will use a case study of three medieval women who chose pilgrimage as their source for empowerment, both inner and worldly. It will argue that aside from piety, one of the main reasons why they went on pilgrimages was to seek personal, socio-political and, in some cases, religious empowerment. The three women were chosen because of the difference in their social circumstances, as well as in their experiences, on their pilgrimages. Moreover, despite their differences, they shared a common desire for empowerment. The pilgrimages they undertook provided them with the liminal space which inspired the crossing between their old and new selves. The three women discussed here are: Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204), Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373), and Margery Kempe (13731438). Both Margery Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden left written records of their pilgrimages, while Eleanor of Aquitaine was a source of much gossip among her contemporaries. There are at least two primary sources (John of Salisbury’s Historia Pontificalis and Richard of Devizes’ Chronicle) regarding her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Also, in the cases of Margery Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden, I will discuss feminist literature on gender and authorship in the Middle Ages. It is all too easy to assume that in the Middle Ages, when the ideal of Christendom was a prevailing paradigm, people undertook pilgrimages solely for the purpose of absolution from their sins. It was not so. Even in the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was often a source of scorn among the

Digance, “Pilgrimage at Contested Sites,” 153; Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schoken Books, 1976), 105. 3 Carl B. Holmberg, “Spiritual Pilgrimages: Traditional and Hyperreal Motivations for Travel and Tourism,” Visions in Leisure and Business 12, no. 2 (1993): 23. 4 Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, “Tourism and Religious Journeys,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006), 8.

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ecclesiastical source.5 Lutz Kaelber states that depiction of pilgrims’ motives in medieval literature was too often what they ‘should have been’ rather than what they really were.6 The complaints about what, from the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy, were anomalies of pilgrimages are as old as pilgrimages themselves. The desire for travel and curiosity was considered one of the secular and somewhat sinful enterprises.7 Among the more unusual practices was ‘pilgrimage by proxy’.8 The above example refers particularly to wealthy, but not necessarily adventurous, pilgrims who chose to hire a substitute, a pilgrim-mercenary, to undertake the burdensome business of travel to foreign lands. Even the pilgrims who undertook travel to holy places for the sake of redemption and penitence for sins were criticised for their worldly desire to travel, curiosity about foreign lands, and the excessive use of indulgencies and commercialisation of Christianity.9 If the entire enterprise of pilgrimage was under much scrutiny in the Middle Ages, then women undertaking a pilgrimage were often seen as setting a dangerous precedent. The paucity of sources on Medieval women travellers has to do with the fact that it was the part of the ecclesiastical order of the Church that the level of literacy among women, including those in religious orders, was low and accomplished women need male confessors to write down their testimonies. That does not mean that women did not travel. On the contrary, women did travel and were among the first Christian pilgrims in the Middle Ages to visit Rome and the Holy Land. After the Edict of Milan (313CE), which granted freedom of religious worship for Christians, the Empress Helena undertook a spiritual pilgrimage/political journey to the Holy Land. Her primary goal was not only to visit places associated with Jesus’ life, but to ‘discover’ them anew in the name of the new rising religion. She was almost single-handedly 5

Lutz Kaelber, “Paradigms of Travel: From Medieval Pilgrimage to the Postmodern Virtual Tour,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006), 53. 6 Kaelber, “Paradigms of Travel,” 53. 7 Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1976); Kaelber, “Paradigms of Travel”; Justine Stagl, A History of Curiosity: the Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 (Chur: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1995); and Bridget Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999). 8 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden; Robert, N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215-c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lutz Kaelber, “Paradigms of Travel”; Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c. 700-c. 1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 9 Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, 65.

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responsible for the discovery of early holy sites associated with Jesus’ life.10 Soon, other women followed and pilgrimage became one of the few ways that a medieval woman could use as a means to free herself from mundane and domestic limitations. Not every woman enjoyed Helena’s freedom of movement. Before entertaining the very idea of a pilgrimage, a woman needed the permission of a number of people, especially her legal guardians: a father for unmarried women and a husband for married ones.11 Nuns could not travel without the permission of their abbesses, which was rarely granted.12 Friar Francesco Suriano, the author of a medieval treatise on pilgrimages, mentions his conversation with a nun who had a “burning desire for these most holy places,” a desire that was impossible to fulfil for her as pilgrimage was seen as a frivolous and improper activity for women.13 Chronicles from the twelfth century onwards boast that no women were allowed into sanctuaries as a rule, and if they did try to enter they were admonished severely and even punished by “divine will.”14 Sumption devoted a whole chapter on condemnation of women pilgrims by contemporaries.15 For example, Symeon of Durham, a twelfth century chronicler and monk, wrote about women entering sanctuaries being “paralysed at the door,” a clear sign that God was displeased with their presence there. Both Gregory of Tours and St Boniface condemned women’s “addiction to travel” and “restlessness” as early as the sixth and seventh centuries respectively.16 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the proverbial wife of the fourteenth and fifteenth century French satires such as the Quinze Joies de Marriage, ridicule women’s motives for going on a pilgrimage as mostly “pleasure-seeking.”17 It was believed that the “fickle tastes of women” would diminish the experience of the holy places for true pilgrims and the emotional reaction to the relics that women sometimes exhibited was judged as inappropriate.18 Margery of Kempe, who was well 10

Edward D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire: AD 312460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 40. 11 Leigh Ann Craig, “Stronger Than Men and Braver Than Knights: Women and Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 29, no. 3 (2009): 157. 12 Craig, “Stronger Than Men and Braver Than Knights,” 158. 13 Craig, “Stronger Than Men and Braver Than Knights,” 156. 14 Jonathan Sumption, An Image of a Medieval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 263. 15 Sumption, An Image of a Medieval Religion, 261-263. 16 Sumption, An Image of a Medieval Religion, 262. 17 Sumption, An Image of a Medieval Religion, 262. 18 Sumption, An Image of a Medieval Religion, 262.

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known for her emotional displays in holy places, was considered ‘hysterical’ in many scholarly studies of medieval devotion.19 Yet not everyone was convinced by the arguments that women were unsuitable to visit holy places. John Capgrave, a fifteenth century English historian and a hagiographer, was one of the influential men who gave no credence to reasons given for the exclusion of women from seeing holy relics. The fact alone that there was so much discussion about women, their ability to travel alone and behave appropriately in various popular shrines around Europe and the Holy Land, suggest that women-travellers were not such a great rarity after all. Ruth Summar McIntyre argues that women used pilgrimage to “gain authority via mobility.”20 It was unlikely, though, that a medieval woman would be allowed to express her desire for empowerment in lay terms without appearing to disregard her duty as a wife and mother, legally dependent on male family members. On the contrary, a medieval woman’s claim for freedom was always framed within the discourse of prevailing ecclesiastical orthodoxy. ffiona Swabey points out that medieval women’s status and ‘achievements’ were “frequently recorded in terms of their spirituality,” and pilgrimage was one of the very few ways for women to claim the privilege of that status.21 Since the beginnings of Christianity, pilgrims had a special authority in society, as they were “divinely authorised”22 in their new spiritual status. They were not just legal citizens of a particular social standing in their countries or bound by familial obligations, they were nothing less than peregrini dei, the pilgrims of travellers of God, to use Augustine’s phrase from The City of God. That special positioning of a pilgrim in social and religious contexts did not mean that the sole motif for pilgrimage was religious. As Silvestro Fiore23 puts it, “[p]ilgrimage has ... two levels of restlessness: the worldly tendency towards ceaseless adventure and the experience of the marvellous, and the 19 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 3. 20 Ruth Summar McIntyre, “Margery's ‘Mixed Life’: Place Pilgrimage and the Problem of Genre in The Book of Margery Kempe,” English Studies 89, no. 6 (2008): 649. 21 ffiona Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004), 58. 22 Christian, K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1976), 52. 23 Silvestro Fiore, “The Medieval Pilgrimage: From the Legacy of Greco-Oriental Antiquity to the Threshold of Greco-Occidental Humanism,” Revue de Litterature Comparee 40, no. 1 (1966): 6.

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spiritual struggling for the perfection of the soul and the union with God.” Based on this statement, Christian Zacher argues that medieval pilgrimage was bound as much by curiositas about life in general, as by piety.24 I would like to take this claim further by saying that it was more than a combination of curiositas and piety that enticed medieval women to go on pilgrimages. Indeed, pilgrimage might have been one of very few ways women could experience their own social and spiritual agencies away from either their marital status or a cloister. This was especially true of Kempe, a fourteenth century wife of a burgher who, in her forties after giving birth to fourteen children, asked her husband to relieve her of her duties as a wife. This was not an easy task as she was asking her husband to live a celibate life to allow her to leave on a number of pilgrimages. In her Book, Margery Kempe situated her desire to undertake the pilgrimage as a direct order from Jesus. In chapter eleven of her Book, Kempe mentioned for the first time that she planned to go to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage. Since she was legally dependent on her husband and needed his permission, this chapter gives details of their marital negotiations on the topic. Kempe asked her husband to let her go to Jerusalem, promising that she would pray for him so he would be saved.25 Her husband did not believe this was a good enough offer and gave her three conditions: firstly that she would pay his debts before she went to Jerusalem, secondly, that she would continue sleeping with him, and finally, that she would stop fasting on Fridays and dine with him.26 After long negotiations and prolonged consultations with Jesus Kempe agreed to pay her husband’s debts and dine with him on Fridays, but refused to sleep with him. At that stage, her husband conceded to her conditions.27 Birgitta of Sweden, on the other hand, was an aristocratic woman who, with her husband Ulf, had “a position of great influence” at the royal court of Magnus Eriksson, as she was appointed a magistra (a lady in waiting) for the king’s wife.28 Despite the differences between Birgitta’s and Margery’s social standings, her motives for leaving on pilgrimage were similar, if somewhat even more ambitious. Birgitta of Sweden undertook her pilgrimages to Rome and, later, Jerusalem, soon after her husband’s death. Being a wealthy widow, she was in an advantageous situation, both 24

Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, 53. B. Windeatt, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 87. 26 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 88. 27 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 91. 28 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 58. 25

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legally and financially. A widow in the Middle Ages required no legal guardian29 and Birgitta was left in possession of a substantial fortune.30 In her Revelations, Birgitta confessed that the death of her husband “came as a relief” to her.31 She was very close to her husband and they had a good marriage, but after his death she was ready to fulfil her larger, individual destiny — different than that of a wife and a mother.32 In ‘Book I’, for example, she confessed that although she loved her husband “with all her heart,” she was glad to throw the wedding ring away which burdensomely reminded her of her earlier life and thus prevented her from entering into her new life.33 Her new life, as in the case of the two other women discussed in this chapter, began with her leaving home and embarking on a pilgrimage. Birgitta first went to Rome, where she spent the remaining years of her life, and nearly thirty years later she went on another pilgrimage, this time to Jerusalem. The third woman discussed here is Eleanor of Aquitaine. Unlike Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden, Eleanor did not seek empowerment through religion. Yet a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was also a significant personal passage for her. She was born into power as, after her father’s death, she became the sole heir of Aquitaine. This was a rare and privileged position for a medieval woman. She was the owner of what now is western France, and quickly became one of the favourites among chroniclers and troubadours. In 1137 she married a French king, Louis VII. The marriage was more advantageous for the king than for her, as she brought the vast lands of Aquitaine in her dowry, whereas France at the time was not much bigger than Ile de France around Paris.34 As fortunate as her position might have been in comparison to that of other medieval women, it still depended on producing a male heir for Louis VII. The lack of a male heir became a cause of contention between her and Louis VII, and Eleanor’s political ambitions were admonished as unsuitable for a woman.35

29

Craig, “Stronger Than Men and Braver Than Knights,” 157. Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 64. 31 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 62. 32 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 62. 33 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 63. 34 Andrea Hopkins, Six Medieval Women (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1999), 39; ffiona Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 33; and Ralph Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 47. 35 Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 34. 30

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However, I would not like oversimplify the complexity of the motives behind the decision to join a pilgrimage or a crusade to a single desire for more freedom from domesticity in the case of the three medieval women discussed above. This kind of decision, especially when it involves danger, facing new and unknown circumstances, and a lengthy separation from loved ones, is often the signal of a pre-existent crisis of an internal or external nature. In medieval hagiographic literature, an inner crisis is a classic requirement for what Anselm L. Strauss called “turning point experiences”36 or “radical discontinuity” between “before and after.”37 An inner crisis could be at times sudden and unforeseen even by the protagonists and their closest companions, and at other times a more lengthy process. The Christian hagiographic tradition found its inspiration in the earliest biblical examples of the conversion of Simon Peter in Luke 5:1-11 and Matthew 4:18-22, and Paul in Acts 9. These examples were replicated in medieval hagiographic literature in the numerous vitae of saints, with notable examples by Saint Francis of Assisi, St Claire, St Caterina of Bologna, St Magdalena of Freiburg, Jeanne d’Arc and many others. The lives of medieval women saints especially emphasised ‘visitations’ from angels, the Virgin Mary or Jesus as precursors to calls for action which would later define their lives.38 Some feminist scholars, such as Leigh Ann Craig, Kate Greenspan, Sarah Beckwith and Clarissa W. Atkinson argue that medieval women who left autobiographical accounts of their spiritual journeys often commented on inner crises that had prompted their transformation.39 Atkinson calls this feature “the peculiarly feminine contribution to the tradition of autohagiograghy in the late Middle Ages.”40 To a degree, the .

36

Anselm L. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), 53. Harry Ballis and Paul Richardson, “Roads to Damascus: Conversions and Other Stories for Literacy Educators,” English in Australia 120, no. 10 (1997): 111. 38 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 64; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1994), 6; Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 13, 59, 86; and Anthony Butkovitch, Revelations: Saint Birgitta of Sweden (Los Angeles: Ecumenical Foundation of America, 1972), 12. 39 Craig, “Stronger Than Men and Braver Than Knights;” Kate Greenspan, “Autobiography of Medieval Women’s Spiritual Autobiography,” in Gender and Text In the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996); Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996); Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 40 Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 220. 37

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same was true in the well-documented cases of Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden. In fact, crises and visions inspired the two women to go on pilgrimages. In her Book, Kempe recalls her first vision after the very difficult birth of her first child. In the first chapter of her Book, while believing she was going to die, Kempe asked for a confessor. Her intention was to confess some sin that “she had never before disclosed to anyone in all her life.”41 However, the confessor became so harsh with her that she decided not to tell him about it out of fear of his judgment. After this incident, Kempe or “this creature” as she calls herself throughout the Book, was “amazingly disturbed and tormented by spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.”42 At the end of this painful period which, by modern standards, was most likely a nervous breakdown Kempe had her first vision of Jesus, who appeared to her as “the most beautiful, most seemly, and most amiable man” and asked her not to “forsake” him as he had not forsaken her either.43 That vision helped Kempe to recover emotionally and mentally, and return to her worldly duties. Her second important vision is described in chapter five of the Book, and happened at another time of crisis when she was tempted to sexually betray her husband. Jesus appeared to her again, asking her to call him her true love, for “I am your love and I shall be your love without an end.”44 Soon other visions came in which not only Jesus but also the Virgin Mary, “the Father of Heaven” and other saints consoled her and gave her guidance.45 Similarly, Birgitta of Sweden began having visions after her husband’s death, which was a defining moment in her life, and a time when she was literally redesigning her position in her personal life and social influence. A short time after her husband’s death, she was praying in her chapel when she became suddenly “rapt in spirit,”46 as Christ appeared to her. This was not the “seemly” and “beautiful man” of Margery of Kempe’s visions, but a mighty and more demanding appearance in “the likeness of a human being” who said, “[h]ear me woman: I am your God who wishes to speak with you ... Fear not, for I am the Creator of all and not a deceiver. I do not speak to you for your sake alone, but for the sake of salvation. Hear the things that I speak.”47 That first vision was a clear passage for Birgitta 41

Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 62. Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 55. 43 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 56. 44 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 68. 45 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 70. 46 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 64. 47 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 64. 42

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of Sweden between her life as a mother and wife, to her calling as a mystic, prophetic visionary, moralist and aspiring politician and reformer of her times. The influential religious and political standing she assumed soon after would not have been possible without her visions. Unlike Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden was very conscious of possible accusations of delusion, and accusations even of having listened to demonic voices — which could have cost her her life through an accusation of heresy. Astutely, in her ‘Revelations’ she writes that she questioned the visions herself until Christ ordered her to go to Master Mathias, her confessor “who has the experience of discerning the two types of spirits. Say to him on my behalf what I now say to you: you shall be my bride and my channel, and you shall hear and see spiritual things, and my Spirit shall remain with you even until your death.”48 In her ‘Revelations’, Birgitta of Sweden tells us that this followed Christ’s orders and she ran to Master Mathias, who upon hearing her, confirmed that her vision was indeed legitimate. Once it had been established by an ecclesiastical authority (Master Mathias) that her visions were orthodox, a reassured Birgitta of Sweden continued to have visitations from Christ and, later, the Virgin Mary. More importantly, however, she successfully established herself as a chosen channel of God to guide her contemporaries’ moral and, often, political choices. In a similar vein, Bridget Morris and Claire Sahlin argue that Birgitta of Sweden’s standing in fourteenth century Europe was less that of a mystic and more that of the visionary or prophet with political leanings.49 In Birgitta’s vita, Alphonso of Jaen says that Birgitta wrote down her visions first in Swedish and then asked her male confessors to translate them into Latin.50 Although Birgitta perfected her Latin in Rome, the Latin version of her ‘Revelations’ was written down and compiled by her three successive confessors: Mathias Ovidson, Peter Olofsson and Alphonso de Jaen.51 The compilation of her ‘Revelations’ was a significant step towards her canonisation in 1391. Less detail is known about the conception of the Book of Margery Kempe, except that she first dictated her visions and adventures to her son, and when he died she managed to persuade an unnamed priest to continue.52 On this account, the authorship of written 48

Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 65. Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 92; Claire Sahlin, “The Prophetess as Preacher: Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy,” Medieval Sermon Studies 40, no. 2 (1997): 9-41. 50 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 102. 51 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 3. 52 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 82. 49

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records of these women’s journeys was questioned.53 The very fact that they needed male confessors to record their experiences in writing became a source of suspicion among modern scholars. As a result, the authenticity of these texts has been widely discussed and brought into doubt.54 Feminist scholars, however, pointed out that the intertextuality of the texts was different from those written by men about their own experiences. While men were advantaged by knowledge of classical examples, texts created by women centred more on personal experiences and re-working biblical themes that could help them in justifying their claims as authors and mystics.55 Both Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden appealed to biblical themes that were widely accepted by the orthodoxy and thus difficult to contest by the canonical powers at play. In her ‘Revelations’, Birgitta positioned herself as a female prophet and used biblical genealogies as a context for her claim.56 In the same vein, she also addressed her gender when she told her readers that God acts through the ‘meek’ — a quality especially desired in medieval women. Although powerful and opinionated in her own life, Birgitta convinced her contemporary readers that it was her passivity and obedience which gave her the divine authority to correct others. Similarly, Kempe emphasised her deeply personal connection with Christ’s Passion in Jerusalem, and draws our attention to the similarities between the persecution of Jesus and her own experiences of ridicule and persecution in ecclesiastical courts.57 Two independent studies of the structure of Margery’s Book by McIntyre and Bowers show how she arranged chapters to focus on the transformational elements of the pilgrimage by centring her attention on her own personal experiences rather than on the descriptions and religious significance of the holy places she visited.58 By focusing on personal experiences during the pilgrimage, Kempe positioned herself at the centre

53

Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 1-39. Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” 185. 55 Greenspan, “Autobiography of Medieval Women’s Spiritual Autobiography,” 23. 56 Jane Chance, “Authority, Domination, Misogyny” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 11. 57 Terrence Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveller,” Studies in Philology 97, no. 1, (2000): 9. 58 McIntyre, “Margery’s Mixed Life,” 643-661; Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveller,” 1-28. 54

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of her narrative — a novel and unusual technique at that time.59 Atkinson argues that it was the very account of personal tribulations that gave women a voice to speak at times when the tradition would not allow them.60 Often, their accounts had to be substantiated and, in fact, ordered, from a higher source to which even their guardians would have to submit themselves. The account had to be conveyed to these women through a mystical communication with God. As genuine as their accounts of their crises and visions might have been, both Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden successfully used them to justify their desire to travel and visit holy places, against the general disapproval of their contemporaries. They secured confirmations from their male confessors that their visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary were genuine — a wise precaution against accusations of heresy and madness at worst, or illegitimacy at best. More importantly, these confirmations allowed them to claim that they were asked directly by God to go on pilgrimages and experience the holy places — a difficult case to argue against for even the most misogynist representatives of the clergy. Margery of Kempe reported in her Book that she was told in her visions by ‘Lord Jesus Christ’ to go on pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela.61 Margery also claimed that Jesus also promised her that she would travel safely as would everyone else who allowed her to go with them.62 This turned out to be very reassuring promise for her travelling companions, who were, otherwise, annoyed with her constant and loud devotions. Armed with the divine visions and promises, as well as her own money, Margery first went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then to Santiago de Compostela. There is some speculation as to how Kempe could have paid off her husband’s debts as well as paid for her own travel, since in the past she had been involved in a few disastrous business enterprises. Hopkins63 suggests that Margery inherited her father’s money, which bought her freedom to travel. Margery’s father died only a year before she embarked on her travels.64 But money was the least of Margery’s troubles as, upon her return from Santiago de Compostela, she was arrested and thrown into gaol in Leicester on the grounds that she was a heretic. When she was finally released, she was arrested again, this time by the Bishop of York, 59

McIntyre, “Margery’s Mixed Life,” 648. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 30-31. 61 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 102. 62 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 102. 63 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 74. 64 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 74. 60

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who accused her of travelling outside her home and preaching — another thing forbidden for a decent woman.65 However, Kempe withstood all the accusations and her answers, both witty and irreverent, are well recorded in her Book: Then the Archbishop said to her: I am told very bad things about you. I hear that you are a very wicked woman.” And she replied, “Sir, I also hear that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here!66

The Archbishop of York was left so speechless by her sense of righteousness and wilfulness that he ordered her to leave York immediately. In an almost comical sequence of arguments and events, Kempe refused to comply with Archbishop’s orders, saying that her purpose was to see holy places in his diocese, a mission she had not yet completed.67 These accusations and misadventures did not discourage Margery from travelling again. In 1431, at the age of sixty, she went on a brief pilgrimage to Danzing to see the obscure “holy blood of Wilsniak”68 and to Aachen to see “our lady’s smock.”69 In her travels, Birgitta of Sweden met obstacles and tribulations of a different sort. As an aristocratic woman and a close acquaintance of King Magnus of Sweden, her motives for travel were seldom questioned. Yet she encountered plenty of hostility in her travels due to her unconventional choices and insistence on giving political advice to high members of the Roman Church. Although now known mostly as a mystic and a saint, a substantial portion of her travels had to do with political reforms in Europe, especially with the Roman Church, the conduct of high-ranking churchmen and pleasure-seeking, misbehaving monarchs (such as Queen Joanna of Naples). The tone of her remonstrations when staying in Rome was not shy by any standards: Listen, all you clerics, archbishops, and bishops and all of lower rank of the Church! Listen, all you religious, of whatever order, Listen, you kings and princes of the earth and all you who serve!70

65

Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 79. Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 250. 67 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 253. 68 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 339. 69 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, 403. 70 Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 140. 66

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Her pilgrimage to Rome was as much a political endeavour as a sign of religious devotion. Her main reason to travel to Rome was political. While in Rome, she intended nothing less than to end the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the Papacy (that is, to bring the Pope’s residence from Avignon back to Rome). Her harsh and opinionated moral judgements and her involvement in politics, which was usually the domain of men, gained her widespread disapproval among the Romans. Morris quotes from her ‘Revelations’ how she not only visited all the shrines in Rome despite the many prohibitions against women, but also insisted on instructing and advising the Roman clergy, even when her opinion was not sought.71 This exceptional-for-thetimes attitude could only be explained by her belief that through her visions she was given very special status divinely communicated to her and bestowed upon her by Jesus and the Virgin Mary. If a multiplicity of motivations for pilgrimage were present in the lives of the three women discussed here, including the desire for empowerment expressed in terms acceptable for the prevailing ecclesiastical leadership of their times, what must be asked here is whether these women succeeded in their quest for authenticity, and did they become what they had sought to become? These kinds of questions are never answered easily. Yet it is possible to point towards what they became to their contemporaries upon returning from their pilgrimages. In the cases of Birgitta of Sweden and Kempe, their pilgrimages put them in positions of power and legitimised their spiritual claims as female mystics. They were secular women whose views on spirituality were heard and recorded. Birgitta of Sweden succeeded in exercising political and social influence on her contemporaries in religious matters, such as her attempts at ending the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the popes and moralising of misbehaving queens (such as Joanna of Naples). Although her grand political ambitions of ending the spilt within the Papacy did not eventuate until three years after her death, her influence was significant and her voice was heard and respected both in Rome and by the exiled popes. By the end of her life her pilgrimages and visions had made her a powerful figure, difficult to ignore even for the popes and monarchs. Upon her return from Jerusalem, she preached in Naples to the high ranking members of Curia and the Queen of Naples. This was an unprecedented event, as she was a lay woman and there was a clear admonition against preaching by women.72 This was a clear sign of her growing influence as a politicising pilgrim. In one of her last visions, Birgitta was ordered to 71 72

Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 100. Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 139.

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return to Rome as “there were still messages to be sent to the world’s princesses.”73 However, her influence as a pilgrim and a religious female figure has been even more lasting. In 1391, Birgitta of Sweden, lay woman, traveller, and politician in her own right, was canonised by the Catholic Church and became one of the six patron saints of Europe. Similarly, Kempe, through her travels, successfully established herself as a mystic, religious figure and travel writer. Although she was not canonised, it is truly remarkable that a burgher’s wife, of no noble descent, without affiliation to any religious order or proof of saintly deeds (such as miracles or service to religious communities) achieved the status of a mystic. At times treated by scholarly literature as a hysterical female affected by postnatal depression at worst, or a genuine mystic at best, Kempe was a powerful figure who managed to transcend the limitations of the dominant dogmas of her times. What is remarkable here is that a woman of no noble descent or privileges, used the liminality provided by her pilgrimage to reconstruct herself as a pilgrim and a mystic, and “her spiritual transformation” was confirmed by her visits to holy places.74 She positioned herself as a central figure not only in her own Book but also as one of the most studied fourteenth century women travellers. By stepping into the liminality of her pilgrimage, she became author of her own life. Ironically, the very personal rather than highly stylised accounts of her pilgrimages make Margery’s Book more interesting to modern readers. What generated ridicule among her contemporaries delights her modern readers. If the Book of Margery Kempe was “fuelled by desire for authority and legitimacy,”75 then I believe that Margery was successful in both cases. As for Eleanor of Aquitaine, when in 1146, Bernard of Clairvaux arrived with papal letters to summon the French king to participation in the crusade, both Louis VII and Eleanor were present and both vowed to go. Medieval scholars often comment that Eleanor of Aquitaine’s enthusiasm for the crusade had less to do with penitence than with “travel, the excitement of new places, exotic cultures, visits to hospitable foreign monarchs.”76 Moreover, there was more to it than excitement for new places for Eleanor. It is no coincidence that medieval depictions of the crusade show Louis VII in a monkish habit, while Eleanor of Aquitaine can be seen dressed in royal purple riding a horse and wearing a crown.77 73

Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden, 139. McIntyre, “Margery’s Mixed Life,” 645. 75 McIntyre, “Margery’s Mixed Life,” 647. 76 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 42. 77 Hopkins, Six Medieval Women, 36. 74

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In essence, these depictions illustrate how different Eleanor’s intentions for the crusade were from those of her husband. She needed the pretext of a pilgrimage to visit her uncle in Antioch, later leading to the demise of her marriage and her rise to power through marriage to Henry II. Indeed, the pivotal event in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s involvement with the crusade is the meeting with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. When Louis VII and Raymond disagreed on military plans, Eleanor took her uncle’s side and refused to follow her husband into Jerusalem.78 Had her intentions been religious and not political, the liberation of Jerusalem would have been her priority. However, it is possible that Eleanor was much more interested in gaining Raymond’s support for her own political ambitions. Her meeting with Raymond was a source of much medieval gossip, as some argued that Eleanor was involved with her uncle romantically as well politically. John of Salisbury in his Historia Pontificalis, as well as Richard of Devizes in his Chronicle, described both the political and sexual involvement between Eleanor and Raymond. John of Salisbury comments in detail on how Prince Raymond’s “attentions paid to the Queen (Eleanor), and his constant, indeed almost continuous, conversation with her aroused the King’s suspicions. These were greatly strengthened when the Queen wished to remain behind.”79 The more gossipy Richard of Devizes ended his account of Eleanor’s adventures during the crusade with the comment, “Let no one say any more about it; I too know it well. Keep silent!”80 What matters, however, is that for Eleanor, as much as for the two other medieval women discussed here, the pilgrimage was a turning point in her life which motivated her to seek the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII and, through many political negotiations, to marry the young Henry of Anjou, the future Henry II, King of England.81 For Eleanor, participation in the crusade was a powerful stand. Her pilgrimage (as crusades were considered in the Middle Ages) resulted in political empowerment and personal change. Eleanor of Aquitaine chose to claim political, rather than religious, power. Her return from the crusade coincided with her ‘coming of age’ as a woman and a queen who made her own decisions against the social expectations of her time. On her way back from the crusade, Eleanor insisted on an audience with a pope, and a few months later managed to annul her marriage to Louis VII on the grounds 78

John of Salisbury, The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, trans. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 52. 79 John of Salisbury, The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, 53. 80 Richard of Devizes, The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, trans. John Appleby (London: Thomas and Sons Ltd., 1963), 26. 81 Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 39.

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of consanguinity with the Pope’s permission.82 Two months after her divorce, she married the future Henry II, becoming the Queen of England and a major political power in twelfth century England. Her political ambitions came to the fore as she orchestrated a rebellion against Henry II, successfully insisted on crowning her favourite son (Richard the Lionheart) King after Henry’s death, and became a queen-regent when Richard the Lionheart went off to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade.83 Even on her death bed she was sending letters to her son John with political advice.84 Much scholarly debate on pilgrimages focuses on moments of liminality which allow pilgrims to experience freedom from social ties and constraints,85 moments of “temporary emotional release” that their pilgrimages opened up for them.86 The same was definitely true of the three women studied here. The multiplicity of motivations for their travels and their encounters with the holy places were well documented either by themselves (Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe) or by chroniclers around them (for Eleanor of Aquitaine). The intention of that chapter was to point out the multiplicity of motives in the case of pilgrimages by medieval women and suggest that their motives were not purely religious. They were complex and directed specifically towards personal empowerment. Confined within their roles as wives and mothers, they managed to frame their political, religious and personal aspirations within the prevailing ecclesiastical dogma. They positioned themselves as pilgrims which granted them the status of peregrini dei, a temporary release from the limitations of their social obligations. None of the women discussed here, however, returned to their previous social roles. The pilgrimage was for them the liminal crossing, the passage from social and political limitations to personal empowerment. They not only used the pretext of the pilgrimage for the purpose of self-empowerment, but even more radically changed their lives and established themselves as authorities, either as religious and political figures or writers. In the cases of Eleonor of Aquitaine, Margery Kempe and Birgitta of Sweden, the 82

Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 39. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 140; Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 56. 84 Swabey, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, 132. 85 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 2. 86 Timothy and Olsen, “Tourism an Religious Journeys,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006), 9. 83

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transformational elements of pilgrimage and travel were real and life changing, whether within religious, personal, or political contexts.

Bibliography The Historia Potificalis of John of Salisbury, translated by Marjorie Chibnall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time King Richard the First, translated by John Appleby. London: Thomas and Sons Ltd., 1963. Atkinson, Clarissa W. Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Beckwith, Sarah. “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe.” In Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, 195-215. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996. Bowers, Terrence N. “Margery Kempe as Traveller.” Studies in Philology 97, no. 1, (2000): 1-28. Bremer, Thomas S. “Sacred Spaces and Tourist Places.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, 25-35. London: Routledge, 2006. Butkovitch, Anthony. Revelations: Saint Birgitta of Sweden. Los Angeles: Ecumenical Foundation of America, 1972. Chance, J., ed. Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Dann, Graham. “There is No Business Like Old Business: Tourism, the Nostalgia Industry of the Future.” In Global Tourism, edited by William F. Theobald, 29-43. Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 1998. Digance, Justine. “Pilgrimage at Contested Sites.” Annals of Tourism Research 30, no. 1 (2003): 143-159. —. “Religious and Secular Pilgrimage: Journeys Redolent with Meaning.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, 36-48. London: Routledge, 2006. Fiore, Silvestro, “The Medieval Pilgrimage: From the Legacy of GrecoOriental Antiquity to the Threshold of Greco-Occidental Humanism.” Revue de Litterature Comparee 40, no. 1 (1966): 6. Greenspan, Kate. “Autohagiography and Medieval Women’s Spiritual Autobiography.” In Gender and Text In the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, 216-236. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996.

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Holmberg, Carl B. “Spiritual Pilgrimages: Traditional and Hyperreal Motivations for Travel and Tourism.” Visions in Leisure and Business 12, no. 2 (1993): 19-27. Hopkins, Andrea. Six Medieval Women. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1999. Hunt, Edward D. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire: AD 312-460. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Inoue, Nobutaka. “From Religious conformity to Innovation: New Ideas of Religious Journeys and Holy Places.” Social Compass 47, no. 1 (2000): 21-32. Jacowski, Antoni. “Religious Tourism: Problems with Terminology.” In Peregrinus Cracoviensis, edited by Antoni Jacowski, 63-74. Krakow: Uniwersytet Jagielonski, 2000. Kaelber, Lutz. “Paradigms of Travel: From Medieval Pilgrimage to the Postmodern Virtual Tour.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, 49-63. London: Routledge, 2006. McCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schoken Books, 1976. McIntyre, Ruth Summar. “Margery's ‘Mixed Life’: Place Pilgrimage and the Problem of Genre in The Book of Margery Kempe.” English Studies 89, no. 6 (2008): 643-661. Morris, Bridget. St Birgitta of Sweden. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999. Sahlin, Claire. “The Prophetess as Preacher: Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy.” Medieval Sermon Studies 40, no. 2 (1997): 9-41. Sawnson, Robert, N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215-c. 1515. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Stagl, Justine. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800. Chur: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1995. Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Strauss, Anselm L. Mirrors and Masks. Glencoe: Free Press, 1959. Sumption, Jonathan. An Image of a Medieval Religion. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Swabey, ffiona. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004. Turner, Ralph. Eleanor of Aquitaine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Timothy, Dallen J. and Daniel H. Olsen. “Tourism and Religious Journeys.” In Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, edited by

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Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen, 1-21. London: Routledge, 2006. Voyé, Liliane. “Popular Religion and Pilgrimage in Western Europe.” In From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Toursim, edited by William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi, 115-135. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Vukonic, Boris. Tourism and Religion. Oxford: Elsevier, 1996. Webb, Diana. Medieval European Pilgrimage, c700-c1500. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Windeatt, Barry. The Book of Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Zacher, Christian K. Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in the Fourteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1976.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE TURN EAST: ‘NEW’ RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRAVEL TO INDIA AFTER BLAVATSKY ALEX NORMAN

Introduction1 The twentieth century saw travel for leisure or pleasure – tourism – reach a position of centrality in the cultural praxis of large swathes of Western society. Situated as a component part of larger trends such as social mobility, consumerism, individual freedom, and eclectic postmodernity, travel quickly acquired a multivocal capability in Western narrative. To travel for leisure became a statement of means, of class (for example, Butlins in contrast with St Moritz), and of identity, but also of belief, desire, and fantasy. These were tropes familiar from the accounts of Grand Tourists, medieval pilgrims, and other travellers throughout prior centuries. However, travel also became mundane; something expected of a normal person, and, in certain ways, something to be loathed. At the same time, changes in the religious topography of the West were also afoot. These changes have often been characterised as the result of ‘secularisation’ or ‘modernity’, though these concepts have been heavily critiqued in recent years.2 What can certainly be said is that the religious landscape of the West demonstrated certain numerically small, though thematically important, changes that indicated, amongst other things, a turn ‘Eastwards’, 1

The first iteration of this chapter was delivered as a conference paper at the 2010 Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics conference on ‘The Legacies of Theosophy’. Other papers from that conference can be found in the journal Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011). 2 For example, see Rodney Stark, “Secularization, RIP,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249-273.

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as Colin Campbell has asserted.3 That is, we can observe an increasing openness to ideas of a non-Western origin (even given the problems attendant upon representations of ‘the East’ highlighted by Edward Said) for religious and spiritual inspiration. It has become clear that in the Western cultural milieu, this was, in part, fuelled by the writings of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of founders of the Theosophical Society, and her followers and heirs. 4 Their legacy has been the normalisation of travel to countries such as India for the purposes of spiritual benefit. That this change in ideas – both of travel and religiosity – took place relatively simultaneously is worthy of note. To date, however, little has been written concerning these parallel trends. This omission is particularly stark given that the field of Religious Studies has shown interest in new religious movements over the past forty to fifty years, and that Tourism Studies has been fascinated with changing trends in leisure mobility. Both, however, have almost entirely ignored the religious as a factor in the motivational impetus for tourism. Further, the history of ideas, as an interpretive framework for the analysis of current events, is yet to find its voice in the analysis of tourism. This is troubling. If the leather-clad, motorcycle-riding C. Wright Mills was right when he asserted that understanding both individuals and social phenomena involved examining history and biography,5 then one of our initial tasks should be to unpack the historical ideas that shape the contemporary world. We cannot begin to fully understand social phenomena such as tourism without this interpretive approach. In the case of Western travel to India and ‘the East’ for religious or spiritual reasons, this entails an analysis of the developing understanding in the West of what was initially perceived as a great Dharmic religious tradition.6

3 Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: a Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). 4 Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993). 5 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). 6 I use the term Dharmic throughout this chapter to avoid the problematically singular, contradictoary and colonial label ‘Hinduism’, but also to encourage readers to think of the influence as not just geographically unspecific, but religiously broad, encompassing notions from Hinduism and Buddhism.

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Contemporary Spiritual Tourism in Dharmic Asia In the early twenty-first century, the region of South Asia draws Western spiritual tourists from around the globe.7 Though somewhat shopworn, the popular cultural example of the visit by the Beatles in 1968 to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, serves as a pertinent reminder that what transpires today is born of the historical and ideological ferment of the past. Nowadays we find tourists jetting across the globe for a variety of reasons, some of which are spiritual. While the scholarly literature has not discussed arrival numbers, spiritual tourism has a clear and strong association with Asia. Indeed, guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet series offer prospective tourists hints and advice on the best ashrams or monasteries to stay at, and numerous South Asia traveller websites contain discussion areas reserved for those seeking a religious experience.8 What is clear from the scholarship, and from the relevant media productions, is that spiritual tourism, or the inclusion of spiritual ‘activities’ is a prominent feature of travel in South Asia. The slowly leavening field of spiritual tourism provides a framework for understanding these phenomena as embodied by Western travellers. Although much scholarship on spiritual tourism is unfocussed or fuzzy with regards the precise definition of ‘spiritual’, the most recent crop of articles discussing the subject move towards a workable frame for analysis. 9 Spiritual tourism is defined as “tourism characterised by an intentional search for spiritual benefit”10 in which the “tourist’s own self thus becomes the object of the tourist gaze, rather than any external attractions or activities.” 11 The purpose of such touristic practices have been shown to relate to individual meaning and identity, as well as specific projects motivated by self-improvement and healing, experimentation, and the seeking of authentic and original sources for eclectic, personalised 7 For example, Richard Sharpley and Priya Sundaram, “Tourism: A Sacred Journey? The Case of Ashram Tourism, India,” International Journal of Tourism Research 7, no. 3 (2005): 161–171, or Alex Norman, Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society (London: Continuum, 2011). 8 The website India Mike is a notable example. See: “India Mike,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://www.indiamike.com/. 9 For a more thorough discussion of the scholarship on spiritual tourism to date see, Alex Norman, “The Varieties of the Spiritual Tourist Experience,” Literature & Aesthetics 22, no. 1 (2012): 20-37. 10 Norman, Spiritual Tourism, 1. 11 Melanie Smith, “Holistic Holidays: Tourism and the Reconciliation of Body, Mind and Spirit,” Tourism Recreation Research 28, no. 1 (2003): 104.

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spiritual practices pursued at home. Such tourism typically takes place within or alongside the formal structures of religious traditions (as social formations oriented towards meaning and identity), but it may also take place in non-religious milieux.12 In Dharmic Asia, however, most spiritual tourism takes place in religious settings; ashrams, monasteries, retreats, and pilgrimage sites. Starting with India – home of the Dharmic religions – several intersections of religion and Western tourism can be observed. On the global stage, India attracts a relatively low number of international tourists, receiving 6.29 million foreign tourist arrivals (FTA) in 2011. This accounts for just 0.64% of global FTAs, ranking India thirty-eighth globally on this metric, though for much of the twenty-first century India has seen a significant rate of tourist growth (8.9% in 2011).13 Oddly, given the thematic focus that spirituality attracts with regards India and travel,14 very little statistical data can be gleaned concerning spiritual tourism. Government studies appear to seek data about religion and pilgrimage; however, as spiritual tourists often construe their journeys as taking place away from formalised ‘religion’ it is unlikely they would indicate religious motivations on any government documentation (such as immigration and customs declarations). Apart from its cultural and architectural attractions, India is renowned worldwide for its religious diversity and intensity. Within India a selection of destinations illustrate the spiritual attraction of the country to Western tourists. The Buddhist Circuit in north-eastern India, where tourists can visit the sites associated with the life of the Buddha, is a prominent example, and one flagged for development by Indian government agencies. 15 Anthropologist David Geary noted the

12

For example, Yamini Narayanan and Jim Macbeth, “Deep in the Desert: Merging the Desert and the Spiritual Through 4WD Tourism,” Tourism Geographies 11, no. 3 (2009): 369-389; Carole M. Cusack and Justine Digance, “‘Shopping For A Self’: Pilgrimage, Identity-Formation, and Retail Therapy,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St John (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 227-241. 13 India Tourism Statistics at a Glance, 2011 (Market Research Division, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, 2012). 14 See for example the relative profusion of memoirs on Westerners ‘finding themselves’ in India, such as Sarah Macdonald, Holy Cow!: An Indian Adventure (Sydney: Bantam Books, 2002); or Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (New York: Penguin, 2007), to name just two. 15 See Madhu Agrawal, Himanshu Choudhary, and Gaurav Tripathi, “Enhancing Buddhist Tourism in India: An Exploratory Study,” Worldwide Hospitality and

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increasing Western interest in the area, 16 and as C. Michael Hall has argued, this is common to many Buddhist tourist sites throughout Asia.17 Visitors may simply tour the sites, but importantly for this chapter, they may also attend meditation courses and retreats. In contrast, the Osho International Meditation Resort near Pune, attracts visitors to its meditation and therapy programmes specifically. According to Anthony D’Andrea, up to 50% of the resort’s 12,000 visitors per year (data from the early 2000s) are Western,18 outfitting themselves in the supplied maroon robes and, as maintained by the resort’s website, enjoying the “tropical oasis where nature and the twenty-first century seamlessly, both within and without. With its white marble pathways, elegant black buildings, abundant foliage and Olympic-sized swimming pool, it is the perfect setting to take time out for yourself.” 19 Here the spiritual projects of tourists are linked with luxury, but also tellingly with the self. Three other locales are emblematic of Western spiritual tourism to India; Varanasi, Dharamsala, and Rishikesh. Varanasi, the city of light, stands as perhaps the quintessential Indian destination; its location on the Ganges Riiver, the iconic ghats, and the profusion of religiosity packed into the small city make it a whirling, chaotic experience even for the wellaccustomed traveller. Eck noted that “it is precisely because [Varanasi] has become a symbol of traditional Hindu India that Western visitors have often found this city the most strikingly ‘foreign’ of India’s cities.”20 It too, of course, attracts Westerners interested in Dharmic religions, and in this respect it stands out for the sheer volume of spiritual activity there. As Korpela notes of long-term Western tourists in Varanasi, or “lifestyle migrants” as she calls them, they travel to India “to find their true selves

Tourism Themes 2, no. 5 (2010): 477-493; India Tourism Statistics at a Glance, 2011. 16 David Geary, “Destination Enlightenment: Branding Buddhism and Spiritual Tourism in Bodhgaya, Bihar,” Anthropology Today 24, no. 3 (2008): 11-14. 17 C. Michael Hall, “Buddhism, Tourism and the Middle Way,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, eds Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 172-185. 18 Anthony D’Andrea, “Osho International Meditation Resort (Pune, 2000s): An Anthropological Analysis of Sannyasin Therapies and The Rajneesh Legacy,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 47, no. 1 (2007): 95. 19 “Osho International Meditation Resort,” Osho.com, accessed November 19, 2012, http://www.osho.com/Main.cfm?Area=medresort. 20 Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9.

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and to realize their individuality.”21 Similar projects are in play in the town of Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama in exile, where Western tourists study Buddhist philosophy and practices such as meditation, as well as languages including Hindi and Tibetan. Interestingly, in their study of Western tourists to the town, Collins-Kreiner and Tueta Sagi found that only 8% of their sample group were motivated specifically by the desire to see the Dalai Lama. 22 Finally, in Rishikesh Western tourists study meditation and yoga techniques, and address personal projects of identity, meaning, and personal growth.23 Sarah Strauss’s examination of Rishikesh also highlights the town’s centrality in the global yoga network. 24 The appeal of the town, as with much of India, is the accessibility it provides to learning within dharmic religious traditions and its status as the quintessential place to search for oneself. While India is the focus of this chapter, other countries in southeast Asia are worthy of remark, as they similarly appeal to Westerners due to their spiritual offerings, and are certainly part of the same social and cultural trend. Sharing a border with India as well as a dharmic religious orientation, Nepal could easily be subsumed into the present study. As Glenys Eddy discusses in this volume (see chapter nine), Nepal is home to many Buddhist monasteries and centres of learning that offer their services to Western travellers. Thailand has similarly attracted Western tourists interested in its Theravada Buddhist monasteries and meditation centres.25 It also has a profusion of wellness retreats which incorporate meditation, yoga, and a range of spiritual practices, sometimes combining eclectic New Age ideas with local Buddhist ones. 26 Many other locations in countries throughout the region offer retreats or learning within and parallel to religious traditions. In Myanmar, for example there appear to be

21

Mari Korpela, “Me, Myself and I: Western Lifestyle Migrants in Search of Themselves in Varanasi, India,” Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America 1, no. 1 (2010): 60. 22 Noga Collins-Kreiner and Keren Tueta Sagi, “Tourism to India as Popular Culture: A Cultural, Educational and Religious Experience at Dharamsala,” South Asian Popular Culture 9, no. 2 (2011): 140. 23 Norman, Spiritual Tourism, chapters 2 and 7. 24 Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts Across Cultures (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005). 25 Brooke Schedneck, “Constructing Religious Modernities: Hybridity, Reinterpretation, and Adaptation in Thailand’s International Meditation Centers” (PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University, 2012). 26 See, for example Joan C. Henderson, “Healthcare Tourism in Southeast Asia,” Tourism Review International 7, no. 3-4 (2003): 111-121.

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emerging monastic retreat operations for Western tourists.27 Likewise, in Bali, as recently popularised by Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love,28 tourists can stay at locations such as the Anand Ashram and listen to satsang, practice meditation, and attend Reiki and ‘self empowerment’ courses.29 It is clear that throughout southeast Asia, Western tourists are engaging with dharmic religious traditions and practices. In India, however, the perpetual tourist drawcard towns of Varanasi and Dharamsala provide easy access points for scholars to the interaction of Western tourists with Dharmic religions. Smaller towns like Auroville30 and Rishikesh, both of which have been the subject of focussed scholarly analysis, illustrate the extent to which Dharmic religious practices and beliefs are specifically sought out by Western tourists. Scholarship thus far also indicates that the function of these touristic practices within Western social frameworks is typically connected to individuated projects of meaning and identity, self discovery, personal empowerment, and healing.31 That is, a holiday is able to be meaningful insofar as it addresses serious and deep issues; the emotions, one’s identity, and the spiritual traditions of another people, and one’s purpose in life. Indeed, so prominent is this characteristic of Western tourism to India, and so powerful is the expectation of change, that a psychological syndrome is apparently developing around it. So-called ‘India Syndrome’ has recently drawn a modicum of press attention following the disappearance of two Western tourists. Both the Irish traveller Jonathan Spollen and the Australian Ryan Chambers, each went missing after travelling to Rishikesh ‘seeking spiritual enlightenment’. Both cases, and the media attention they garnered, are indicative of the dramatic location spiritual tourism to India maintains in Western popular

27 Paula Hancocks, “As Myanmar Opens up, Spiritual Tourists Journey In,” CNN Belief Blog, May 25, 2012, accessed December 3, 2012, http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/25/as-myanmar-opens-up-spiritual-tourists-journey-in/. 28 Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love. 29 “Spiritual Travelers, Ubud Inn, Rajarajeshwari, Tripurasundari,” Ubud Anand Ashram, accessed November 20, 2012, http://www.ubud.anandashram.asia/; For an introduction to the group, Anand Ashram, see Julia D. Howell, “Muslims, the New Age and Marginal Religions in Indonesia: Changing Meanings of Religious Pluralism,” Social Compass 52, no. 4 (2005): 473-493. 30 See Sharpley and Sundaram, “Tourism: A Sacred Journey?,” passim. 31 See Norman, Spiritual Tourism. For a detailed analysis of the philosophical motivations underpinning Himalayan backpacker tourism see Christopher Howard, “Horizons of Possibilities: The Telos of Contemporary Himalayan Travel,” Literature & Aesthetics 22, no. 1 (2012): 131-155.

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culture.32 Among other things, India is a location to which Westerners go ‘to find themselves’. Scott Carney, writing for the Condé Nast men’s magazine Details, noted that, “[t]his quest to become superhuman—along with culture shock, emotional isolation, illicit drugs, and the physical toll of hard-core meditation—can cause Western seekers to lose their bearings.”33 Former staff psychiatrist for the French embassy in Mumbai Régis Airault has written a book, Fous de l’Inde (‘Crazy About India’, not yet translated to English),34 and together with documentary maker, Philippe Vitaller, has made a film about the phenomenon.35 While not recognised in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, the phenomenon shares a number of characteristics with other travel syndromes such as Stendhal Syndrome, Jerusalem Syndrome, and Paris Syndrome. 36 Characterised by hallucinations, delusional states, elevated heart rate and blood pressure, these syndromes which occur in the context of travel or exposure to the sublime are to be understood, as David Picard maintains, “in terms of a socially framed subjective experience.”37 That is, that tourists would unlikely to have such reactions were there not strong

32

These two stories are among many covering the two cases; Meredith BennettSmith, “Jonathon Spollen, Missing Irishman, May Have Fallen Victim To Mysterious ‘India Syndrome’,” Huffington Post, October 11, 2012, accessed December 2, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/jonathon-spollenmissing-irishman-may-have-fallen-victim-to-india-syndrome_n_1957927.html; Neil McMahon, “Lost on a Journey to Free His Mind,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 19, 2005, accessed December 2, 2012, http://www.smh.com.au/ news/world/lost-on-a-journey-to-free-his-mind/2005/09/ 18/1126981947872.html. 33 Scott Carney, “Death on the Path to Enlightenment: Inside the Rise of India Syndrome,” Details, October 2012, accessed December 5, 2012, http://www.details.com/ culture-trends/critical-eye/201210/india-syndrome-deathenlightenment?currentPage=1. 34 Régis Airault, Fous de l’Inde: Délires d’Occidentaux et Sentiment Océanique (Paris: Payot, 2000). 35 Philippe Vitaller, Syndrome of India (Syndrome Des Indes), 2011, accessed January 10, 2013, http://vimeo.com/22018447. Croatian-born film-maker Davor Dirlic has also made a film about the Chambers family’s search for Ryan Chambers called Missing in the Land of Gods (2012). 36 For example, see Yair Bar-El et al., “Jerusalem Syndrome,” The British Journal of Psychiatry 176, no. 1 (2000): 86-90; Timothy R. J. Nicholson, Carmine Pariante, and Declan McLoughlin, “Stendhal Syndrome: a Case of Cultural Overload,” BMJ Case Reports (2009), unpaginated. 37 David Picard, “Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys,” in Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation, eds David Picard and Mike Robinson (Farnham; Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2012), 12.

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social expectation that the experience of travel in a certain place will result in change.38 India and the religious traditions it hosts are of significant appeal to Western tourists and this is a phenomenon worthy of specific attention. Apart from my own work on spiritual tourism in India, 39 a few other scholars have examined the topic of Westerners approaching either Asia as a broad locale, or Dharmic religions as alternative or superior to Abrahamic ones. Christopher Howard has noted the draw of the subcontinent to Western travellers looking to ‘find themselves’. 40 Similarly, Glenys Eddy’s ethnography, in this volume, of Western attendees at a monastic retreat in Nepal raises the curious question of why geographic space and certain ideas work together so intimately.41 As noted above, Schedneck provides a nicely comprehensive account of Thailand,42 though misses crucial elements that are the focus of this chapter; namely, the influence of the Theosophical Society (among others) on the possibility of travelling ‘Eastwards’. Most Western individuals have ample opportunity to study, practice, and learn about Buddhism or Hinduism without having to go far from their own homes. Yet travel to India, Nepal, Thailand, and many other Asian countries they do. As noted by Siv Ellen Kraft, the Lonely Planet India guidebook exemplifies the way in which tourists are inculcated to the mythology of India as the homeland of spiritual wisdom, with its assurances of life changing personal transformation and an Orientalist depiction of the exotic truths to be found in the East.43 A pertinent question, therefore, is how this pull has been shaped in the social processes of recent Western history.

38

For numerous well researched discussions on the subject of the motions in travel and tourism, see David Picard and Mike Robinson, eds, Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation (Farnham; Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012). 39 Norman, Spiritual Tourism, chapters 2 and 7. 40 Howard, “Horizons of Possibilities,” 140-143. 41 Eddy’s book Becoming Buddhist: Experiences of Socialization and Selftransformation in Two Australian Buddhist Centres (New York: Continuum, 2012), contains a valuable explanation of how contemporary Westerns approach Buddhism. 42 Schedneck, “Constructing Religious Modernities,” 168-174. 43 Siv Ellen Kraft, “Religion and Spirituality in Lonely Planet’s India,” Religion 37, no. 3 (2007): 237-238.

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The Light of Asia Until this point Buddhism and the religions of Asia in general, were not well known or well thought of, broadly speaking, in the West. Various colonial writers noted with distaste the traditions of the locals, whom they regarded collectively as little more than savages. Perhaps most gross is the opinion of Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote that the “monstrous superstitions” of Indian religious traditions, were “less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.”44 Macaulay was also responsible for the ruling that education in India be delivered in English. While a no doubt well intentioned decision, it was one that, through the long and ponderous course of time, would lead to a degradation of Indian cultural knowledge so profound that when, in 1967 on Delhi television, a schoolboy could not answer who the mother of Rama (the hero of the Ramayana) was, Anant Pai felt compelled to create graphic novels series Amar Chitra Katha.45 However, even by 1835 Macaulay’s opinion was of a kind diminishing in popularity and authority. As an example, in 1879, British Poet Edwin Arnold was so moved by the tale of the life of the Buddha that he penned a narrative poem detailing his life and philosophy with the intention of popularising Buddhism in the West. A little knowing, little have I told Touching the Teacher and the Ways of Peace. Forty-five rains thereafter showed he those In many lands and many tongues and gave Our Asia light, that still is beautiful, Conquering the world with spirit of strong grace.46

The thematically broad changes in religious interest that occurred in West society in the twentieth century were driven not just by an exposure to new ideas, but by a large scale exposure to new places and new cultures. The number of Western travellers who visited sites, cultures, and people 44

Macaulay, cited in Harry Oldmeadow, Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters With Eastern Religious Traditions (Bloomington IN: World Wisdom, 2004), 6. 45 Frances W. Pritchett, “The World of Amar Chitra Katha,” in Media And The Transformation Of Religion In South Asia, eds Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 76. 46 Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (London: Trübner and Company, 1879), 575580.

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on the other than their familiars increased dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Added to this, the exposure to other places for millions of western soldiers fighting in numerous wars also broadened the perspective on the variety and similarity of human life. 47 Nor can we forget the rapid change in travel technologies; going from rail and steamer tourism, through short-distance aviation and long-haul jets, to space tourism in just one hundred years. Furthermore, something happened in the late nineteenth century that changed the way India and the East generally was approached. Many great thinkers had extolled the virtues of certain aspects of both Chinese and Indian philosophy. However, whereas the likes of Voltaire and Hume had taken texts as their entrée to Eastern (or more precisely Chinese) thought, with the advent of modern tourism a broad range of individuals from the West found it possible to go to the place from which these ideas had emanated. As numerous scholars have noted, any discussion concerning interest in the East by Westerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century must include the Theosophical Society. 48 This influential group emerged amidst a period of cultural recapitulation of Western society and progress. What has come to be ‘the West’ has had a long fascination with the subcontinent. From the legend of Socrates being visited by a Brahmin and Alexander the Great’s desire to conquer the land as part of his quest for world domination (including meeting Chandragupta Maurya), through to the Romantics’ ideals of a unity in all life forms, and the Beats’ interest in transformative philosophy, interest in ‘the East’ is a long-invested capital in Western cultural imaginings. However, it was not until the Indian colonial period that we can find evidence of ‘Hinduism’ beginning to be constructed in the West. The founding of the Asiatic Society by the great philologist William Jones in 1780, and the publication of the Bhagavad Gita in English by Charles Watkins in 1785 both had widespread and lasting impacts. Indeed, Eric Sharpe described this as an event that would “exercise enormous influence on the mind of Europe and America.” 49 47 In 1944 alone over three million American G.I.s embarked from the United States. Lee B. Kennett, G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 111. 48 Harry Oldmeadow, “Ex Oriente Lux: Eastern Religions, Western Writers,” Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011): 24-25; See also, J. Gordon Melton, “How New Is New? The Flowering of the ‘New’ Religious Consciousness Since 1965,” in The Future of New Religious Movements, eds David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 4655. 49 Eric J. Sharpe, The Universal GƯtƗ: Western Images of the BhagavadgƯtƗ: A Bicentenary Survey (La Salle: Open Court, 1985), 10.

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Further to this, however, was the growing sentiment that India was home to an ancient wisdom. Jones himself promoted the idea that there was a great deal of similarity between the vernacular forms of worship in Europe and India. Indeed, Jones also argued for a common cultural and religious ancestry, and that when they came to the sub-Continent, Europeans were not “not encountering a strange culture but their own culture in its primitive form.”50 This sentiment fed the fires of Romantic imagination, which saw in India a space “where it was supposed a man might get rid of the burden of self, that land outside time and space, thought of as being at once a place of wandering and a place of homecoming.”51 Amid this rising interest in the East, the Theosophical Society was formed in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and William Quan Judge. It was intended as a vehicle for the purposes of unearthing and promoting the perennial wisdom contained in the world’s religions, and quickly developed a membership base around the Western world. In 1877 Blavatsky and Olcott sailed for India, where they were to remain for some years. In 1881 both converted to Buddhism while in Sri Lanka, and in 1882 the Theosophical Society headquarters was moved to Adyar, near Chennai. The Society attracted freethinkers and counter culturalists, and promoted Hindu and Buddhist spiritual content. It produced, as Partridge put it, “not Eastern thought in the West, but Western thought with an Eastern flavour.”52 In 1886, Blavatsky reminded members in a letter of the original objects of the organisation, which included, “study[ing] the philosophies of the East – those of India chiefly, presenting them gradually to the public in various works that would interpret exoteric religions in the light of esoteric teachings,” and to “oppose materialism and theological dogmatism in every possible way.”53 By 1889, however, Blavatsky was promoting the idea that the Society was a preparation ground for a coming world teacher; one who would be raised within the fold of Theosophy and schooled in all

50

Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), 3. 51 Michel Le Bris, quoted in J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 19. 52 Christopher H. Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 90-91. 53 Helena P. Blavatsky, “The Original Programme of the Theosophical Society,” October 3, 1886, accessed December 2, 2012, http://www.theosophynw.org/theosnw/theos/th-origp.htm.

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the religious traditions of the world.54 Some years later the young Jiddu Krishnamurti was chosen to take on this role, though he eventually rejected it. At its heart, the Theosophical message was that a primordial, common wisdom was at the foundation of all religious traditions, and that a more pure, untarnished version of this could be found in the East, and India more specifically. Helena Blavatsky’s impact on the character India retains in much popular Western imagination should not be underestimated. Born in 1831 in what is now Ukraine, accounts of her early, pre-Theosophical Society life are confusing and contradictory. Her upbringing in an aristocratic family led to marriage (or an elopement) at age seventeen with the elderly General Blavatsky (whose name she kept for the rest of her life). However, she quickly fled back to her family and then moved to Constantinople. As Mark Bevir notes, her exact movements for the next seventeen years are unclear.55 According to the mythology she spun around herself later in life, by around 1858, aged roughly twenty-seven, she had travelled for a decade alone through Egypt, the Middle East, Tibet, and India.56 She also claimed to have lived with Tibetan Lamas and resided in India, where the idea of reviving the perennial religion was said to have come to her. While few scholars give much weight to these claims, their impact has been significant. While her original interests were undoubtedly anchored in Western esoteric traditions, her later work looked to ‘the East’ and particular to India and the Himalayas. Indeed, she gained some reputation (some may say notoriety) as a medium early in her life. She later distanced herself from the spiritualist movement, however, her promotion of Hermeticism and the occult sciences remained core components of later writings.57 In order to understand her promotion of India, Blavatsky’s formulation of human history and her incorporation of ‘the sciences’ must be examined. 54

This immediately caused tension and led eventually to schism. Among the breakaways was Rudolf Steiner, General Secretary of the German branch of the Theosophical Society, who left to form his own movement, Anthroposophy, and who would later found the Steiner-Waldorf school system and lay the foundations for the biodynamic agricultural method. See Gary Lachman, Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007). 55 Mark Bevir, “The West Turns Eastward: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62, no. 3 (October 1, 1994): 749. 56 Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, 33. 57 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 449-451.

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Her initial foray into macrohistorical thought came in the generously proportioned Isis Unveiled (1877), the subtitle of which is telling as regards her methods; A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. Blavatsky was clearly responding, as many other religious thinkers were at the time, to the perceived problem of a “terrible de-spiritualization of life”58 that it was thought would come in the wake of evolutionism. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) had shaken traditional Christian theological undergirding of morality and in particular sin. In response to this Blavatsky argued that humans carried a divine spark that demanded, teleologically, a future union with the divine; the evolutionary trajectory therein should be apparent. Further to this, it was no great leap for freethinkers such as Blavatsky to assert that as species evolve from a common ancestor, so too must religions. She argued that India had, six thousand years ago (as evidenced by the great epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana), been the thriving civilisation from which the world’s other great civilisations had been born. Thus Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all “sprang from the two main branches of that mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedic ages – we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which emerged later into Brahmanism.” 59 While erroneous, Blavatsky saw in the crisp nihilism of Buddhism, as it was then understood by Western scholars (with only limited philosophical translations and little anthropological study of its lived and practiced traditions), the pure, original religion of humanity. Thus, she wrote that Buddhism was that philosophy “taught from the beginning of time in the impenetrable secrecy of the inner sanctuaries of the pagodas.”60 This, however, should not be misunderstood as a promotion of Buddhism alone, for Blavatsky’s impact on spirituality in the West, and thus on spiritual tourism, was a result of, as Joscelyn Godwin put it, her “omnivorous mind,”61 and its ability to select and assimilate whatever she found useful in the religious traditions she examined. Moreover, as Wouter Hanegraaff noted, the Theosophical Society “is not only rooted in Western 58

Garry W. Trompf, “Imagining Macrohistory? Madame Blavatsky from Isis Unveiled (1877) to The Secret Doctrine (1888),” Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011): 49. 59 Helena P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, vol. 2 (Wheaton: The Theosophy Publishing House, 1972), 123. 60 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. 2, 169. 61 Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 292.

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esotericism, but has remained an essentially Western movement.” 62 Nonetheless, this characteristic of religious and spiritual practices and Western societies (which has been described by David Lyon as bricolage63 and by Anthony Giddens as part of a reflexive project of selfconstruction)64 is a key feature of modern Western spirituality. As Colin Campbell notes, the limited knowledge Blavatsky and others had of Buddhism and Hinduism, combined with the novelty of Asian religious movements in Western societies meant that a process of ‘Easternisation’, in which ideas from Asian societies were subsumed into Western social contexts, took place religiously in two ways. 65 On the one hand, what Campbell calls ‘exogenous’ religious ideas were cherry-picked, as it were, by the likes of Blavatsky and brought into the fold of existing currents of thought and religious practice in the West. On the other, indigenous Eastern religious traditions either migrated or were introduced to the West unmodified and left to fend for themselves. Blavatsky’s significant contribution was to popularise and open up the religious traditions of India, and Asia more broadly, to the eclectic Western eye. Blavatsky’s promotion of the idea that there was a universal wisdom, underlying all the religious traditions of the world, has had a profound impact. In turn, and manifesting a trope of the age, the Theosophical Society’s focus on the comparative study of religions learning itself impacted upon the notion of travelling to India. Bevir argues that it was through the Victorian crisis of faith in the wake of scientific discoveries, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution, that Blavatsky was able to encourage the West to look to India for “a practical, as well as a spiritual, knowledge that [it] sorely needed.”66 In moving the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to Adyar, Blavatsky expressed the collective desire for closeness to the traditions and the texts of this new-found ancient wisdom. 67 By travelling to India to learn of and from Indian religions, Westerners were cast as spiritual explorers, or in Blavatsky’s most 62

Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, 455. 63 David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 75-76. 64 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991). 65 Campbell’s work is a comprehensive treatment, at a macro-social level, of how this process has taken place in the West. See Campbell, The Easternization of the West, particularly 38-39 and 157-161. 66 Bevir, “The West Turns Eastward,” 748. 67 Trompf, “Imagining Macrohistory?,” 52.

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grandiose visions, spiritual saviours, rescuing and resuscitating the one true, original source of all religions. To be uncovered in India were the secrets, not just of Indian religions, but of the human race itself. This is most coherently articulated in her second major work, The Secret Doctrine, which was cast as a commentary on a secret book connected with ancient Tibet and “the Masters” found there. India was a place of potential and the great stage upon which humanity’s future would be played out. Romantics such as Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman, and E.M. Forster had portrayed India as a country in which the people pursued simple lives oriented towards selfrealisation. In the writings of Jones and others who had begun to see the familial link some Indian languages had with European languages, Blavatsky saw proof of the ancient wisdom Western occultists had been referring to, “not only of the civilization, arts and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity.”68 Journeying to India was, from the very beginning, pitched as a journey of discovery. As the greater part of the project of Theosophy is centred on learning, where better to seek out repositories of knowledge concerned with the self than at their source in India. In The Secret Doctrine, in which Blavatsky tackled the weighty topics of cosmohistory and the origins of the human race, also contained an argument about a coming messiah and a new age of peace that would precede him.69 Her idea of a revolution about to take place the ideas for which are to be found in India also persists. Many spiritual tourists in India speak of their tourism as having global, if not macrohistorical significance, in which their journeys of learning and self-explorations and transformation become catalysts in the ushering in of a new age of humanity.70 After her death in 1891 the Theosophical Society underwent a period of tumultuous schism. Nonetheless, the ideas of Blavatsky passed into the public imagination through discussion in newspapers and in small interest groups that formed to discuss the radical and challenging ideas that people such as her were producing at the time. It was, without doubt, a period of tremendous reconsideration of what it was to be human. Parallel to these astounding reformulations of human life by Blavatsky and other Theosophists like Annie Besant, a number of historically important events in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped the Society’s promotion of the East to reach a broad spectrum of Western society. J. Gordon Melton notes that shortly after Blavatsky and the 68

Bevir, “The West Turns Eastward,” 756. Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, vol. 1 (Ardyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1971), 470. 70 See Norman, Spiritual Tourism, 158-159. 69

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Theosophical society began advocating Eastern religious ideas, a number of immigration exclusion acts were passed around the world (Australia’s infamous ‘White Australia’ policy is one example), which limited the ability of teachers from countries such as India, Japan, and China visiting. Melton notes two main effects of these changes; firstly, there developed a focus on migrant religious groups by visiting teachers. Senior religious officials who travelled to the west found their duties in the limited time they were allowed in Western countries was typically solely focussed on migrant groups, often themselves an underclass. Secondly, there was a notable uptake of the teaching of ‘Eastern spiritual knowledge’ by Westerners such as Alice Bailey and Edwin Dingle. As a result, the learning, distribution, and teaching of Eastern religious ideas and practices by lay Westerners became accepted and commonplace. But there was a third, smaller outcome that Melton brushes over that is crucial to this chapter’s argument. In the discussion that follows, Melton notes that “those not satisfied with second-hand knowledge, made pilgrimages to the East and discovered teachers like Meher Baba and Ramana Maharshi.”71 While travel was expensive and time-consuming, the return of these travellers to their native lands helped to lay the foundations for the rapid spread of Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas through Western cultures late in the twentieth century. Importantly, they also acted as pathfinders for the thousands of tourists who were to follow in the jet age of travel.

Blavatsky’s Heirs as Travellers There can be little doubt that one of the most significant historical influences on Western spiritual tourism to India has been the Theosophical Society, and in particular Madame Blavatsky. However, all Blavatsky’s writings would have done little had no one attended to them. They key to understanding her influence, even to this day, begins with investigating the direct influence she had on those around her. Within this movement there were politicians, artists, and poets, and a number of Theosophists who set out to explore India/Tibet and its religions following in the tradition of their leader. Tibet, the home of ‘the Mahatmas’, was of particular interest to Blavatsky, and her writings on the region cast her as having seen it first hand. This is important. Her life before the Theosophical Society is, as discussed above, largely unknown, but Blavatsky was regarded as a global traveller at a time when women were not commonly accepted unaccompanied (Lady Hester Stanhope and Isabelle Eberhardt being 71

Melton, “How New Is New?,” 51.

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notable others). What is critical here is to appreciate the impact Blavatsky, as a solo female traveller, had on the image of India. With her writings, regardless of their veracity, India moved from being a colonial location and seat of mercantile possibility, to being one of sacred geography and spiritual possibility. In particular, she helped cement the notion of India as a place of self-realisation and self-transformation; one that had been developing for some time. Blavatsky’s influence was wide-ranging, and among those who were attracted to her and the Theosophical Society’s message were a number of artists and political thinkers. W.B. Yeats, the great Irish poet, was among those to take more than a passing interest in Blavatsky’s charismatic personality and her writings. Yeats was, as Beaumont notes, attracted to the occult, and particularly Blavatsky’s notion of a coming epoch of peace and higher purpose.72 Echoing this, Yeats wrote “I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect – now beginning in the world.” 73 This accorded well with Yeats’ parallel interest in the socialist teachings of William Morris. Similarly, as Zoe Alderton has highlighted, the writings of Blavatsky and later Theosophists had a significant impact on the emerging abstract art movement. 74 Wassily Kandinsky, for example, directly credited Blavatsky’s writings as an influence. However, much of this influence seems to have occurred after Blavatsky’s death in 1891, and following the publication of Thought Forms, by Charles W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant in 1901. Nonetheless, Blavatsky and her imposing character stand as influences to a range of artistic forms, and alternative lifestyle and freethinking groups. Within the milieu of travel itself, however, Blavatsky was a direct influence. Indeed, regardless of the truth of her accounts, the casting of her as a world traveller and spiritual explorer is crucial not only to her authority as a spiritual teacher, but her influence on later traveller, in that they followed her example. Perhaps the most famous Theosophical Society traveller apart from Blavatsky herself (real or imagined), was Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969), arguably one of the Twentieth century’s greatest adventurers. After discovering the Theosophical Society in London in 1888, and attending lectures given by Blavatsky, she struck 72

Matthew Beaumont, “Socialism and Occultism at the Fin De Siècle: Elective Affinities,” Victorian Review 36, no. 1 (2010): 217-232. 73 Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 2000), 13. 74 Zoe Alderton, “Colour, Shape, and Music: The Presence of Thought Forms in Abstract Art,” Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011): 236-258.

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up a friendship with Annie Besant, and later studied Indology and Tibetan Buddhism. By the age of twenty-three she had journeyed to India and by twenty-five was considering a life as a sannyasin there before (as had happened on previous journeys)75 her money ran out.76 Her famous 19231924 entry into Tibet to study Tibetan language and Buddhism was almost unheard of for Western men, let alone women (aside from Blavatsky), and would later contribute to the fame of her books, My Journey to Lhasa and Magic and Mystery in Tibet, an ‘Age of Aquarius’ classic according to Heelas. 77 She studied Buddhism extensively and masqueraded as a pilgrim-mendicant, crossing perilous terrains and combating threats of exposure, to become the first woman to enter Lhasa in Tibet, “ready to show what a woman can do.”78 Her remarkable accounts of journeys to Tibet have been attributed as influencing a range of thinkers and artists, including Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Among many notable leaders of religious groups, during her journeys David-Néel met D.T. Suzuki and the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Her approach to travel, and her impact on spiritual tourism a century later, is characterised by the following statement; “There are great men at the Sorbonne, who know all the roots of the words and the historical dates, but I wish to live philosophy on the spot and undergo physical and spiritual training, not just read about them.” 79 She was, as Harry Oldmeadow stated, “one of the earliest in a long line of seekers for whom bookish learning was only a prelude to a more direct engagement with Eastern spirituality.”80 She fitted with the emerging desire not just to learn about, not just to see, as if on some Cook’s tour, but to actually experience the ways of life and modes of thought alternative to those imposed upon individuals in the West. Within this cultural and social mix we should not forget the influence Krishnamurti and the Order of the Star of the East had on the image of India. Krishnamurti was heralded as a ‘World Teacher’ by Blavatsky’s 75

Centre Culturel Alexandra David-Néel, “Summary Biography of Alexandra David-Néel (Second Part),” Alexandra David-Néel: Explorer, Writer & Orientalist, accessed November 27, 2012, http://www.alexandra-David-Néel.org/anglais/ biog2.htm. 76 Clearly the prospect of actually being poor, rather than renouncing the money she had, did not appeal. 77 Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 43. 78 Alexandra David-Néel, My Journey to Lhasa (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 9. 79 David-Néel, quoted in Luree Miller, On Top of the World: Five Women Explorers in Tibet (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1976), 145. 80 Oldmeadow, Journeys East, 132.

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successors, and was taken around the world to promote the notion. He however, had different ideas yet nonetheless became one of the beacons of Eastern, alternative, and New Age thought in the twentieth century. Another traveller, also influenced by Blavatsky and the teachings of the Theosophical Society as well as through her friendship with DavidNéel, was fellow Frenchwoman, Mirra Alfassa, now referred to as The Mother (1878-1973). Alfassa moved to Pondicherry in India to set up Auroville, an experimental town designed to ‘realise human unity’, with the enigmatic spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). There she conceived of Auroville as a place “that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of good will, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the Supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony.”81 Today Auroville is home to over two thousand people from India and the rest of the world,82 and continues to attract a steady stream of overseas visitors, though, as evidenced by Sharpley and Sundaram, it is far from the original vision of a populace of thousands of global citizens living in spiritual peace.83 Instead, it attracts visitors from the West for a range of reasons that fit well within the spiritual tourism framework discussed above. Other writers and travellers of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century have either direct or indirect legacy to Blavatsky. Francis Younghusband (1863-1942), who entered Tibet not as a spiritual seeker but as an invader/negotiator with 8,000 Indian Army troops in 1904 had a mythical moment of change; a spiritual revelation or epiphany about the scale of the world and his place in it. Younghusband is mentioned or cited in some Theosophical Society publications, 84 and his own publication record places him squarely in the middle of the developing New Age movement. Titles such as Mother World: In Travail for the Christ That Is To Be (1924); Life in the Stars: An Exposition of the View That on Some Planets of Some Stars Exist Beings Higher Than Ourselves, and on One a World-Leader, the Supreme Embodiment of the Eternal Spirit Which Animates the Whole (1927); and Modern Mystics (1935), display the same 81

Alain G., Auroville: A Dream Takes Shape (Auroville: Auroville Publication Department, 2000), 2. 82 Auroville OutreachMedia, “Auroville Press Sheet,” accessed December 9, 2012, http://www.auroville.org/journals&media/outreach/PRESS sheet_ Eng.pdf. 83 Sharpley and Sundaram, “Tourism: A Sacred Journey?,” 168-170. 84 For example, in the Society’s magazine, The Theosophical Path in 1933, which can be found in G. De Purucker, ed., Theosophical Path Magazine, 1933 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 137.

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mixture of Western esotericism and Eastern philosophy that Blavatsky produced. There is a clear Theosophical connection, if not a direct influence. Further, in imitation of the World’s Parliament of Religions, Younghusband founded the World Congress of Faiths in 1936. Writers such as Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and others, were later in inheritors of Blavatsky, though not directly. Both writers served on the editorial board, and wrote numerous articles for the magazine Vedanta and the West, the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Huxley in particular was interested in the perennial philosophy that Blavatsky had promoted, and wrote about it at some length. In his book on the matter, The Perennial Philosophy, quotes from religious texts the world over are interspersed with Huxley’s commentary and attempt to discern the “Highest Common Factor.”85 The idea of India and its surrounds (Tibet, Afghanistan, Nepal) as places of life-changing epiphany is found throughout travel literature. To this day the Theosophical Society headquarters is located in Adyar, India, but it was their popularising of India as a repository of wisdom and learned masters that led others to undertake journeys there searching for spiritual practices and philosophies. From James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933) to Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), and Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), the idea promoted was that something significant was supposed to happen to the Western traveller in ‘the East’. Even Peter Bishop’s The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape – a text intended to unravel the Western construction of that mythology – only served to further emphasise it. Bishop, confronting the problem anthropologists like Gary Fine, among others, have talked about concerning the ‘lie’ of ethnography,86 is forced to admit that texts offer “a direct encounter with that elusive place.”87 That the image projected of India is largely one of spiritual encounter, revelation, confrontation, and change is one with a long history, and one that Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky helped to popularise in the modern West.

85 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009). 86 Gary Alan Fine, “Ten Lies of Ethnography: Moral Dilemmas of Field Research,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22, no. 3 (1993): 267-294. 87 Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing, and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 149.

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Conclusions It is hard to over-estimate the influence of Blavatsky on spiritual tourism to India, even though the enacted phenomena occur largely without credit to or even reference to the woman herself, or even to the Theosophical Society. More typically, from my own fieldwork, it seems that the heirs of Blavatsky, as well as the celebrities of the 1960s onwards, are the sources of inspiration for such journeys of self-discovery. Blavatsky and her followers came upon a groundswell of changing sentiment towards India and particularly its religious traditions, and popularised it. They added to the already developed Romantic notion of India as the mystical locale, par excellence. Blavatsky also championed reincarnation and the laws of karma, following from her spiritualist roots, such that moral action could be justified on evolutionary grounds, and that moral laws were equated with the natural laws of the universe that scientists were beginning to uncover. Moreover, Blavatsky argued that Indian religions were immanentist in their cosmology, and that as a result, they promoted the idea of turning inwards in order to find the divine essence or spark within the individual. She promoted an image of the Indian people, or the ‘true’ Indian people, it should be noted, in which they were ascetic, deeply spiritual, and wise. The link with colonialism, both historical and ideological, should not be downplayed here, nor should impact of the anti-religious Mao and the Communist Chinese government throughout the twentieth century. The great distinction that exists in contemporary tourism between India and China in religio-spiritual terms is primarily driven by the issue of access. Western tourists feel they have greater access to religious praxis and thought in India, compared to a China that is understood as religiously closed. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the ‘theft’ of Tibet, not, it would seem, from the Tibetans themselves, but from Western tourists who desire the access that was previously denied them. Unpublished field research from Dharamsala indicated that among spiritual tourists in India, China, or more specifically the Chinese government, was viewed as antireligious and thus opposed to the kinds of global spiritual projects espoused by Western spiritual tourists. In these projects, one common theme revolves around the very Blavatskyan notion of the Himalayas, particularly Tibet, as the home to great spiritual truths either hidden or lost. This idea, often narrated as part of a necessary event in the course of

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human evolution (frequently inspired by Eckhardt Tolle), 88 is typically attached to a peculiar reiteration of the paradigm of Western scientific thought that seeks to marry the spiritual and physical. Blavatsky and Olcott would be proud, at least in some respect, of the thousands of Western tourists who sit in cafés, chai huts, restaurants, and hotel bars in India lamenting this ‘loss’ of spiritual truths. In this light, some Western tourists cast themselves as the saviours of humanity’s spiritual progress in a manner all too reminiscent of Said’s “system of ideological fictions,” taking over from an India that was now incapable of it.89 The important point, and what is key to Blavatsky’s legacy in modern spiritual tourism, is that the Theosophists went to India; a legacy that found its full voice once mass travel (cheap and fast) to the sub-continent was possible for Westerners. It was not simply a Romantic or Orientalist ideological construction from afar. Rather, Theosophical travellers, and those of similar vein, opened up the possibility of travelling to India to study the religions of the East in situ. Only ninety years after Blavatsky and Olcott moved the Theosophical Soceity headquarters to India the celebrities of Western culture made their highly publicised way there after them. Gita Mehta’s biting description of the result sums up the legacy of Blavatsky well; it was the turn of the populists, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to become the pacemakers for a faltering Western heart, and they achieved a more striking success … The women were models, the men were stars, and the massage was the message. When they came out of their spiritual retreats draped in homespun, they glowed with vegetarian good health.90

In an age of counterculture and resistance through dissent and alterity, India offered a visual and cultural marker unsurpassed. Without the writings and far-reaching influence of Madame Blavatsky, it is safe to say that the character of India in Western social milieux would be markedly different. Blavatsky’s promotion of India as the home of spiritual truth for humanity could be relegated to a footnote were it not for the procession of influential figures who associated with her long enough to be influenced. This cultural and historical influence led, once the technologies of travel allowed, to the large numbers of Western tourists 88 Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Penguin, 2006), particularly chapter 1. 89 Edward W Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), 321. 90 Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 68.

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that we now see making their way to India. While we have no statistical data to examine for spiritual tourism, the field reports available from a number of sources, the amount of cultural production that utilises the idea, and the volume of ‘chatter’ through blogs, web fora, and advertising indicate to us that travelling to India for spiritual reasons has now settled within the fringes of mainstream Western societies. It is, as Paul Heelas remarked with reference to the New age, “no longer so much a matter of ‘cults’ as it is of ‘culture’.”91 The ‘Eastern’ turn of Western new religiosity that featured throughout the twentieth century has, it seems set in. Short holidays to the other side of the globe are normal. The idea of travelling to India to find oneself, to discover a new spiritual path, or to refine a known one has now thoroughly diffused into Western society and culture, and, in certain sectors, has been normalised.

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CHAPTER EIGHT REFLEXIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY IN THE STUDY OF A MODERN ESOTERIC TEACHER: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF G. I. GURDJIEFF JOHANNA J. M. PETSCHE

Introduction This chapter will explore the role that travel stories have played in the lives, and the hagiographical renderings of those lives, of Western spiritual teachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attention will primarily be paid to the travel stories of Armenian-Greek esoteric teacher G. I. Gurdjieff (ca. 1866-1949), which are vividly presented in his Meetings With Remarkable Men, first published in English in 1963. In early 2011 I attempted to trace Gurdjieff’s elusive footsteps through Armenia and Turkey, and came to unearth some new information about him. My experiences and findings will be presented here. Bringing context to Gurdjieff’s travel stories and illustrating a ‘travel story trend’ among spiritual teachers at this time, there will first be brief examinations of the hagiographies of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), who cofounded the Theosophical Society in 1875, and L. Ron Hubbard (19111986), who founded the Church of Scientology in 1953. It will be demonstrated that accounts of travel are central to their hagiographies, which were strategically constructed from their own accounts of their lives, as well as from the elaborations of followers. In fact it seems that it was almost a prerequisite for spiritual teachers of the time to have travelled, and particularly to places considered ‘remote’, ‘exotic’ and ‘ancient’. Through their tales of travel, Western spiritual teachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could best tap into the West’s contemporary fascination with ‘the East’ and with ancient cultures. Travel tales also legitimised their teachings with a sense of authority and authenticity.

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Historical facts surrounding the lives, achievements and personas of G. I. Gurdjieff, H. P. Blavatsky, and L. Ron Hubbard, three flamboyant and controversial founders of new religions, have been mythologised and clouded by elaboration, making it highly troublesome for the scholar wishing to discern fact from fiction.1 This is nowhere more evident than in accounts of their travels. A number of parallels can be found between these accounts; Gurdjieff, Blavatsky and Hubbard all claimed that their motivation to travel came from a desperate disillusionment with the modern world and the teachings of traditional Western religions, and all described setting off as young ‘seekers’ in search of a universal principle or source of wisdom that underlies all religions. Later in life they each formed a body of teaching characterised by a synthesising of Western science with Eastern religious and philosophical ideas, where the latter was attributed to the experiences and knowledge they personally acquired on extensive and adventurous travels to the East. Further, two principal notions can be detected in their travel accounts. The first notion, essential to esotericism, is that hidden sources of esoteric knowledge exist in remote, ancient cultures, and that this knowledge can be transmitted through initiates. Today this idea lives on in the New Age movement, which promotes ancient wisdom as spiritually superior to contemporary Western thinking. Westerners today are popularly seen as out of touch with nature and themselves; the idea being that over time humanity has regressed spiritually, rather than progressed.2 The second notion characterising these accounts is the Orientalist assumption that real spiritual wisdom is to be found in the East. Cultural critic Edward Said argues in Orientalism (1978), a landmark text in postcolonial studies, that ‘the East’ is a European construct that became an idealised object of desire, representing everything that the West was not.3 The East was like a bastion of light for Westerners since antiquity, and in the nineteenth century this Western veneration of all things ‘Eastern’ reached its peak. This was due to Western expansion into the Middle East, India and Asia at this time, and also due to the translation of Sanskrit and Pali texts, as well as archeological discoveries. At this same time, social and religious 1

For more on the topic see Mikael Rothstein, “Hagiography and Text in the Aetherius Society: Aspects of the Social Construction of a Religious Leader,” in New Religions in a Postmodern World, eds Mikael Rothstein and Reender Kranenborg (Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2003), 165. 2 Christopher H. Partridge, “Truth Authority and Epistemological Individualism in New Age Thought,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 14, no. 1 (1999): 87-88. 3 Jonathon Bellman, “Introduction,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathon Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xi.

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structures in the West were shifting due to industrialisation, the rise of materialism, and scientific positivism. All these circumstances led to new research and a burgeoning interest in comparative religion, myth, oriental studies, the Eastern arts, the occult and new religious movements.4

H. P. Blavatsky and L. Ron Hubbard Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) popularised the perennialist notion that a common wisdom undergirds all religions, and that this teaching could be found in the East.5 According to travel stories promulgated by Blavatsky and her followers, she had travelled for a decade from 1848, at the age of seventeen, to destinations including Egypt, France, South America, Mexico, the Middle East, and most importantly, India and Tibet. She described living in India for approximately two years and, deciding that the country would see the rebirth of religion, later set up the Theosophical Society headquarters in Madras.6 She also claimed to have lived in Tibet for more than seven years (seven years traditionally being considered the period of apprenticeship for esoteric initiation), where she studied with ‘Himalayan Masters’ in their mountain homes and was chosen to reach the highest level of initiation.7 During her travels Blavatsky is attributed with cultivating her powers in levitation, clairvoyance and telepathy. Researchers question Blavatsky’s travel accounts, which contain chronological contradictions and were based only on her own memories. Most of her accounts have not been confirmed by any other reliable source, and scholars question how Blavatsky could have travelled by herself as a woman in the nineteenth century to places like Tibet, where she did not know the language. In fact Maria Carlson, scholar of Russian history, mythology and occult movements, states that Russian letters and

4

James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and Their Followers (UK: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 35-36. See MacKenzie’s critique of Said’s Orientalism and his defence of each of the arts from Said’s argument in John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). 5 Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions (Illinois: Open Court, 1997), 40. 6 Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason (London: Harrap, 1973), 231. 7 Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993), 32-33.

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memoirs indicate that in this period Blavatsky travelled strictly within the Russian Empire and Europe.8 L. Ron Hubbard’s (1911-1986) ‘official biography’, rigorously promoted by the Church of Scientology, presents the young Hubbard as a restless spiritual seeker who travelled the world in search of insights into the mysteries of the human mind. According to the Church, Hubbard was a pilot, navigator, sailor and surveyor (not to mention a nuclear physicist, sci-fi author, photographer, Hollywood script writer, singer, poet and accomplished rose gardener), and his youthful adventures led him to the far corners of Asia, where he visited Buddhist lamaseries, befriended Manchurian warlords, and lived with bandits in the hills of Tibet.9 These accounts can be found in What Is Scientology? published by the Church of Scientology, and the Ron series of magazines dealing with separate parts of Hubbard’s areas of experience. It seems suspicious that travel accounts tend to be portrayed in this literature by artists’ impressions rather than photographs that might verify accounts. One can also find details of his legendary life in the “L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition” on Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, which holds a large collection of items and information connected to Hubbard’s alleged achievements and travels. Interestingly, at a birthday event in memory of Hubbard in 1997 at FLAG Landbase, it was announced that a ‘new biography’ was to be published in 1999, written by Scientologist Dan Shermann, the writer of the Ron magazines. This is yet to be published.10 According to What Is Scientology? Hubbard’s lifelong quest for spiritual knowledge began when he was six years old and became a ‘blood brother’ to the Blackfoot Indians on the outskirts of Helena, Montana. This was “an honor bestowed on few white men.”11 In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Hubbard set out on his first voyage, journeying through China, Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines and Indonesia. In Beijing he befriended “an insightful Beijing magician who represented the last of the line of 8

Maria Carlson, ‘No Religion Higher Than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 39-40. See also Johanna Petsche, “Gurdjieff and Blavatsky: Western Esoteric Teachers in Parallel,” Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011): 98-115. 9 Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 4. 10 Dorthe Refslund Christensen, “Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology of Scientology’s Founder,” in Controversial New Religions, eds James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 235. 11 The Church of Scientology, What is Scientology? (California: Bridge Publications, 1998), 89.

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Chinese magicians from the court of Kublai Khan,”12 and in the Western Hills of China he became one of the few Americans to gain admittance to Buddhist lamaseries.13 By the age of nineteen “he had travelled more than a quarter of a million miles.”14 Later he embarked on ethnological expeditions to Puerto Rico, where he pioneered the first complete mineralogical survey, and journeyed to Alaska, where he studied the ways of the Tlingit, Haida and Aleut Indians.15 Hubbard claimed to have travelled widely, but the extent of that claim can only fully be appreciated with reference to a bulletin he wrote in 1963, in which he informed readers that he had twice visited Heaven. On his first visit to Heaven he found “the gates … well done, well built…” whereas on the second visit it had gone downhill, “[t]he place is shabby.”16 Altogether Hubbard had apparently made contact with “twenty-one races and cultures”17 on his travels, and in the post-war years he claimed that his experiences with these cultures led him to profound insights into the mysteries of the human mind. He went on to imply, in his poem “The Hymn of Asia” (1956), that he was Maitreya or the Future Buddha, and beseeched others to validate him as a great world teacher of the stature, or even reincarnation, of the Buddha.18 To what extent Hubbard’s travel stories were fabricated is impossible to determine as there is little substantiated evidence for them. Historian of religions Dorthe Refslund Christensen argues that the Church’s narratives about Hubbard only become meaningful if perceived as legend or myth, as the historiography upon which it builds is unable to support any other reading.19 What is clear is that Hubbard used his travels, whether they were real or imaginary, to authenticate his teaching and to explain its formation. This is also true for Blavatsky and Gurdjieff.

12

The Church of Scientology, What is Scientology?, 93. The Church of Scientology, What is Scientology?, 95. 14 The Church of Scientology, What is Scientology?, 99. 15 The Church of Scientology, What is Scientology?, 112, 117. 16 Evans, Cults of Unreason, 28. 17 Friends of Ron, L. Ron Hubbard: A Profile (Los Angeles: Church of Scientology, 1995), 78. 18 Gail M. Harley and John Kieffer, “The Development and Reality of Auditing,” in Scientology, ed. James R. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186. 19 Mikael Rothstein, “Scientology, Scripture and Sacred Tradition,” in The Invention of Sacred Tradition, eds James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19-20. 13

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G. I. Gurdjieff George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was a teacher of esoteric doctrine, who aimed to harmonise people’s three disparate parts or ‘centres’ (intellectual, emotional and physical). This might then elevate them from the two lowest states of consciousness in which most people carry out their lives (the first is sleep at night and the second is the sleep-like condition in which one lives), to higher states of consciousness where people ‘awaken’ and become ‘conscious’. In his second book Meetings With Remarkable Men (henceforth Meetings) Gurdjieff described his youthful years in Russian Armenia and Turkey, and how he set out as a young man to travel the world in search of esoteric knowledge. He attributed his desire for travel to his fascination in the paranormal phenomena he had observed in his youth,20 and the fact that his studies in religion and science had offered no answers to these. He became convinced in the esoteric notion that there is “‘a certain something’ which people formerly knew,”21 preserved in ancient traditions and transmitted through initiates. According to Gurdjieff, his frantic ambition to find knowledge led him on a long journey (biographer James Moore gives the dates 1887 to 1907),22 through Central Asia and the Middle East with a group of companions called ‘Seekers of the Truth’, whose principle was “never to follow the beaten track.”23 He then arrived in Moscow in 1913 with a body of teachings that he promoted as hidden knowledge accessed through initiates on his travels.24 For over thirty-five years, until his death in 1949, he taught groups of pupils, mainly in Paris. 20 For examples of these phenomena see Kathleen R. Speeth, The Gurdjieff Work (California: And/Or Press, 1976), 4. 21 George I. Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002), 87. This is best coupled with Gurdjieff’s later statement that his central goal was to master an understanding of vibration so as to comprehend the meaning of organic life on earth, and in particular, “the aim of human life.” George I. Gurdjieff, The Herald of Coming Good (USA: Sure Fire Press, 1988), 13. 22 James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth A Biography (Brisbane: Element, 1993), 31, 321-323. 23 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 166. 24 Moore gives 1912 as the year Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow. See Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 324. But, pupil A. R. Orage gives 1913 and Beekman Taylor also argues convincingly for 1913. See Paul Beekman Taylor, G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life (The Netherlands: Eureka Editions, 2008), 40-47, 225; C. S. Nott, Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil’s Journal, An Account of Some Years With G. I. Gurdjieff and A. R. Orage in New York and at Fontainebleau-Avon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 1.

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Gurdjieff’s travel accounts read more like an adventure story than biographical fact. They begin with his stumbling upon a pile of ancient Armenian parchments in the ruins of Ani in Armenia that revealed information about the ‘Sarmoung Brotherhood’, which Gurdjieff believed was an esoteric school founded in Babylon around 2500BCE.25 In search of this school he proceeded to Kurdistan and, after discovering a map of ‘pre-sand Egypt’ revealing sacred locations,26 his expedition unfolds. Gurdjieff claims to have travelled extensively, visiting sacred sites, secret monasteries and hidden brotherhoods in Turkey, Crete, Jerusalem, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mecca, India, Tibet, China and Siberia, with the most fruitful period of his journey in the Islamic regions of Bokhara, Merv and Samarkand.27 The ‘Sarmoung Monastery’, which Gurdjieff situates only vaguely as “somewhere in the heart of Asia,”28 is presented as the focal point of his travels. This monastery is popularly considered to be a source of inspiration for his music, Movements and enneagram symbol.29 As no factual evidence exists on the monastery, it was most likely fancifully created as an explanation for the origins of his key teachings. Like Blavatsky and Hubbard, Gurdjieff emphasised his travels through Asia and particularly Tibet, where he apparently underwent initiation (as Blavatsky also claimed to have done) and became a collector of monastic dues for the Dalai Lama, which gave him access to every monastery there.30 Tibet was, and still is, a country steeped in romantic symbolism due to its perceived remoteness. It came to symbolise in the West an almost archetypal place or liminal threshold that transforms people and incorporates them into a new community.31 Most significant to Gurdjieff’s travel stories, however, was the Middle East and his contact with dervish communities. Neither Blavatsky nor Hubbard emphasised the Middle East or Islamic traditions in their travel accounts, preferring to engage mainly with polytheistic and pantheistic traditions. Peter Washington suggests that

25

Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 87-90. Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 99. 27 Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 41, 43. Ouspensky gives a similar account of the locations Gurdjieff visited. See P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1977), 36. 28 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 148. 29 Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 32. 30 Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage, 30-31. 31 See Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 33-34; Petsche, “Gurdjieff and Blavatsky: Western Esoteric Teachers in Parallel,” 98-115. 26

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Islam was excluded from the Theosophical synthesis because it looked too similar to Christianity and Judaism to be sufficiently exotic.32 Gurdjieff’s tales of travel resist verification, and biographers admit that it is impossible to trace his travels with any degree of accuracy.33 In fact, until his entrée into Moscow in 1913 one must rely solely on Gurdjieff’s own accounts in Meetings for information pertaining to his life. Biographer James Moore describes Gurdjieff’s travel accounts as “AutoMythology” and of “the nature of myth,”34 and occult scholar James Webb states that Gurdjieff’s writings “present great problems when they are treated as biographical material [as they are] laden with symbols and allegorical stories … Most of these characters [in Meetings] probably had no historical existence … but a rich supply of autobiographical experience from Gurdjieff’s undoubtedly adventurous past went into their making.”35 These evaluations are unsurprising considering that Gurdjieff himself said to a pupil, “[n]ever believe anything you hear me say. Learn to discriminate between what must be taken literally and what metaphorically.”36 Whether his travels were fact, fiction, or a combination of the two (the latter appears most likely), what is clear is that Gurdjieff framed his teachings as being derived from travel. In 1913, when he arrived on the world stage in Moscow as an unknown teacher, this claim authenticated his teaching and lured Westerners, who were looking to ancient and foreign cultures for spiritual fulfilment and answers to existential questions.

Travelling in the Footsteps of Gurdjieff: My Experiences and Discoveries in Armenia and Turkey In April and May 2011, researching for my doctoral thesis on Gurdjieff, I ventured abroad to trace Gurdjieff’s elusive footsteps. This was necessary, as the few biographies available on Gurdjieff are largely based on Gurdjieff’s own untrustworthy autobiographical accounts, and on the 32

Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, 204. Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 26. 34 Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 2, 319. 35 Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 27-28. See also Sophia Wellbeloved, Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales (New York: Solar Bound Press, 2002), 9, 12-13. Even pupil P. D. Ouspensky emphasises Gurdjieff’s vagueness regarding the details of his travels and questions the truth of some of his stories pertaining to them. See Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 36. 36 Nott, Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil’s Journal, 75. 33

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apologetic, often inaccurate accounts of pupils. Biographers had not themselves travelled to primary source locations. My travels did not resemble the journeys of Blavatsky, Hubbard and Gurdjieff, who described being motivated to travel by a pressing desire to find answers to existential questions in ‘sacred’ locations. The sites I was seeking were not for me ‘sacred’, though they were meaningful in that I had spent some years immersed in literature on and by Gurdjieff. My objective was not to uncover spiritual truths, but instead to unearth new information, while gaining glimpses and impressions of the sights, sounds and surroundings that shaped Gurdjieff’s early life. With my encouraging partner Sebastiaan, I travelled through Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Russia, all significant countries to Gurdjieff’s early life. This journey gave me a great appreciation of the necessity of travel when uncovering information, and in satisfying the need for information to come from the ‘source’, My most fruitful finds were in Gyumri, Armenia, and Kars and Ani in Turkey, and these will form the basis of the following discussion. Gurdjieff’s birthplace of Gyumri, Armenia lies near the border of Turkey and is one of the oldest localities in Armenia, mentioned in Urartian inscriptions from the eighth century BCE. The young Gurdjieff must have been exposed to a colourful range of ethnicities in Gyumri, or ‘Alexandropol’ as it was known in his day, as he described the city as frequented by Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Tartars and Yezidis, or Transcaucasian ‘devilworshippers’.37 My field research for Gyumri began in Sydney where I had discovered a website for the Merkurov Museum in Gyumri, devoted to the sculptures of Gurdjieff’s cousin Sergey Dmitrievich Merkurov (18811952). Merkurov was a prominent sculptor and People’s Artist of the USSR, and was the designer of the three largest monuments of Stalin there. He was considered the greatest Soviet master of post-mortem masks, having made three hundred that included masks of Tolstoy, Lenin, Scriabin, Plekhanov and Gorky. Before his death Merkurov gave his house, originally built in 1858 by his grandfather,38 to the city of Gyumri as a gift with the request that it should serve art.39 It was first opened as a museum in 1984, though between 1988 and 2003 it served as a refuge for

37

Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 65-66. Personal communication with guide at Merkurov Museum, Gyumri, April 28, 2011. 39 “The Merkurov House Museum,” accessed October 25, 2011, http://www.ginosi. com/en/armenia/shirak/gyumri/museums/the-merkurov-house-museum. See also Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 72, 356-357. 38

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people after the disastrous ‘Spitak earthquake’ in December 1988. In 2003 it was renovated by the Lincy Foundation and reopened as a museum.40 Upon arriving in Gyumri on April 28 we visited the Merkurov Museum at 47 Haghtanaki Street, to enquire about information on Gurdjieff. However, the museum guide was hesitant to discuss Gurdjieff, wishing only to show us around the museum. We returned the next day to ask again about Gurdjieff. After numerous promptings the guide wrote a man’s name on a slip of paper and vaguely described the whereabouts of his office. She requested that we not mention her name to him. We eventually found this man, Avetik Melik-Sargsyan, an Armenian historian, scriptwriter and head of the ‘Gurdjieff Centre of Gyumri’, which was formed to undertake original research on the early life of Gurdjieff. MelikSargsyan is involved with seminars and conferences on Gurdjieff, and has organised tours of Gyumri and other nearby regions for Gurdjieff groups around the world, though he explained that most of these groups are not interested in making the trip. Over powerful Armenian coffees MelikSargsyan showed me unpublished documentation and maps relating to Gurdjieff’s early life in Gyumri, and indicated a number of errors in the translation from Armenian to English of Gurdjieff’s texts. The Gurdjieff Centre of Gyumri is working to correct these errors. He also pointed out something amusing in a passage of In Search of the Miraculous, the most popular text on Gurdjieff’s teachings written by pupil P. D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky states that when he visited Gyumri with Gurdjieff he could see from an ancient Armenian cemetery the snow-clad summit of mount Ararat.41 Yet Melik-Sargsyan explained that this mountain is not visible from Gyumri; Ouspensky was referring to Mount Aragats. He suspected that this was one of Gurdjieff’s jokes, as he enjoyed testing people’s naivety. Melik-Sargsyan plans to publish all his research finds, documentation and photos in his upcoming book Gurdjieff in Armenia, in collaboration with Yerevan University. However, he very kindly gave me permission to publish any information he gave me on my visit in this chapter.42 I explained to Melik-Sargsyan that I had hoped to find the general whereabouts of Gurdjieff’s house in Gyumri. The only published description of the location of the house comes from biographer James Moore: the “Cappodocian Greek quarter of Alexandropol on the Russian

40

“The Merkurov House Museum.” Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 341. 42 Email correspondence with Melik-Sargsyan, October 27, 2011. 41

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side of Russo-Turkish border.”43 Melik-Sargsyan knew not only the region but also the very house in which Gurdjieff had lived. He came to this information by way of census records and a building plan, both located in the Yerevan Armenian State archives. The census records showed Gurdjieff’s parents’ names next to the thirty-fifth block in a plan of the city. In addition, birth years were given for all male members of the family, with Gurdjieff’s birth year given as 1880.44 Melik-Sargsyan then examined the building permit to find Gurdjieff’s family’s residence within this block. The permit gave the name of their street, and showed a building plan for the house. Based on information in these documents, MelikSargsyan knew the block, street name, and plan of the house. He then walked down this street and found only one house that matched the house plan. Melik-Sargsyan drove us to the house, which was about two hundred metres from the Merkurov Museum. (This conflicts with pupil Olga de Hartmann’s reference to Mercurov’s house as “next door to Mr Gurdjieff’s parents in Alexandropol,” which is reproduced by Moore).45 The house was located in the ‘Greek district’ of Gyumri, favoured by Greek Orthodox Christians, many of whom immigrated from Chalcedon or modern-day Kadiköy in Istanbul. The name of the street, Ɍɢɯɚɹ ɭɥɢɰɚ (Tikhaya Ulitsa) translates as ‘Quiet Street’. Melik-Sargsyan had visited 43

Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 319. However, there is much controversy over Gurdjieff’s year of birth due to conflicting dates in various documents. Scholars have so far suggested dates ranging from 1866 to 1877, though the most convincing date still seems to be 1866, as argued by James Moore, Thomas C. Daly and Thomas A. G. Daly (who edited the memoirs of the de Hartmanns, who were close pupils of Gurdjieff) academic Paul Beekman Taylor in his recent biography of Gurdjieff, and Gurdjieff’s daughter Dushka Howarth. See T. de Hartmann and O. de Hartmann, Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff, eds T. C. Daly and T. A. G. Daly (London: Arkana Penguin Books, 1992), 260-262, Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 339340; Beekman Taylor, G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life, 17; Dushka Howarth and Jessmin Howarth, It’s Up To Ourselves: A Mother, A Daughter, and Gurdjieff (USA: Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 1998), xv. Gurdjieff clearly fostered this obscurity, as he possessed a number of passports with inconsistent birth dates and, when questioned on a trip to America about the birth date on his passport as it was some time in the future, he stated characteristically, “[n]o mistake… you go arrange” quoted in Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 25. Further, in 1930 Gurdjieff burned a number of personal documents, including passports, possibly to eliminate any hard facts about himself. See Hartmann and Hartmann, Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff, 256. 45 Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 72. 44

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the house many times and knew the elderly residents there, who had no connection to Gurdjieff. When we arrived he explained to the residents in Armenian that we were interested to see their house, and they allowed us to take photographs and to walk inside. The house was small and pokey, with low ceilings and doors. Melik-Sargsyan pointed out that the exterior of the house now consisted of two types of brick; there were rows of old, irregularly shaped bricks at the bottom, which met rows of newer bricks at the top. Where the older bottom rows must have been original to Gurdjieff’s time, a new top layer of bricks was later erected due to the devastation of the earthquake of 1988. One can also see an outline in the new bricks of what was once a door and window. These may have represented the front door and window in Gurdjieff’s time, before the house was restored after the earthquake. Another site we visited in Gyumri, courtesy of Melik-Sargsyan, was the grave of Gurdjieff’s father Giorgios Giorgiades,46 which lies in the oldest graveyard in Gyumri. In Meetings Gurdjieff expressed great reverence for his father,47 and a well known passage reads, Owing to circumstances of my life not dependent on me, I have not personally seen the grave where the body of my dear father lies, and it is unlikely that I will ever be able, in the future, to visit his grave. I therefore, in concluding this chapter devoted to my father, bid any of my sons, whether by blood or in spirit, to seek out, when he has the possibility, this solitary grave, abandoned by force of circumstances ensuing chiefly from that human scourge called the herd instinct, and there to set up a stone with the inscription: “I am thou, thou art I, he is ours, we both are his. So may all be, for our neighbour.”48

Melik-Sargsyan had made many attempts to find the grave, and one day approached the graveyard supervisor. The supervisor referred him to the master stonemason, who was retired and only frequented the cemetery once every few months. However, that very day the master stonemason appeared, and actually remembered that over thirty years earlier he had cut a new stone for a grave of ‘Gurdjieff’, though he knew nothing about this man, or his son. The stonemason had remembered this because a European 46 Webb suggests that Gurdjieff’s father altered the original Greek name ‘Giorgiades’ to the Armenian ‘Gurdjian’ when he began moving in circles in which Armenian was the lingua franca. ‘Gurdjieff’, then, is the Russian form of ‘Gurdjian’. See Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 26. See also Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 340; Beekman Taylor, G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life, 11-13. 47 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 32-49. 48 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 48-49.

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had specially paid him to cut this stone, an unusual situation in the Soviet era. Melik-Sargsyan was led straight to the grave, and now presides over it. The grave is demarcated and protected by a small, locked blue wrought iron fence, and a plaque on the tombstone is inscribed with the words that Gurdjieff requested. The master stonemason died in 2009, and is now buried in the same graveyard.

Kars On May 1 we arrived in the region of Kars in Turkey, where Gurdjieff and his family had relocated from Gyumri. Kars was more financially lucrative, and Gurdjieff’s uncle had taken up business there and persuaded the family to move.49 Biographer James Moore gives 1878 as the year of their move to Kars, when Russia had taken over part of Turkey.50 In Kars Gurdjieff went to school and sang in the cathedral choir. As my doctoral thesis is concerned with Gurdjieff’s relations with music, I wished to find this particular cathedral, which Gurdjieff described in Meetings as the ‘Russian Military Cathedral’ or ‘fortress cathedral’. Melik-Sargsyan had given us an image of the cathedral in which Gurdjieff had sung, but this did not match the photograph of the cathedral given in Moore’s biography.51 After exploring the many mosques of Kars, which were Orthodox Christian churches in Gurdjieff’s day, we discovered that Moore’s photograph was incorrect. We found the structure Moore had photographed, which was the former ‘Apostles’ Church’, now Kumbet Mosque, built between 932 and 937CE by Bagradit King Abbas, with exterior walls of the dome’s vault holding reliefs of the twelve apostles. The church was converted into a mosque in 1064CE when the Seljuks conquered Kars, but was used again as a church between 1878 and 1918 when Kars fell to the Russians. After being temporarily converted into a museum, it was reopened as Kumbet Mosque in 1994.52 This information did not describe a former ‘Russian Military Cathedral’. We also found the cathedral, now ‘Fethiqe Mosque’, depicted in the image given to us by Melik-Sargsyan. This structure was originally a cathedral built on behalf of Alexander Nevisky in the late nineteenth century for Cossack soldiers in Kars after the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877 to 1878.53 It was erected for the Russian army, a fact confirmed to 49

Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 41. Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 320. 51 Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 178-179. 52 Information on a sign outside Kumbet Mosque, May 1, 2011. 53 Information on a sign outside Fethiqe Mosque, May 1, 2011. 50

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my partner by the current imam there. This structure must have been Gurdjieff’s ‘Russian Military Cathedral’ and, although the building was converted into a mosque in 1985, one can still discern original Christian architectural features, such as marks in the exterior indicating crosses. Further, in Meetings Gurdjieff stated that at the time that he attended the cathedral, it was still in the process of being built. He described meeting his comrades almost daily in the temporary bell-tower of the cathedral, where the bells were hung in a makeshift wooden structure with a high roof, like an octagonal sentry-box. Here they smoked, told anecdotes, and prepared for lessons. He states that when the permanent stone bell tower was completed and the bells put in, the Russian government gave the old temporary bell-tower to the new Greek church where it continued to serve as a bell-tower.54 Gurdjieff’s account accords with the fact that the cathedral was built shortly after 1878, because according to Moore, Gurdjieff’s family moved to Kars around 1878 when Russia had taken over part of Turkey.55

Echmiadzin, Sanahin, and Ani We also visited three locations that featured in Gurdjieff’s travel accounts, though we were aware of the controversy surrounding these accounts. In Armenia we visited the city of Echmiadzin, the Vatican of the Armenian Apostolic Church and capital of Armenia from 180 to 340 when Christianity was first adopted by the Armenians. Gurdjieff described going on a pilgrimage there, likening the city to Mecca and Jerusalem, but leaving disappointed, as he had not been able to uncover answers to his existential questions.56 We also visited the tenth-century Sanahin Monastery in Armenia, which we supposed was the monastery of ‘Sanaïne’ where Gurdjieff described spending three months as an acolyte to a priest.57 The name ‘Sanahin’ translates as ‘older than that one’, presumably indicating the claim that it was older than the neighbouring Haghpat Monastery.58 Finally, in Turkey we visited the ruins of Ani, ‘The City of a Thousand and One Churches’, which is an hour’s drive from Kars. Ani was once the capital of medieval Armenia but flourished for less than a century before being conquered in 1045 by the Byzantines and then by the Seljuks, 54

Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 201-202. Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 320. 56 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 83-85. 57 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 79. 58 John Noble, Michael Kohn and Danielle Systermans, Georgia Armenia & Azerbaijan (USA: Lonely Planet Publications, 2008), 201. 55

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Georgians and Mongols until it was partially destroyed by an earthquake.59 Gurdjieff described living among the ruins of Ani and one day, while excavating in an underground passage, discovering ancient Armenian parchments that led him to the secret ‘Sarmoung Brotherhood’.60 At around the time that Gurdjieff would have visited Ani (Moore gives the date 1886),61 the first archaeological excavations and building repairs were being carried out there. Thus it is possible that Gurdjieff was involved with the excavations of Ani. However, in 1921 the Turkish National Assembly ordered that the monuments of Ani be demolished, and these excavations and building repairs were destroyed.

Field Research Method Summarised My field research objective was to uncover original data that could supplement my doctoral thesis, and enrich my own understanding of the enigmatic figure of Gurdjieff. Research first involved finding information online, in Gurdjieff’s writings, and in biographies on Gurdjieff, that might serve as ‘leads’ to further information. As I had no contacts in the locations I was to visit prior to my trip, it was not possible to organise formal interviews or appointments. Instead, I mapped out a general plan for the trip that allowed for flexibility and the possibility of staying longer or shorter periods of time in areas depending on how productive they proved to be. Directly after visiting each region on my trip, I typed field notes that took account of the context of the day and all the details remembered. When I returned to Sydney this data was analysed and in some cases assessed through ‘triangulation’, or a cross-examination with other forms of data. To confirm some of the finer details of data collected in Gyumri, follow up emails were made to Melik-Sargsyan.

Conclusion To conclude, with focus on the travel stories of G. I. Gurdjieff it was argued that travel stories played a pivotal role in the lives, and the hagiographical renderings of those lives, of Western spiritual teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the case for H. P. Blavatsky and L. Ron Hubbard whose travel stories, like those of 59

“Ani, Ancient Capital of Armenia,” accessed September 25, 2011, http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/go/East/Kars/Ani.html. 60 Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men, 87-90. 61 Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, 321.

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Gurdjieff, tapped into the West’s contemporary fascination with ‘the East’ and with ancient cultures, and also legitimised their teachings with a sense of authority and authenticity. A number of parallels between these three accounts were outlined, for example each figure claimed to have been motivated to travel by their disillusionment with the modern world and with Western religions, and all described seeking a universal principle or source that underlies all religions. Later in life each figure defined their teachings as a synthesis of Western science and Eastern religious and philosophical ideas, attributing the latter to the experiences and knowledge acquired on their travels to the East. Gurdjieff’s tales of travel, like those of Blavatsky and Hubbard, resist verification, and biographers admit that it is impossible to trace his travels with any degree of accuracy. What is significant, however, is that Gurdjieff framed his teachings as being derived from travel. In 1913, when he arrived on the world stage in Moscow as an unknown teacher, this claim authenticated his teaching and lured Westerners, who were looking to ancient and foreign cultures for spiritual fulfilment and answers to existential questions. This examination was followed by an account of my own travels to foreign lands in 2011 in search of much-needed firsthand information on the life of the elusive Gurdjieff. My travels did not resemble those of Gurdjieff, Blavatsky or Hubbard, who all described a pressing desire to discover answers to existential questions in ‘sacred’ locations. The sites I sought were not for me ‘sacred’, though they were personally meaningful because I had spent some years researching Gurdjieff, and it was satisfying to physically explore locations central to his life and travel accounts, regardless of the truth or falsity of the latter. I had hoped to gain new impressions and insights into Gurdjieff and his background, but had not expected to uncover unpublished facts, which is what occurred in Gyumri and Kars. It was a rather strange, reflexive occurrence, where the real tracing of the ‘false’ steps of Gurdjieff yielded new data to correct and supplement the historical record. Through my travels I gained insight into the significance of travel when attempting to unearth information, as it satisfies one’s innate need for this information to come from ‘the source’.

Bibliography “Ani, Ancient Capital of Armenia.” Accessed September 25, 2011. http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/go/East/Kars/Ani.html. Beekman Taylor, Paul. Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium. Maine: Weiser Books, 2001. —. G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life. The Netherlands: Eureka Editions, 2008.

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Bellman, Jonathon. “Introduction.” In The Exotic in Western Music, edited by Jonathon Bellman, ix-xiii. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Carlson, Maria. ‘No Religion Higher Than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Christensen, Dorthe Refslund. “Inventing L. Ron Hubbard: On the Construction and Maintenance of the Hagiographic Mythology of Scientology’s Founder.” In Controversial New Religions, edited by James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, 227-258. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Church of Scientology, The. What is Scientology?. California: Bridge Publications, 1998. de Hartmann, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff, edited by T. C. Daly and T. A. G. Daly. London: Arkana Penguin Books, 1992. Evans, Christopher. Cults of Unreason. London: Harrap, 1973. Friends of Ron. L. Ron Hubbard: A Profile. Los Angeles: Church of Scientology, 1995. Gurdjieff, George I. The Herald of Coming Good. USA: Sure Fire Press, 1988. —. Meetings With Remarkable Men. New York: Penguin Compass, 2002. Harley, Gail M. and John Kieffer, “The Development and Reality of Auditing.” In Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis, 183-208. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Howarth, Dushka and Jessmin Howarth, It’s Up To Ourselves: A Mother, A Daughter, and Gurdjieff. USA: Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 1998. MacKenzie, John M. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Moore, James. Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth A Biography. Brisbane: Element, 1993. Noble, John, Michael Kohn, and Danielle Systermans. Georgia Armenia & Azerbaijan. USA: Lonely Planet Publications, 2008. Nott, C. S. Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil’s Journal, An Account of Some Years With G. I. Gurdjieff and A. R. Orage in New York and at Fontainebleau-Avon. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Ouspensky, P. D. In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1977. Partridge, Christopher H. “Truth Authority and Epistemological Individualism in New Age Thought.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 14, no. 1 (1999): 77-95.

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Petsche, Johanna. “Gurdjieff and Blavatsky: Western Esoteric Teachers in Parallel.” Literature & Aesthetics 21, no. 1 (2011): 98-115. Rawlinson, Andrew. The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions. Illinois: Open Court, 1997. Reitman, Janet. Inside Scientology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Rothstein, Mikael. “Hagiography and Text in the Aetherius Society: Aspects of the Social Construction of a Religious Leader.” In New Religions in a Postmodern World, edited by Mikael Rothstein and Reender Kranenborg, 165-193. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2003. —.“Scientology, Scripture and Sacred Tradition.” In The Invention of Sacred Tradition, edited by James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, 18-37. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Speeth, Kathleen R. The Gurdjieff Work. California: And/Or Press, 1976. Storr, Anthony. Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus. London: Harper Collins, 1997. “The Merkurov House Museum.” Accessed October 25, 2011. http://www.ginosi.com/en/armenia/shirak/gyumri/museums/themerkurov-house-museum. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1993. Webb, James. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and Their Followers. UK: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Wellbeloved, Sophia. Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales. New York: Solar Bound Press, 2002.



CHAPTER NINE THE KOPAN EXPERIENCE AS TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCE: AN EXPLORATION OF PARTICIPANT RESPONSES TO THE TEN-DAY INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM COURSE AT KOPAN MONASTERY, NEPAL GLENYS EDDY

Recent decades have witnessed a growth in the amount of scholarly literature available about the relationship between contemporary spiritual life and travel motivated by spiritual or religious concerns.1 In recent decades also, the number of meditation retreat centres has increased worldwide, and according to Michael Stausberg, the international spiritual retreat business has been growing since the 1980s.2 Stausberg also lists retreat participation as one of the common purposes of religious tourism,3 itself one of the various forms of contemporary spiritual life that are a result of the increased leisure time available to us in our modern life.4 Many western tourists and backpackers travelling through Asia have included a Buddhist meditation retreat in their list of things to do, and as Stausberg notes, some tourists who do not travel for religious reasons, develop an interest in religion, spirituality, or meditation after exposure to

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For instance, see Boris Vukonic, Tourism and Religion (Oxford: Pergamon, 1996); Alex Norman, Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society (London and New York: Continuum, 2011); Michael Stausberg, Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters, (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 2 Stausberg, Religion and Tourism, 133. 3 Stausberg, Religion and Tourism, 14. 4 Vukonic, Tourism and Religion, 4.



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religious locations or activity.5 Many Buddhist centres and monasteries in Asia cater for the needs of Western travellers by offering courses in Buddhism, a variety of meditation retreats, or both. Kopan Monastery on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, affiliated with the worldwide Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), runs a variety of courses and retreats to cater for the religious needs of its affiliates and interested travellers. The ten-day Introduction to Buddhism course, held several times a year, provides individuals with the opportunity to learn about the foundational Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist teachings and practices, in a semi-retreat setting. As part of research conducted for my doctoral thesis, I attended the course held between September and October in 2004, as a participant observer. My decision to undertake this was prompted by the positive responses to Kopan Monastery and its activities, from several of my interview respondents from Vajrayana Institute, an FPMT centre in Sydney, Australia.6 In this chapter I describe the ten-day introductory course in order to convey both the participant’s experience of such ‘sampling’ of a religious tradition’s offerings in this context, and how the FPMT facilitates experimental participation in its beliefs and practices in order to access the worldview underlying its curriculum. Accordingly, the concern of this chapter is not with those aspects of travel that are more typically the focus of religious and leisure tourism studies, such as the nature of place or the experience of journeying per se, but with the nature of the introductory course as an example of the religious activities on offer to travellers in Asia. Discussion of the responses of course participants in conjunction with the consideration of what it is possible to gain from these courses, will aid understanding of the religious tourist’s experience of sampling such activities, designed to meet a variety of needs that scholars have identified with both contemporary travel and contemporary Western spiritual practice, including: knowledge and meaning-acquisition, authenticity/authentic experience, pragmatic self-help and well-being, and self-knowledge and self-transformation.7

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Stausberg, Religion and Tourism, 15, 88. See Glenys Eddy, Becoming Buddhist: Experiences of Socialization and SelfTransformation in Two Australian Buddhist Centres (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2012), 128. 7 Norman, Spiritual Tourism, 57, 104, 112; Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, “Aproaches to the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism,” in Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, eds Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 2, 5. 6



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Kopan Monastery is one of many FPMT centres and monasteries in Asia under the directorship of Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. The FPMT belongs to the school of Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism, which bases its scriptural authority in the writings of Lama Tsong-kha-pa, the founder of the Gelugpa Order, who drew on the work of Lama Atisha8 and the earlier Kadampa Order. Kopan Monastery is about three kilometres northeast of Boudhanath, and situated on a hill overlooking the outskirts of Kathmandu, with Boudhanath Stupa and its surrounds clearly visible. Kopan is a teaching and retreat centre, and held to be a special place by FPMT members. The monastery is inhabited by sangha members, teachers and administration personnel, kitchen and cleaning staff, visitors and Buddhist practitioners, but plays host to them as two virtually separate cultures: the Nepalese and Tibetan sangha, and the Western visitors, practitioners and adherents of the FPMT. The monastery runs several types of course to cater for the differing needs of western travellers and western Tibetan Buddhists.9 The ten-day Introduction to Buddhism course, which is held several times a year, between March and October, is the activity for the tourist or individual new to Buddhism. The one month Lam Rim meditation course held every November, follows the Tibetan Gelugpa tradition of Buddhism and is based on Lama Tsong-kha-pa’s ‘Graduated Path to Enlightenment’,10 which is the foundational text for the FPMT’s entire teaching program, in both its sutric and tantric aspects. This includes teachings and meditation. The annual three-month Vajrasattva retreat beginning in mid January follows a strict schedule of four meditation sessions a day (no teachings). The retreat is open to students who have previously attended the one month Lam Rim course at Kopan, or have done a similar course, such as the FPMT Discovering Buddhism course, and have received the Vajrasattva Initiation with a commitment to do the retreat. This is a tantric initiation, for which the initiate must have previously ‘taken refuge’, the formal Buddhist commitment ceremony. Another type of course is between nine days and two weeks’ duration, and focuses on a specific topic or practice, for instance, the Medicine Buddha Sadhana.

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John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1995), 418. 9 For information about Kopan’s courses see “Kopan Monastery,” accessed April 4, 2013 http://kopanmonastery.com/program.html. 10 Tsong-kha-pa, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, ed. Guy Newland (New York: Snow Lion Publications, vol. 1, 2000; vol. 3, 2002; vol. 2, 2004).



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The purpose of my doctoral research was to explore and articulate the nature of religious change and commitment undergone by Westerners committing to the Buddhist path.11 This involved fieldwork with two local Buddhist centres: the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre, a Vipassana centre, and Vajrayana Institute, affiliated with the FPMT. After a few months of participant observation and interview, it was evident that a number of theoretical approaches were applicable to the interpretation of my data, namely, religious conversion conceived as religious resocialization,12 as a self-transformation or change in the self-concept,13 and as a trend toward treating religions ‘less as systems of truth than as efforts to discover a ground of being that orients and orders experience more generally’.14 Chief among these was the experimental motif, one of John Lofland and Norman Skonovd’s six conversion motifs—intellectual, mystical, experimental, affectional, revivalist, and coercive—which are conceived as salient thematic elements and key experiences combined with objective situations. Lofland and Skonovd define motif experience as ‘those aspects of a conversion which are most memorable and orienting to the person undergoing personal transformation’. The experimental motif consists of ‘a pragmatic, show me attitude’, learning to act like a convert, withholding judgment for a considerable length of time after taking up the life style of the fully-committed participant. There is a relatively low level of social pressure and transformation of identity, behaviour, and worldview takes place over a relatively prolonged period, from months to years. They hold the experimental motif to operate in new age-type or alternative groups, where the prospective convert is encouraged to take an experimental attitude toward the group’s ritual and organizational activities.15 Data obtained from fieldwork strongly indicated the

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See Eddy, Becoming Buddhist. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966), 144; T. Pilarzyk, “Conversion and Alternation Processes in the Youth Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Religious Traditions,” Pacific Sociological Review 21, no. 4 (1978): 379-405. 13 C. Staples and A. Mauss, “Conversion or Commitment? A Reassessment of the Snow and Machalek Approach to the Study of Conversion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 2 (1987): 137; Peter Stromberg, Language and Self-transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18. 14 Max Heirich, “Change of Heart: A Test of Some Widely Held Theories about Religious Conversion,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 3 (1977): 674. 15 John Lofland and Norman Skonovd, “Conversion Motifs,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20, no. 4 (1981): 373-385. 12



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experimental motif to be a viable interpretive tool for the experiences of affiliates of both centres, who began their exploration as religious seekers, willingly undergoing a process of trying out and evaluating belief structures and practices.16 Most of my respondents had reached the point of commitment to Buddhism, and had either made the commitment privately, or stated it publicly by taking refuge.17 Scholars have observed the emphasis on personal experience and selftransformation in the phenomena of spiritual tourism and religious seekerhood, which having their historical roots in the counterculture of the 1960s,18 began to be studied in the 1970s. Lofland and Skonovd drew on Robert Balch and David Taylor’s research in the 1970s, with the Human Individual Metamorphosis group (later to be known as Heaven’s Gate).19 The recognition of the active role played by the religious seeker in their own process of exploration and change20 is reflected in definitions of religious conversion to be employed in scholarly research during the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, Richard Travisano’s definition of conversion as a “radical reorganization of identity, meaning, and life,” and Max Heirich’s as “the process of changing a sense of root reality.”21 The view of the active participant, the religious seeker who experiments with religious beliefs and practices in order to effect identity change, can be seen to be part of a broader cultural trend, “a new spirituality in postmodernity that values personal experience as a key to religious meaningfulness.”22 This

 16

See Eddy, Becoming Buddhist, 18-20. See Christopher Lamb, “Conversion as a Process Leading to Enlightenment: The Buddhist Perspective,” in Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies, eds C. Lamb and M. D. Bryant (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), 75-88; See Eddy, Becoming Buddhist, 184-185, for a discussion of the significance of the refuge ceremony for affiliates of Vajrayana Institute, an FPMT centre in Sydney, Australia. 18 Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 61. 19 Robert Balch and David Taylor, “Seekers and Saucers: The Role of the Cultic Milieu in Joining a UFO Cult,” in Conversion Careers: In and Out of the New Religions, ed. James. T. Richardson (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978), 4364. 20 James T. Richardson, “Conversion Careers,” Society 17, no. 3 (1980): 49. 21 Richard Travisano, “Alternation and Conversion as Qualitatively Different Transformations,” in Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction (Xerox College Publishing, 1970), 600-601; Heirich, Change of Heart, 673-674. 22 William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi, “Epilogue: Pilgrimage for a New Millenium,” in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, eds William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi (Westport 17



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new spirituality extends to spiritually-oriented travel.23 Many scholars have observed the potential of travel to effect transformation in the individual through engagement with new experiences,24 knowledgeacquisition, and enhancement.25 In accordance with the observation that people travel for a combination of motivations,26 the religious or spiritual tourist is generally conceived as the mid-point, on a continuum of travel type, between the extremes of pilgrimage and tourism.27 Although Nancy L. Frey suggests that the categories of pilgrimage and tourism are better seen as similar forms of human mobility as opposed to a binary opposition,28 a general consensus appears to exist about the definition of the spiritual tourist as someone who

 and London: Greenwood, 2002), 208. 23 Luigi Tomasi, “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism Via the Journey,” in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, eds William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi (Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002), 14; Norman, Spiritual Tourism. 24 J. Harrison, “A Personalized Journey: Tourism and Individuality,” in Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction, eds Vered Amit and Noel Dyck (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006), 110; Bob Hodge, “The Goddess Tour: Spiritual Tourism/Post-Modern Pilgrimage in Search of Atlantis,” in Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, eds Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 27, 31; Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, “Introduction: the Anthropology of Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), xxxvi. 25 Valene Smith, “Introduction: The Quest in Guest,” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 5; Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 14. Also see Dubisch and Winkelman, The Anthropology of Pilgrimage, xxxvi, who note that cross-cultural comparisons of pilgrimage illustrate the transformational element of pilgrimage as a phenomenon. 26 H. Robinson, A Geography of Tourism (London: MacDonald and Evans, 1976), 28-34; Ellen Badone, “Crossing Boundaries: Exploring the Borderlands of Ethnography, Tourism and Pilgrimage,” in Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, eds Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 180. 27 Smith, “Introduction: The Quest in Guest,” 5; Farooq Haq, Ho Yin Wong and John Jackson, “Applying Ansoff’s Growth Strategy Matrix to Consumer Segments and Typologies in Spiritual Tourism,” (paper presented at The Eighth International Business Research Conference, Dubai, UAE, November 27-28, 2008). 28 Nancy L. Frey, “Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and Its Aftermaths,” in Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, eds Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 89-90.



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travels to places out of their usual environment, with the intention of acquiring spiritual meaning and growth, and for a combination of religious and secular concerns.29 Some of my interview respondents recounted their experiences at other FPMT centres in Australia and overseas, chief among them was Kopan. Of especial interest to me were reports about the ten-day introductory course, which attracted a lot of travellers and allowed them to explore Buddhism, and to ‘ask a lot of questions’. It was clear that the introductory course at Kopan could be a fruitful source of data on the early stage of engagement with the FPMT worldview for many westerners. The ten-day introductory course gives an introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by way of an overview of the Lam Rim, teaches meditation skills and includes a two-day single pointed and analytical meditation retreat. The courses are led by a Swedish nun, Ani Karin, a senior sangha member, and include daily teachings given by a Tibetan lama with the aid of a translator. As a result of my own participation in the course in September and October 2004, I gained insight into the way in which the course structure and content facilitated the experimental approach to learning, by allowing the participant to ‘experience being Buddhist’, to ‘try it out’. The course is structured so that participants are active, not passive recipients of information; one can have the experience of being Buddhist. The course combines teachings, discussion, meditation and ritual. All teachings are explained and all action is performed from the perspective of the Tibetan Buddhist worldview, which facilitates the mutual reinforcement of conceptual, practical and experiential dimensions of religious activity. There were twenty-six course participants: ten women and sixteen men. Ages ranged from twenty to thirty-four years, with the exception of myself, at forty-seven. Seven were from the United States, two were from Australia (of which I was one), one from Denmark, three from England, four from Germany, three from Holland, one from Italy, one from Israel, two from Russia, one from Slovenia, and one from Switzerland. Most were university educated. Of the twenty-five participants (excluding myself), I conducted interviews with eight. This small number was due to the limitations imposed by the semi-retreat style setting. While we were free to socially engage, except for the prescribed periods of silence, we had undertaken not to enter the rooms of members of the opposite sex, and accordingly, I did not interview any men during the course itself. On the last day, people dispersed quickly after lunch and departed for other

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Haq et al., “Applying Ansoff’s Growth Strategy Matrix, 2-3; Norman, Spiritual Tourism.”



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activities. While I had obtained participant consent forms from thirteen course participants, eight interviews were conducted, two were incomplete, and three who had undertaken to answer my questions by email never did. I therefore relied heavily on my participant observation notes. I also interviewed three resident Western nuns. Because they had taken ordination and had therefore made their commitment, I considered their data appropriate for inclusion in the set of data I had collected at Vajrayana Institute, for use in my expansion of Lofland and Skonovd’s experimental model. The course officially began on the evening of Sunday, September 19, 2004 with an introductory session, which included a discussion of why people were doing the course, and what they hoped to gain from it. A passage from my participant observation notes, dated Monday, September 20, later proved to be significant. The course began last night. There was a general introduction to the course at 5.30 after tea, followed by a session after dinner where everybody introduced themselves. Many people had read books on Buddhism, some had tried or practised other forms of meditation, but it appeared that most were new to Tibetan Buddhism. Two had tried Zen, maybe three Vipassana. Most had been travelling through India and Nepal for some time. When asked why they were doing the course, some said “to find out more about myself and Buddhism.” Their conversation conveyed the sense that finding themselves and Buddhism were taken to be interconnected, that learning about Buddhism would help them to learn something about themselves, that Buddhism might be the vehicle for their self-exploration. It struck me at the time that some participants were hoping that ‘something’ would open up for them, while others were looking for a more definite sense of direction.

The introductory session continued with an introduction to Kopan Monastery and its founders, Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa, and their journey out of Tibet and into India. Ani Karin outlined some basics of Buddhism, and a few preliminary facts about the mind, the main point of which was that ‘what stops the mind from being calm is attachment to things’. The purpose of meditation was explained as to develop positive qualities of the mind and to let go of negative qualities; Ani Karin expanded on this. Dharma was explained as the method for doing this. We were given an outline of the five lay precepts that were to be kept on the retreat, and an explanation of the reason for maintaining periods of silence: that introspection was not possible without it as the mind is easily distracted by other things. The evening finished with an introduction to meditation, consisting of an outline of concentration and analytical



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meditation—maintaining a focus on one object and contemplating an aspect of wisdom such as impermanence or the nature of mind respectively—as the two types of meditation, an outline of meditation technique, and finally some breathing meditation. The daily programme, which began at 6.30 AM and finished at 9 PM, consisted of sessions of meditation, teachings and discussion groups. Our day seemed to begin and end at the same time as that of the resident monks, which began at sunrise and ended at about 9.30 PM with evening prayer.30 However, for the period of the course, apart from some interaction with the monks at mealtimes and with those who had administrative roles, the two groups were virtually independent of each other. The participants were expected to attend all sessions. Half of each day, from 10 PM until after lunch the next day, was to be in silence as a course discipline. For the first seven days, the program consisted of teachings and meditation practice, and the last two days were to be a twoday meditation retreat, with seven meditation sessions a day. The schedule was placed up on the gompa door so that everyone had access to it. Schedule for Sunday 19 to Sunday 26 September 5.45 Morning bell 6.00-6.30 Tea 6.30-7.30 Meditation 7.30 Breakfast 9.15-11.30 Teachings 12.00-2.00 Lunch 2.00-3.00 Discussion Groups 3.00-3.30 Break 3.30-5.00 Teachings with Geshe 5.00-6.00 Tea 6.00-6.45 Meditation 6.45-8.00 Dinner 8.00-9.00 Question and Answer, Mantra recitation and meditation Retreat Schedule: Monday 27 to Wednesday 29 September 5.45 Morning bell 6.00-6.30 Tea 6.30-7.30 Meditation Session 7.30 Breakfast 9.15-9.30 Mental Preparation and Walking Meditation 9.30-10.15 Meditation

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Ann M. Heubner and Andrew C. Garrod, “Moral Reasoning Among Tibetan Monks: A Study of Buddhist Adolescents and Young Adults in Nepal,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 24, no. 2 (1993): 173.



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For the next week we followed the schedule above, with each day beginning with breathing meditation and ending with analytical meditations,31 and teachings and discussion groups during the middle of the day. Teachings introduced us to key Buddhist concepts, for instance, the nature of mind and mental states, including the nature of negative mental states (the three poisons: attachment, anger and delusion); the cause of desire as ego-grasping; how and why we purify the mind; the four powers of purification: regret, reliance, remedy, determination not to repeat the negative action; the mental factors and the aggregates; karma and merit accrual including an explanation of the wheel of life and the realms; the doctrine of dependent origination; the notion of emptiness as no inherent characteristic or identity; the Buddha-nature as our potential for complete liberation; the Bodhisattva and the six perfections.32 There was also some discussion of the subtle body, as it is understood in Tibetan Buddhism. The content of teachings was reinforced by the nature of the meditations and contemplative ritual practices such as prayers and prostrations; using body, speech and mind, the purpose of their performance was to overcome negative states of mind such as pride.33 Breathing meditations were practised as both traditional concentration or calm-abiding meditation, involving focussing on the in-and-out movement of the breath, and as analytical meditation, in this instance the purpose of which was to note periods of distraction in order to become more aware of one’s mental state. Most often the concentration was used to settle the mind in preparation for analytical meditation, which would involve contemplation of some aspect of samsaric existence such as the nature of



31 See Kathleen McDonald, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide (Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1984), for an outline of the meditations practised at FPMT centres. 32 See Tsong-kha-pa, Graduated Path to Enlightenment, all three volumes, for discussion of these doctrines. 33 For an explanation of the FPMT’s prayers and pujas see “Kopan Monastery – What is a puja?,” accessed April 4, 2013, http://kopanmonastery.com/pujas.html.



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mind, cast in the form of questions such as ‘where does the mind exist? Inside or outside the body?’ Other meditations took the form of visualisations of the Buddha, Chenrezig or Tara. All sessions were accompanied by traditional prayers, for instance, the Refuge and Bodhicitta prayer, and the prayer in praise of the Buddha. The expectation that participants would behave as if they had taken the five lay precepts, to abstain from killing or harming living beings, stealing, false speech, taking intoxicants and sexual misconduct, was to introduce us to the purpose and practice of ethical training of body, speech and mind. In this way, we were introduced to the doctrinal, practical, ethical and experiential dimensions of Tibetan Buddhist activity. Nearly all participants’ comments and questions during the course, and responses to the question of what they gained from the course, involved responses to the Buddhist concepts and doctrines as opposed to the meditations and rituals. No-one reported to me any significant meditation experience, or shifts of awareness or perspective resulting in any transformative experience. By comparison, most Vajrayana Institute affiliates reported having strong responses to a teaching on first encounter, where they could connect the import of the teaching to their life experience in a deeply personal way. With time, they learned how the meditation practices related to the teachings, began to organize key doctrinal concepts into an interpretive framework, and to develop a deeper and more committed orientation towards internalization of the meaning system. During the course, I noticed that the style of questioning was analytical and from the third-person perspective, as opposed to the deductive reasoning style and the first-person perspective adopted by the Vajrayana Institute affiliate. This is exemplified by the nature of responses, expressed in the afternoon discussion group, to the teachings about karma, given earlier that morning (Tuesday, September 21, 2004). I had recorded in my participant observation notes: Today’s topic was karma, which followed on from this morning’s teaching. This generated a lot of discussion, mainly in the form of questions. Many of the questions and comments, both in the discussion group and in the earlier morning teachings, reflected a desire for an explanation of karma that was ‘concrete’, infallible, and to do with action rather than the nature of mind; to do with physical events rather than with mental phenomena. Some of the questions were posed as scenarios. For example, “if someone tells me to kill 100 people or else he will kill my family and friends, what should I do?” and, “if we do something with the best of intention, say giving medicine to people believing it to be beneficial, and we later find out that the medicine was harmful, will the karma be positive or negative? What will the nature of the karma be?”



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The nature of the questions being asked by course participants, where they appear to be trying to reconcile the tenets of the Buddhist worldview with their own understandings of and responses to the world, and appear to be responding to perceived contradictions in Ani Karin’s teachings and explanations, was more direct than the style of response I had encountered in dharma centres in Sydney. At Vajrayana Institute the style of participants’ vocalized reasoning is more deductive as already indicated, and the style of interchange with sangha members more deferential, quite likely due to the potential to cultivate relationships within a more familiar social and authority structure. These differences may be simply attributed to the amount of time available—ten days as opposed to several months or longer—for familiarization with the ideas and expected behaviours. The aim of my research was to extend the experimental motif beyond modelling the means of approach to religious change, to delineate the stages involved in the entire process of engagement and commitment to Buddhism as a potential end-point.34 Based on my data analysis, I proposed a model of commitment consisting of three cumulative stages: 1) engagement and apprehension, 2) comprehension, and 3) commitment.35 The first two stages, apprehension and comprehension, refer to the process of turning acquired knowledge into meaning, but whereas the former is concerned with learning the meanings of Buddhist terms, comprehension is the stage of organizing these meanings into an interpretive framework, to come to understand the interrelationships between a set of discrete concepts. As practitioners become more familiar with the meaning-system, and more convinced of its validity, their exploratory orientation becomes more intense, until for most, they reach a decision either that they will commit to Buddhism, or that they already have. Instrumental in reaching the commitment phase, is the recognition that one has changed as a result of one’s personal application of the Buddhist principles and practices. Although one respondent had entered the commitment phase and took refuge at the end of the course, there was variation among participants in terms of both the level of prior knowledge of Buddhism and the approach to learning: from ‘collecting’ experiences, to toe-dipping, to the preconversion confirmation of this respondent. For the most part, participants were sampling the experiences on offer, in the process of engaging with the material and apprehending the meanings of Buddhist ideas, and required more time for the assimilation of the material. In a general sense,

 34

See Lofland and Skonovd, “Conversion Motifs,” 383. They note that their motifs do not elucidate stages of change, only how change is approached by the potential convert. 35 Eddy, Becoming Buddhist, 18-20.



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the approach of the course participants fits the profile of Lofland and Skonovd’s experimental motif. Many of the questions about Buddhist doctrines and concepts exhibited the ‘show me’, ‘prove to me’ approach as originally identified by Lofland and Skonovd.36 However, the profile of the religious tourist, as described by Haq, Wong and Jackson, as one who combines sacred and secular concerns and enjoys a knowledge-based decision making position,37 appears to correspond to the orientation of the majority of course participants. This becomes clearer on consideration of the way in which their participation in the course related to their previous travel experience and future travel plans, and to their reason for being in Kathmandu. On this basis, I categorized the participants into three groups. Two of my respondents, who had come straight from their home country in Europe in order to attend the course, had a specific purpose for coming to Kopan Monastery. The first, a German from a Catholic background, was trying out the FPMT framework for herself. Her partner was already a devoted adherent of the FPMT, and in trying it for herself by attending the introductory course, she intended to make sure that she wanted to follow the Buddhist path for herself, and not just because of her partner’s orientation. In so doing, she was also attempting to evaluate whether her new Buddhist orientation would interfere or clash with her Catholic affiliation. This participant was one of four to take refuge at the end of the course. Another was a Christian by religious affiliation, and a Religious Studies schoolteacher in her native Denmark. Her exploration of Buddhism was to both learn more about another tradition, and to test her commitment to Christianity. By the end of the course, she had made a clear decision to stay with her Christian affiliation. For several of the participants, the course was part of their backpacking working holiday, which had included a stay of several months in Kathmandu, working in schools or orphanages, working with Nepalese children. Here, they were exposed to the Nepalese culture and in many cases, the seeming poverty of the children’s families. Many people report undergoing a culture shock on visiting countries such as India and Nepal, part of which is their response to the poverty they encounter and compare to the living standards of their own western country. By contrast with what they had observed in Kathmandu and for many, in other Asian cities, Kopan was a place of privileged comfort in the way Luigi Tomasi’s description suggests, of hotels as ‘places of privileged comfort for the

 36 37



Lofland and Skonovd, “Conversion Motifs”; Eddy, Becoming Buddhist, 10. Haq et al., “Applying Ansoff’s Growth Strategy Matrix,” 3.

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pilgrim’ near pilgrim routes.38 Kopan is this for the Western traveller. Several blogs about Kopan on the Internet speak about the tranquillity and beautiful views, and one writer spoke about coming away from the introductory course feeling more peaceful.39 Many participants had been working in Nepal, some in Kathmandhu in orphanages or schools, and had been affected by the lower living standards. For these participants, coming to Kopan Monastery evoked no culture shock as they had already experienced one. For others, the course was part of their tourist experience more generally, which had included travel to several countries, sight-seeing, trekking, mountain-climbing and other activities. Two in particular were suggestive of a ‘New Age’ orientation to the course and the experience of being at Kopan through their style of expression and preoccupation. One in particular, constantly referred to his previous spiritual experiences and past-life experiences. In interview, another talked about being on a journey of self-exploration, employing metaphors for her experience of personal change, such as ‘peeling the layers of an onion’. On being asked to, she did not seem to be able to articulate her experience any more clearly than this, and did not seem to feel the need to do so. Her responses expressed a style of thought I have often associated with the New Age, where it is assumed that one is constantly on a journey of self-discovery, in the same way that, for this group generally, courses such as the ‘Introduction to Buddhism’ seemed to be ‘part of what you do’ when travelling. They were interested in the experience, but seemingly not engrossed in it. The participants in this group also seemed to fit the profile of the spiritual tourist, who while experiencing ‘the impulse of the desire to travel in order to satisfy the need to know both mundane reality and celestial mystery’,40 also experiences a wavering engagement with the sacred, an oscillation between the sacred and the secular/mundane.41 This was expressed in conversations between course participants, who would frequently discuss what food and drink they were going to consume in Kathmandu once the course was over, as if such consumption was a reaction to the realization

 38

Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 14. For instance, see “Kopan Monastery Kathmandu,” TravelBlog.org, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Kathmandu/Boudhanath/blog526054.html; “Meditative Peace at Kopan Monastery,” TravelBlog.org, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Nepal/Kathmandu/blog-219337.html. 40 Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 1. 41 Frey, “Stories of the Return,” 93. I refer to Frey’s comments about the travellers on the pilgrim route to Santiago, whom she notes, “have moments of identifying with” the pilgrim and then with the tourist. 39



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that the course, and therefore the restraints placed upon their behaviour, was coming to an end. By these comments I do not mean to convey the sense that these participants’ responses were in any way superficial or inauthentic compared to those of the small number who were more definite in their decision-making as an outcome of course-participation. In the earlier quote from my field notes, I referred to my observation that all participants had said that they were doing the course “to find out more about myself and Buddhism,” and had seemed to express the desire for something to open up for them. Tomasi’s reference to Erik Cohen’s phenomenology of tourist experiences, which “assumes that the modern individual seeks authenticity in different ways,”42 suggests the search for authenticity to be an influential motivator for travel. As Ellen Badone suggests, our notion of authenticity and its identification with the ‘Other’ may be localized in other places or historical periods. Badone sees authenticity as a culturally and historically situated ideal, an ideal that is believed to exist by individuals or groups of individuals in specific social settings.43 Another source of this ideal may be the religious books and texts that inspire people to travel, and to explore other religious traditions. This is suggested by Richard Quinney, who, as a Western reader of Eastern religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, experiences the sense of “daily life’ being ‘infused with the wisdom from another place.”44 Pilgrimage has come to be seen as both a traditional practice and an expression of contemporary spirituality, including as a style of travel experience.45 Tomasi notes that pilgrimage, as a journey undertaken for religious purposes, is a journey toward an “elsewhere” with utopian features.46 Dean MacCannell maintains that “for moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere, in other historical periods and other cultures.”47 This sense of authenticity located in the mystic East,

 42

Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 17; Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centers: Concentric and Excentric,” Annals of Tourism Research, 19, no. 1 (1992): 33-50. 43 Badone, “Crossing Boundaries,” 182. 44 Richard Quinney, “Kathmandu and Home Again: A Cautionary Tale,” in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, eds William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi (Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002), 195. 45 Dubisch and Winkelman, “Introduction,” ix; Swatos and Tomasi, “Epilogue,” 208. 46 Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 3. 47 Dean MacCannell. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 3.



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may indicate the source of the religious seekerhood exhibited by many of the course participants, who had tried other Buddhist courses and retreats during their travel in Asia, and spoke about future plans to do so. When I responded to one participant who had expressed the desire to do a Vipassana retreat while in Asia, “you could do one when you come to Sydney, we have two Vipassana centres nearby,” she replied emphatically, “but I want to do one in Asia.” I remember thinking at that time that her desire sprang from some sense that a Vipassana retreat in Asia as opposed to in a western country, would provide a more authentic experience.

Image: Some of the course participants in front of the stupa at Kopan Monastery (image courtesy of Glenys Eddy)

Badone and Tomasi see the transformative aspect of travel as a modern phenomenon.48 Conversely, it seems that authenticity is sought in the premodern, capable of being accessed by visiting historical sites, or by journeying to the mystic East. While visits to historical sites can provide a sense of historical connection with past events, in the way that Tomasi suggests in his description of “lay pilgrims following ancient routes of

 48



Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 14; Badone, “Crossing Boundaries,” 181.

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knowledge,” and Bob Hodge in his description of the experience of spiritual tourism as one which “allows knowledge, emotion, and spirituality to meet and interact,” and where “the premodern can be felt as a powerful presence,” it seems for these Western tourists, that the authentic and the premodern are sought via a journey to the cultural other.49 Quinney notes that as westerners, we are drawn to the exotic, to the otherness of the Third World.50 This involves a journey away from the westerner’s homeland, to the societal centre of the cultural other, as a symbol of Eastern spirituality. While not as well-known, nor as significant a site as Bodhghaya which is home to the Mahabodhi Temple, and the bodhi tree held to mark the location of Buddha’s enlightenment,51 both Kopan Monastery and Boudhanath Stupa on the outskirts of Kathmandu are popular tourist destinations. Religious centres such as Kopan Monastery fulfil a variety of traveller’s needs in that they provide both touristic elements, such as the beautiful views and snapshots of ‘the everyday life’ of another culture. MacCannell refers to the idea of authenticity of a tourist attraction.52 Both he and John Urry refer to the way in which windows into the lives of others, the observed, can be constructed for “the tourist gaze.”53 My encounter with the ‘other’ at Kopan Monastery involved brief periods of contact with the monks, and with the nuns from the nearby Kachoe Ghakyil Nunnery. This occurred through observing pujas and listening to the monks chanting in the main gompa before the course began, hearing the younger monks chant the scriptures as part of their daily lessons, observing the older monks debate in the traditional Tibetan style of making a doctrinal point and then clapping loudly for emphasis, and observing the nuns being taught a dance in praise of Tara by some American women. These events were engaging and enjoyable, but aspects of a Buddhist other available to me only as sounds and images, as I had virtually no interaction with the Kopan residents. On several occasions during the course I reflected that the teachings, practices, the symbols and colours in the thankas decorating the walls of the gompa, the colours, were the same as at Vajrayana Institute. Only the sounds and images particular to the location were different. Because of my association with Vajrayana

 49

Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 15; Hodge, “The Goddess Tour,” 31. Quinney, “Kathmandu and Home Again,” 195. 51 David Geary, “Destination Enlightenment: Branding Buddhism and Spiritual Tourism in Bodhgaya, Bihar,” Anthropology Today 24, no. 3 (2008): 11. 52 MacCannell, The Tourist, 14. 53 John Urry. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990), 9. 50



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Institute, I was aware that in terms of ‘new’ religious knowledge, one could find at home what one was seeking overseas. However, for most of the course participants, these windows into the lives of the Kopan residents, and the knowledge of Buddhism gained from the course, were the expressions of the authentic available to them. I have suggested two theoretical approaches to understanding the orientation of individuals who participate in courses such as Introduction to Buddhism. The first is that of the participant-experimenter in the first stage of socialization into a belief-system, that of apprehension wherein the student begins to organize the learnt meaning of Buddhist concepts into an interpretive framework as part of the ‘trying-it-out to see’ process. The second is that of the spiritual tourist as defined by many scholars of travel and tourism. Each of the courses on offer at Kopan Monastery, including the annual one-month Lam Rim and the three-month Vajrasattva retreat, have the potential to lead the participant to a threshold, to the beginning of a deeper level of religious participation, in that they facilitate deeper engagement with the beliefs, practices and experiences of the FPMT’s worldview. From this they can be seen to possess the initiatory quality as ‘to a threshold’, that Victor and Edith Turner ascribe to pilgrimage,54 and the characteristic of hardship associated with pilgrimages55 insofar as restrictions are placed upon behaviour, social interaction and food consumption, in terms of the type of food eaten (vegetarian) and the set meal times. As such, they represent a different type of travel experience from secular tourism. A strong characteristic shared by these two positions is their means of acquisition of a knowledge base. For the affiliates of both Vajrayana Institute and Kopan Monastery, this happens in the same way in that they are taught the same doctrines and practices, but the environments are different in terms of the level of social engagement possible given the short time of the course at Kopan.

 54

Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 14-15; also see Dubisch and Winkelman, “Introduction,” xiii. 55 Tomasi, “Homo Viator,” 5; Dubisch and Winkelman, “Introduction,” xxxiii.



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Bibliography Badone, Ellen. “Crossing Boundaries: Exploring the Borderlands of Ethnography, Tourism and Pilgrimage.” In Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, 180-190. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Badone, Ellen and Sharon Roseman. “Aproaches to the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism.” In Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, 1-23. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Balch, Robert and David Taylor. “Seekers and Saucers: The Role of the Cultic Milieu in Joining a UFO Cult.” In Conversion Careers: In and Out of the New Religions, edited by James. T. Richardson, 43-64. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966. Cohen, Erik. “Pilgrimage Centers: Concentric and Excentric.” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 33-50. Dubisch, Jill, and Michael Winkelman. “Introduction: the Anthropology of Pilgrimage.” In Pilgrimage and Healing, edited by Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, xi-xxxvi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. Eddy, Glenys. Becoming Buddhist: Experiences of Socialization and SelfTransformation in Two Australian Buddhist Centres. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2012. Frey, Nancy L. “Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and Its Aftermaths.” In Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, 89-109. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Geary, David. “Destination Enlightenment: Branding Buddhism and Spiritual Tourism in Bodhgaya, Bihar.” Anthropology Today 24, no. 3 (2008): 11-14. Haq, Farooq, Ho Yin Wong and John Jackson. “Applying Ansoff’s Growth Strategy Matrix to Consumer Segments and Typologies in Spiritual Tourism.” Paper presented at The Eighth International Business Research Conference, Dubai, UAE, November 27-28, 2008. Harrison, Julia. “A Personalized Journey: Tourism and Individuality.” In Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction, edited by



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Vered Amit and Noel Dyck, 110-130. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006. Heelas, Paul. Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Heubner, Ann M. and Andrew C. Garrod. “Moral Reasoning Among Tibetan Monks: A Study of Buddhist Adolescents and Young Adults in Nepal.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 24, no. 2 (1993): 167185. Hodge, Bob. “The Goddess Tour: Spiritual Tourism/Post-Modern Pilgrimage in Search of Atlantis.” In Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, edited by Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, 27-40. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Heirich, Max. “Change of Heart: A Test of Some Widely Held Theories about Religious Conversion.” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 3 (1977): 653-680. Lamb, Christopher. “Conversion as a Process Leading to Enlightenment: The Buddhist Perspective.” In Religious Conversion: Contemporary Practices and Controversies, edited by C. Lamb and M. D. Bryant, 7588. London and New York: Cassell, 1999. Lofland, John and Norman Skonovd. “Conversion Motifs.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20, no. 4 (1981): 373-385. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. McDonald, Kathleen. How to Meditate: A Practical Guide. Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1984. Norman, Alex. Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. Powers, John. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1995. Pilarzyk, T. “Conversion and Alternation Processes in the Youth Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Religious Traditions.” Pacific Sociological Review 21, no. 4 (1978): 379-405. Quinney, Richard. “Kathmandu and Home Again: A Cautionary Tale.” In From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, edited by William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi, 193-206. Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002. Richardson, James T. “Conversion Careers.” Society 17, no. 3 (1980): 4750. Robinson, H. A Geography of Tourism. London: MacDonald and Evans, 1976.



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Smith, Valene. “Introduction: The Quest in Guest.” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 1-17. Staples, C. and A. Mauss. “Conversion or Commitment? A Reassessment of the Snow and Machalek Approach to the Study of Conversion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 2 (1987): 133-147. Stausberg, Michael. Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Stromberg, Peter. Language and Self-transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Swatos, William H. and Luigi Tomasi. “Epilogue: Pilgrimage for a New Millenium.” In From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, edited by William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi, 207-208. Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002. Tomasi, Luigi. “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism Via the Journey.” In From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, edited by William H. Swatos and Luigi Tomasi, 1-24. Westport and London: Greenwood, 2002. Tsong-kha-pa. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, volume 1, edited by Guy Newland, translated by The Lam Rim Chen Mo Translation Committee. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2000. —. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, volume 3, edited by Guy Newland, translated by The Lam Rim Chen Mo Translation Committee. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2002. —. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, volume 2, edited by Guy Newland, translated by The Lam Rim Chen Mo Translation Committee. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2004. Richard Travisano, “Alternation and Conversion as Qualitatively Different Transformations.” In Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction, edited by G. P. Stone and H. A. Faberman, 594-606. Waltham Massachusetts: Xerox College Publishing, 1970. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Vukonic, Boris. Tourism and Religion. Oxford: Pergamon, 1996.



CHAPTER TEN CROSSING BOUNDARIES: TRAVEL AND MUSLIM WOMEN LISA WORTHINGTON

Introduction The process of travel and of crossing boundaries and frontiers has long been a source of dispute and negotiation for Muslim women. Religion and culture often combine to create limited closed spaces where women are permitted to dwell and interact with others in a public sense. Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi’s research deals closely with the concept of gender in Islam and more specifically examines the idea of women crossing a variety of boundaries in Muslim societies and communities.1 Her work shares many parallels with the data gathered for the case study featured in this chapter based on Sakinah’s (pseudonym) travel experiences. A series of ethnographic interviews were undertaken with Sakinah a twenty-eight year-old Muslim woman from Sydney on her experiences while travelling. Sakinah grew up in Singapore and immigrated to Australia at twelve years of age and recently spent two years living in the Middle East. Her experience links strongly to themes in Mernissi’s research, particularly those of crossing frontiers and public and private spaces for Muslim women. In her sociological novel Dreams of Trespass Mernissi emphasises the importance of crossing boundaries: “As a child in a harem I instinctively knew that to live is to open closed doors. To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing.”2 Along this line of thought crossing frontiers and travel in general is still viewed by women as a way to reclaim power and personal freedom. 1

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, (New York: Perseus Books, 1995); Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (Washington D.C.: Washington Square Press, 2001). 2 Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 3.

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Mernissi was born in Fez in 1940 into a harem, a traditional household with locked gateways that women were not intended to open.3 At the age of nineteen she crossed one of the most significant frontiers of her life when she left Fez for Rabat to enroll at Mohammed V University.4 Later she studied political science at the Sorbonne and then received her doctorate from Brandeis University. Mernissi’s grandmother Yasmina encouraged this transgression and negotiation of boundaries through much of the Sufi wisdom she passed down to her. Yasmina saw the harem as a prison, a place where women were banned from leaving, so she glorified travel and considered the chance to traverse boundaries as a hallowed opportunity, “the best way to shed powerlessness.”5 Similarly, Sakinah also used travel as a positive tool to avail herself of knowledge and new experiences. The data from this chapter was drawn from interviews that were undertaken as part of my Masters thesis on Sydney Muslim women and their public sphere activities. I had at least four lengthy interviews with Sakinah between 2009 and 2011 and as she is also a close friend, I had the opportunity to observe and interact with her in varied social settings. My intent is to mirror the complexity of travel experiences and lived realities of one particular self-identified Muslim woman. Here I refrain from imposing a Eurocentric linear narrative and organise some of her thoughts around themed postcards. A version of this chapter was presented at the Philosophies of Travel conference at the University of Sydney in 2011 and featured four themed postcard artworks from Moroccan artist Ouida that were originally created to summarise Mernissi’s Erasmus Prize speech. To date there seems to be a large gap in the literature concerning Muslim women and travel and as such there are not many titles to refer to. My interviews with Sakinah were always lively and talkative. We covered themes including Islamic law and women’s travel, fear and insecurity, gender rights personal growth, and legitimising travel. On one occasion Sakinah was particularly excited to remove her hijab (head covering) and show me her new hairstyle as soon as we were in a private place. Here boundaries were strictly drawn: the divide between the public and the private was strongly emphasised. As such the material we were able to discuss was quite private in nature due to the established trust between us. This rapport was integral to collecting data on this underresearched topic – Muslim women and travel. There has been a long history of Muslim women travelers, however, 3

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 2-3; Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 1. Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 4. 5 Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 2. 4

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not many of their journeys have been documented through travel writing thus establishing a gender travel divide. For instance, Roxanne L. Euben contrasts the exalted (and embellished) nature of the Rihla of Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta (1304-1368CE) with that the travel writing of Omani princess Sayyida Salme (Emily Ruete) (1844-1924CE).6 While Ruete described her own travel writing as “sketches of my life” and a “memoir” written for the benefit of her children,7 while Ibn Battuta wrote his story at the behest of the sultan of Morocco.8 Their travel experiences were also wildly different. Ibn Battuta left on his excursion for the Hajj with the blessing of his family and his journey was fuelled by “wanderlust, spiritual fulfillment, desire for knowledge, sex.”9 Salme, however, fled her home in haste, undercover, and without the blessing of her family to seek refuge in Germany. Euben’s example points to the gendered nature of Muslim travel: Salme’s memoir is “haunted by the domestic,” while according to Ibn Battuta’s travel accounts he “left a girl in every port.”10 It seems many of the boundaries faced by Muslim women are created through an uneven distribution of power. As Euben explains: Given the frequency with which the specter of sexual violence has been invoked to secure the gates of female domesticity, such anxieties might seem to reflect concern for the physical vulnerabilities of women travelers.11

However, it appears many of the fears held by men have much less to do with actual physical harm and more to do with fear of “moral corruption and cultural corrosion.”12 For example, Muhammed Karim Khan ties the increased journeys of Iranian women in the late 1800s to the “infection” of Iranian women with the aspiration to seek independence, travel and dress as they please. This was a development he saw as a sign of social demise: Can any Muslim allow the incompetent women to have the affairs in their 6

Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 156-164. 7 Emily Ruete and Emeri J. van-Donzel, An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993), 144. See also Emily Ruete, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009). 8 Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 48. 9 Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 163. 10 Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 162. 11 Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 135. 12 Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore, 135.

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Crossing Boundaries: Travel and Muslim Women hands so that they could go wherever they choose, sit with whomever they desire, leave the house whenever they wish?13

Khan’s imagining of a deluge of ‘disasters’ brought about by women’s freedom actually highlights the importance of ensuring women’s mobility. Gender in Muslim societies is often spatially organised and bounded creating a distinct difference between the inside and outside. Boundaries in this Muslim sense cannot be reduced to the very specific notion of territorial borders, even though each concept is used to create social spaces.14 Katherine Pratt Ewing describes Fatima Mernissi’s autobiography as “organised around the spatial image of a gendered ‘sacred frontier’ characterised by limits, immobilities, and silences that stands in contrast to a fantasy of flight.”15 These functional definitions of boundaries transcend both my data and Mernissi’s work and are central here to understanding and conceptualising the state of Muslim women’s travel.

Postcard One – Adab – Power is Communication Adab in Arabic means both, the established standard of moral behavior and also the discipline of self-teaching it requires.16 Caliph al Mansur (714-775CE), the second Abbasid Caliph, who established Baghdad in 750CE, launched a large translation effort of key books from Persian and Sanskrit; The Book of Sindbad was among them.17 They saw treating the stranger equitably as the initial step in communicating productively with him or her. It was thanks to their reliance on adab as a strategy that the Abbasid caliphs succeeded in expanding travel, trade and the exchange of ideas, and managed to produce and maintain the ‘Empire of Islam’, which at that time extended from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Kashgar in China.18 In my interviews with Sakinah she strongly identified travel with 13

Muhammad Khan Kirmani quoted in Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “The Persian Gaze and Women of the Occident,” South Asia Bulletin 11, nos 1-2 (1991), 1-2, 27. 14 Katherine Pratt Ewing, “Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities,” Ethos 26, no. 2 (1998): 262-267. 15 Pratt Ewing, “Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries,” 263. 16 Fatima Mernissi, “Adab or Allying with the Stranger as the Strategy to Win the Globalised Planet,” Quaderns de e Mediterrania 14 (2010): 99-103. 17 Brent Peeples, trans., 1001 Arabian Nights: The Adventures of Sinbad, vol. 2 (New York: Zenescope, 2011). 18 See Mernissi, “Adab or Allying with the Stranger;” Artemis Verlag, The Life and Works of JƗhiz, trans. D. M. Hawke (Los Angeles: The University of

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the process of knowledge gathering. She described her experience as a spiritual and personal renewal centered on knowledge: I wanted to study my religion, I wanted to study Arabic, I wanted to and also on a personal level I wanted to start fresh. I felt it would give me the chance to learn all these things I wanted to learn and to give me a fresh start.

Sakinah also exemplified a reliance on a similar adab strategy to that which appeared in The Book of Sinbad involving communicating successfully with strangers and adding their ideas to her own through new experiences.19 When discussing travel as a single Muslim woman Sakinah felt there was a need to legitimise her travel, especially upon her return to Australia. She described a long proud tradition of female scholarship in Islam and mentioned that for this to occur there was a need for women to be able to travel to teach and spread the knowledge. At times this would have meant solitary travel for the single Muslim woman, not something many contemporary Muslims would be familiar or comfortable with. Sakinah described this as “a misunderstanding or misapplication (of Islam), it is sort of deliberately trying to cut the wings that women have.” Similar themes are also present in Fatima Mernissi’s work: For my grandmother Yasmina, the harem was a cruel institution that sharply curtailed her rights, starting with “the right to travel and discover Allah’s beautiful and complicated planet,” as she put it.20

Travel, or the crossing of boundaries and frontiers has long been a right that Muslim women have had to negotiate and bargain for. For those such as the young Mernissi these boundaries were as limited as living in a closed harem community. For others these boundaries may expand to include education, employment and international travel. During our interviews Sakinah also described a process where she learned from strangers while travelling, a practice of adding their experiences to her own. This was particularly noticeable to her during her visit to Egypt. In Egypt she learnt from the good humour of the Egyptian people. She explained that the Egyptians have undergone many adverse situations and what helps them through is their sense of humour. In this way she added part of their way of thinking to her own. We also see that California Press, 1969). 19 Peepels, 1001 Arabian Nights. 20 Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 8.

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the importance of learning from strangers features prominently in Mernissi’s scholarship. Mernissi places an emphasis on the importance of understanding the stranger or the other: You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have.21

Being able to understand and interact beneficially with strangers became an important aspect of Islamic civilisations and culture during the early Islamic period. Many of these principles are also important in Sufi traditions. Sakinah linked the practice of learning and personal growth to most of the relationships she had while living in Jordan, saying, You know whether it was people I spoke to like my teachers and my friends, the friends I made or the people I watched, like the ordinary sellers in the streets, the generosity of people that was something that I definitely learnt.

Sakinah placed a strong currency or capital on everyday interactions. Some of her most often recalled memories related to ordinary everyday experiences and interactions. Her concept of travel relied heavily on the experiences of learning and personal interaction. Travel was linked strongly with spiritual renewal, understanding of the other and power. In his book Sacred Drift Peter Lamborn Wilson mentions a Sufi saint Ali Hujwiri (990-1077CE) who set out guidelines for Sufi wayfarers seeking spiritual travel. The permitted purposes of travel were to seek knowledge, to visit a venerable person, to visit a holy site, to derive instruction, and to visit the tomb of a saint.22 Many of these prescriptions fit closely with Sakinah’s reasons for traveling.

Postcard Two – Travel as Self-discovery In his writings al-JƗhiz (781-896CE) described a strategy whereby one emancipates oneself through learning from strangers or by “adding the stranger’s brain to one’s own.”23 This is known as the adab strategy. This 21

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 3. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1993), 147. 23 Mernissi, “Adab or Allying with the Stranger,” 100. and Mohammed Didaoui, “Translation and Textual Incongruity: The Background for Al-JƗhiz’s Rhetorical 22

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line of thinking suggests the multiple benefits of travel and being open to new ideas. In this sense travel brings about self-renewal and improvement. The key element of JƗhiz’s strategy was to travel to distant locations, to communicate with strangers and to strengthen relations by exchanging goods with him/her.24 Movement was seen to create prosperity while immobility would bring about stagnation. This concept was reinforced by the words of poet Abu Tammam (788-845CE) who announced to the streets of Baghdad, “Travel, it is the only way to renew your self!.”25 Here the concept of travel is connected to a ‘quasi-biological’ need to renew oneself and was explained centuries later by the Sufis who associated movement with life and inactivity with mortality. The poet At-Tinnisi (born in Egypt in the eleventh century) entertained and captivated his audiences by reminding them what they gain from traveling to strange lands: “Travel! Trips provide you with five advantages: entertainment, earning one’s living, self-discipline, knowledge and the opportunity to be in the company of splendid creatures.”26 Yet, for many Muslim women there is an anxiety about crossing boundaries and frontiers. During our interviews Sakinah recalled her feelings before leaving Sydney for Jordan in 2009. There is definitely an element of nervousness, like, oh I’m leaving behind everyone I know, everything I’ve worked very hard to achieve and so on, because it’s a very physical uprooting of myself.

Upon her departure there was a feeling of disconnection from the familiar for Sakinah; all the people she had been taught to rely upon were no longer immediately available to her. This insecurity is also paralleled in Mernissi’s work. Even after many years of study abroad and frequent travel she finds herself fearful of crossing boarders and boundaries. If by chance you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers you would think me self confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers.27 Work,” in Similarity and Difference in Translation, eds Stefano Arduini and Robert Hodgson (New York: The American Bible Society, 2008), 427. 24 James Montgomery, “Speech and Nature: al-JƗhiz, KitƗb al-BayƗn wa-al-tabyƯn 2.175–207, Part 3,” Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 2 (2009): 107-125. 25 Quoted in Hussein Nasr, Adab Ar-Rihla (The Art of Travelling) (Cairo: Achariqa al Misriya Linachr, 1991), 16. 26 Quoted in Nasr, Adab Ar-Rihla (the Art of Travelling), 16. 27 Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West, 1.

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Both Mernissi and Sakinah display an uncertainty that may not be initially apparent, especially to strangers. Internally there is a fear of crossing boarders or boundaries, a fear of the unknown, but in order to complete their journeys and attain their desired outcomes, they must both appear outwardly self confident. Sakinah points out that in her opinion this vulnerability while traveling alone as a woman supports the implementation of certain Islamic legal rulings. She says, I think definitely being a woman and traveling does add a level of vulnerability compared to, for example, men traveling. I mean this is why there is a fiqh (legal) ruling of [a woman] traveling with a male guardian (wali).

There has been a great amount of debate surrounding the legal rulings governing Muslim women’s travel. Even in modern times with the introduction of air travel many jurists uphold that a woman should not travel the equivalent of a journey equal to a day and a night by camel or more than fourty-eight miles (77.249 kilometers) without a male guardian present.28 This has major implications for Muslim women’s freedom of movement. Upon her arrival to Amman Sakinah was surrounded with the unfamiliar. This presented her with the opportunity to observe everything as if it was new. Sometimes the environment or place can also be described as a ‘stranger’ with attendant unknown possibilities. Sakinah recalls, I arrived in the height of summer and I remember thinking wow this is really hot and why are there so many pictures of the king everywhere? We are in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this is not a democracy, and it’s a different thing you know. I remember thinking like wow there are no clouds in the sky. It’s really hot. All the white buildings, the concrete buildings, they looked exactly the same, you know. There were herds of sheep being moved around the neighborhood like it was completely normal.

This concept of a place as a ‘stranger’ or the unknown is important to the 28 Information on legal rulings are now often disseminated by websites. See “Islamopedia Online,” accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.islamopediaonline.org/ fatwa/european-council-fatwa-and-research-question-women-traveling-alone-notun-marriageable-kin; “The Fiqh of Travel,” Qibla, accessed April 4, 2013, http://spa.qibla.com/issue_view.asp?id=1003.

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concept of travel and the crossing of boundaries. Sakinah has also linked it to buildings and other parts of the landscape: When I went to Syria I learnt about the sheer beauty of Islamic architecture. Like when we saw the Umayyad Masjid (mosque) it was amazing. We were like subhanallah (glorious is God) we were like blown away by the adhan (call to prayer) we were like this is very, very different, we haven’t heard that before. We were there for ishaa (night) prayer and we saw the minaret that Imam Al Ghazali (1058-1111CE) had written his work and it was like subhanallah. So that was, like, a stranger in terms of like architecture [sic].

The aptitude for adaptation in the forms of social interactions and surroundings has been particularly notable both in Mernissi’s and Sakinah’s experiences. Travel was an excellent means of learning to adapt to and communicate with strangers and the ability to utilise these skills was seen by Al JƗhiz and Abu Tammam as both useful and an excellent mode of self renewal. Mernissi recognises the importance of movement and writes in Dreams of Trespass: I thought that Samir was very clever and wished that I could travel like he did. It was his wandering around with Uncle and Father which made him so clever. I knew that if you moved around, your mind worked faster, because you were constantly seeing new things that you had to respond to.29

This sentiment is paralleled in Sakinah’s experiences. The process of relocation allowed her the opportunity to learn things and have experiences that she had never had before: I mean, not only did I learn fiqh (legal rulings) and tafsir (exegesis) and aqeedah (dogma or belief) and Arabic and all the traditional sciences like tasawuf (self improvement) and so on, I learnt about people, I learnt about different cultures, I learnt about the self reliance it takes to run a house… and you know being nervous about doing things but doing them anyway.

Sakinah’s time in Jordan allowed her space to learn and develop, but further than this, presented her with challenges that had to be overcome. Even new tasks as simple as living alone and keeping a house were to be learned from and conquered. Strangers also became sources of good,

29

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 199.

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sources of knowledge, instead of people that Sakinah had to isolate herself from. The strangers instead became a possibility. We have to learn from strangers you know. Then after a while they are not strangers anymore because they become your teachers they become your friends and so on.

Sakinah spoke a lot about the people that she met along the way. Flat mates that began as strangers and quickly became friends, colleagues she struggled constantly to befriend and get along with and teachers who later became her mentors.

Postcard Three - Individual Responsibility Every man is a hostage of his own deeds Travel in Islamic literature often links back to a sense of community responsibility. The General Survey of Roads and Kingdoms by Persian official Ibn Khurdadbih (820-893CE) supported Muslim travelers with cultural, geographical and astronomical information to plan their journeys.30 This allowed individuals to understand social expectations in a variety of communities. This connects individual responsibility back to a responsibility to one’s own community. Community perceptions were very important to Sakinah. People had varied reactions to Sakinah’s travel experiences. By and large people were very happy that she had the experience because she did not do anything against the (fiqh) rules as she had her brothers to accompany her. She explained her journey was acceptable in her community, because I didn’t rock the boat so to speak I didn’t create ripples that were unpleasant because I went for knowledge I got to study and then I came back.

When I asked Sakinah what ultimately allowed her to make and complete her journey with minimal scrutiny she pointed out the importance and respect for seeking knowledge in her community.

30

Mernissi, “Adab or Allying with the Stranger,” 101; Carl Schoy, “The Geography of the Moslems of the Middle Ages,” Geographical Review 14, no. 2 (1924), 260.

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So I think it boils down the knowledge... and there’s a difference between I want to travel somewhere far, far away with no mahram (guardian) because I’m just bored, because I feel like it. As opposed to I’m traveling because I need to study my knowledge so that I can fulfill my responsibilities as a Muslim, so that I come back to the West and teach it.

There was an apparent process of legitimisation when any crossing of boundaries occurred. Travelling for the sake of gaining knowledge protected the honour of the family. Muslim women travelling alone for pleasure risk their reputation and that of their family. Further, in the work of Sufi philosopher Ibn cArabi (1165-1240CE) voyaging (safar), for instance, was to be separated from the concepts of wayfaring (sulûk) and wandering (siyâha). The wayfarer wanders freely on the highways and byways of this life, while the voyager has a destination and a purpose.31 While on the subject of community, Sakinah mentioned the differences between the public versus the private sphere in the East and the West. Her life in the Middle East was much more private and community structures allowed her to remain in more private settings. She explained that in the West such a secluded life would not allow her to reach out to others. In Jordan it was a very private space in a sense where, it was a very private space because women, even though we sought knowledge and so on, we didn’t interact with anyone outside our community and it was a given the women would display certain behaviour. It was something that was often talked about, that a woman’s beauty was in her hiddeness [sic], we wore niqab [face covering]. Now that I’m in the West, you know, I’m not able to function if I stay in my house and don’t do anything else. In the West there’s a need for me to bring this knowledge and to share it.

In Jordan even the supermarket becomes a primarily male dominated domain and as such women opt for activities that allow them more privacy and separation from men. That has lead to questions around the existence of a woman’s space or differing public and private sphere dynamics. Public space in the West was a topic of hot contention. Sakinah said that many men in her community believed that a woman’s space is in the home but she had objections to this line of thinking, arguing, I think if a man believes that a woman’s place is inside the home and nowhere else, then naturally he would reject any concept of a woman 31

Angela Jaffray, “Unveiling from the Effects of the Voyages,” Muhyiddin Ibn cArabi Society, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/ alisfar_introduction.html.

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For more conservative Muslim families the concept of women joining the workforce is still not entirely accepted. This has broad implications for Muslim women being able to travel when some women are negotiating boundaries far smaller than state lines or national boarders. Obviously this is also important when it comes to career and educational choice for Muslim women. For many who are negotiating on these fronts, travel is inaccessible. Sakinah labeled travel in terms of knowledge versus pleasure. She pointed out that her journey was only considered acceptable because of her intention to study, to gain knowledge and bring that knowledge home to Sydney to teach. I know my family was totally fine with me leaving the house to go and to study, to go and work, and eventually to go to Jordan, and you know, but I’m assuming that they would not be ok with me going to a ski trip in Switzerland with nobody accompanying me. It’s a matter of priority and what is important to individual families – it’s one thing what Islam says, what the Prophet says, then people read and interpret.

Yet again we see formal learning is prioritised. This also leaves us with further questions surrounding the interpretation of Islam particularly when it comes to gender and family law. The various interpretations of the Islamic scriptures and the influence of culture can result in many varied experiences for Muslim women. Sakinah commented about this cultural difference in gendered expectations: It’s this Malay concept where families work together to make things work. Yes the mother raises the children and does all the domestic work and so on but there is a place for her outside as well, I’m getting the impression that depending on what culture you come from there are different boundaries for women.

Postcard Four – The Effect of Travelling The effect of traveling is also highlighted in al-Ghazzali’s (1058-1111) Revival of the Knowledge of Religion. These two excerpts demonstrate the

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importance of travel from an Islamic perspective: “Whosoever goes forth from his own house in search of science will find himself until his return upon the road of God,” and, “for whosoever follows a highway in search of science God will render more easy the road to Paradise.”32 Sakinah described travel as an integral part of her personal growth and development. It seemed that her identity was linked to her journey. I left everything behind and traveled and learnt for almost two years and I’ve come back and I feel I’m the person that God intended me to be like at last. And I needed to travel to reach this point of togetherness and, even though ’til today I’m still negotiating my space, still trying to figure out where I fit, what my identity is, travelling has been such a critical part of that. I do feel that if it wasn’t for my experiences travelling and the good bits and the bad bits I would not be who I am today and … it is impossible for me to have learnt what I have learnt without having traveled.

As this journey was such an important step in Sakinah’s life it was important to her that those around her accepted it. There was still a strong sense of community responsibility. People who are on that same page respect my journey, they embrace it and they’re excited for me and they want to learn and they want to benefit from what I have to share. But those who are not on that page, those who are very differently inclined they think women belong in the home. They don’t really want to hear it.

This again raises important issues around space and women’s public activity. There is currently a great deal of debate about the essential function of Muslim women working in their communities as doctors, nurses, teachers and psychologists. Progressive Islamic movements have been very vocal about the guarantee of human rights for all, men and women alike. These movements are particularly critical of the absence of Muslim women in spiritual and public life.

Conclusion We can see from Sakinah’s discussion that many factors shaped her ability to undertake travel. Firstly, her intention was very important. The distinction was drawn between travel for pleasure and travel in order to obtain traditional religious knowledge. This relates strongly to the next 32

Quoted in Schoy, “The Geography of the Moslems of the Middle Ages,” 259.

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factor, legitimising travel. Here Sakinah is careful to frame her travel within the acceptable confines of Islamic fiqh law. She mentions that during any of her actual transits that one of her brothers was present to accompany her on the journey. Many Muslims still consider it unlawful for a Muslim woman to travel long distances without a male family member present. Besides this Sakinah still needed to present a valid reason for leaving her family home for such a long period of time. In this case travel was legitimised in terms of the need to learn from religious teachers who are not accessible in Australia and to then benefit the Sydney Muslim community by transmitting this knowledge to them upon return. Further, her presence amongst a highly religious Sufi community during most of her two years away guarantees her honour and good behaviour were upheld. For more than a generation, the public space in Islam has been an area of dispute in which activists and militants alike attempt to challenge traditional interpretative practices and gain authority to speak for Islam, particularly to communicate its “social interests and political agendas.”33 The rising emphasis on the private sphere, and the vital concern for protecting that which is private (female space) from public intruders (unrelated men) have at times acquired unparalleled momentum. What distinguished the public from the private sphere unquestionably depends upon a “complex set of cultural, political and economic factors,” and as a result of the interaction between such factors the line of separation certainly has to shift. From among many aspects, religion is distinct as one of the most significant components in demarcating the two spheres. The distinction between public and private has strong implications for Muslim women’s travel. The division of public and private space was also a concern for Sakinah on her journey and contributed to her ability to travel. The community in which she spent most of her time living in while in Jordan practiced gender segregation. Unrelated men and women did not usually interact in public or private spaces and to symbolically ensure this most women wore the niqab (face veil) when outside their homes. In this case, even when men and women were present in the same space, such as a classroom, the identity of individual women was concealed behind their Islamic dress. This allowed them to maintain some element of private space, even on the street. This division of public and private also shares similarities with the 33 Nilüfer Göle, “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 173-190.

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male – female frontier of division of space. The conceptualisation of the social interaction between genders varies widely from the situation in the Western world. In Muslim societies and communities the social space is constructed much more rigidly hence also creating in many cases designated men’s spaces and women’s spaces. Sakinah touched on this a number of times during our interviews. She described Jordan as a place where social roles, and by extension their places of performance, were gender specified. The supermarket became a male domain. Women would not venture to these places if they had a male relation that could perform the action on their behalf. Similarly the home became a place of honour and comfort in a much stronger way than was experienced in Australia. Gender clearly plays a significant role here. Sakinah spoke extensively about boundaries that were erroneously constructed for Muslim women, even in diaspora communities. These are particularly pronounced around travel and general freedom of movement in most Islamic cultures but for many they can also extend to everyday activities like study and employment. Family priorities play a large role in this and by extension it may also be possible that class plays some role. Even though many Muslims draw attention to the need for female Muslim doctors, nurses, dentists and so on, some refuse to entertain the notion that members of their own family may be educated to enter these roles. Therefore, we see that the boundaries that Muslim women need to overcome in order to travel abroad may be diminutive or on the other hand too immense to position as a priority in their lives. As noted in my masters research, some Muslim women are still in the process of negotiating and shifting the boundaries to allow them to enter meaningful education or employment. In many situations the maintenance of family and especially young children took priority, leaving many women to abandon their quest for most activities in the public sphere except for volunteer work. To conclude Sakinah describes travel on a higher level, a spiritual journey to gather knowledge. This knowledge is sought both through conventional learning, through interactions with others and by a learned familiarity with new places. The data presents a clear case that the crossing of boundaries, borders and frontiers is important for Muslim women’s personal and spiritual growth. This awareness relates closely to the romantic vision of escape often promoted in Mernissi’s work. Sakinah’s travel experiences were achievable through adherence to a set of principals that did not compromise her family’s interpretation of Islamic rulings and their position on normative gender roles. This still leaves us with some questions; do Muslim women need to renegotiate boundaries to allow for further enrichment such as travel experiences? To what extent

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can they work within the parameters of Islamic practices to achieve this? Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass ends in much the same manner and with the same exhortation as my interviews with Sakinah, “if you can’t get out you’re on the powerless side.”34

Bibliography Brent Peeples, trans. 1001 Arabian Nights: The Adventures of Sinbad, volume 2. New York: Zenescope, 2011. Addas, Claude. Ibn cArabƯ, the Voyage of No Return. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2000. Didaoui, Mohammed. “Translation and Textual Incongruity: The Background for Al-JƗhiz’s Rhetorical Work.” In Similarity and Difference in Translation, edited by Stefano Arduini and Robert Hodgson, 427-448. New York: The American Bible Society, 2008. Euben, Roxanne L. Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Jaffray, Angela. “Unveiling from the Effects of Voyages.” The Muhyiddin Ibn cArabi Society. Accessed November 18, 2012. http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/alisfar_introduction.html. Mernissi, Fatima. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. New York: Perseus Books, 1995. —. Scheherazade Goes West. Washington D.C.: Washington Square Press, 2001. —. “Adab or Allying with the Stranger as the Strategy to Win the Globalised Planet.” Quaderns de e Mediterrania 14 (2010): 99-103. Montgomery, James. “Speech and Nature: al-JƗhiz, KitƗb al-BayƗn wa-altabyƯn 2.175–207, Part 3.” Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 2 (2009): 107-125. Nasr, Hussein. Adab Ar-Rihla (The Art of Travelling). Cairo: Achariqa al Misriya Linachr, 1991. Nilüfer, Göle. “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 173-190. Pratt Ewing, Katherine. “Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities.” Ethos 26, no. 2 (1998): 262-267. Ruete, Emily, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar. Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 2009. 34

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, 242.

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Ruete, Emily and Emeri J. van-Donzel. An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993. Schoy, Carl. “The Geography of the Moslems of the Middle Ages.” Geographical Review 14, no. 2 (1924): 257-269. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “The Persian Gaze and Women of the Occident.” South Asia Bulletin 11, nos 1-2 (1991): 21-31. Verlag, Artemis. The Life and Works of JƗhiz, translated by D.M. Hawke. Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1969. Wilson, Peter Lamborn. Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1993.

CHAPTER ELEVEN TO STAY OR TO LEAVE: THE DILEMMA OF ANCIENT CHINESE LITERATI AND EXILIC WRITING PING WANG

Introduction Confucius says: “The wise man finds joy in water, the benevolent delights in mountains.”1 Indeed, the Chinese literati have never been far away from streams and hills. One only needs to look at the ancient Chinese travel writing and traditional landscape painting to see the significance of shanshui (literally ‘mountain-water’, referring to landscape or nature in general) and travel in Chinese literati tradition. For many ancient Chinese scholarofficials, however, travel is synonymous to exile, and for that reason, shan-shui is much more than just physical locations or sites; it is “a dynamic medium” in which the scholar-officials sojourn, move, find or lose themselves.2 So what concerns us here, as Mitchell put it, is not what the landscape ‘is’ but rather what it ‘does’. Shan-shui, with all its healing power, also offers the disillusioned and embittered Chinese scholarofficials a new point of view, an alternative to their official life. The choice, however, is by no means easy; they are torn by the dilemma between office and shan-shui, advance and retreat, and indeed between Confucian ethics and Daoist and Buddhist beliefs. Scholar-officials find themselves constantly on road, trudge to and fro, pondering over to be or not to be; to stay or to leave.

1

Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 6.23. 2 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1-4.

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A common path followed by generations of Chinese men in ancient times was to become a scholar-official, and hold an official position, but then only to be disappointed and frustrated, and face their first cycle of dilemma: should they continue to be officials, or should they leave their posts? Some of them were not even given a choice; they simply had to leave, being banished from the court, demoted or sent into exile. Once they had already left their posts, and lived amidst shan-shui, like wang sun3 did, they found themselves yet again in a predicament: should they stay where they were, or should they leave, and return to service? Confucius’ ethic of filial piety adds yet another dimension to the paradox for scholar-officials. In ancient China, a man was expected to establish a name that would add honour to his parents and ancestors. When Sima Tan (ca. 165-110BCE) entrusted his son Sima Qian (145-87BCE) with the mission to complete Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) that he had left unfinished, he reminded his son that “filial piety begins with serving your parents, centers around serving the emperor, and ends with establishing yourself.”4 To establish oneself, one had to first of all pass the Civil Service Examination and subsequently get an official position. This meant more and more travel for the literati, because at final level of the tests, candidates had to travel to the capital to sit the exams. When successful they would be assigned to a post in distant provinces, other than one’s own hometown to avoid conflicts of interest, and be reassigned every few years. However, to be filial, one is also expected to stay close to home so as to look after aged parents. Thus Wang Bo (ca. 650-676CE) wrote in his well-known Qiuri deng Hongfu Tengwangge jianbie xu, (Preface to Poems from the Pavilion of the Prince of Teng): “I have given up my official career forever, and am travelling far to look after my parents.”5 He suggested that being dismissed from office, he had brought 3

Wang sun [䌳⬁] was originally a term for descendants of aristocrats; later it was often used to refer to scholar-official who lived the life of a recluse. Its first appearance could be traced back as early as in “Summon the Recluse” in Chu ci [Songs of the South], a collection of poems written in a distinctive style known also as chuci by poets living in the State of Chu during the Warring States Period (476-221BCE), represented first and foremost by Qu Yuan (340-278BCE). The collection was compiled by Liu Xiang (77-6BCE) of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE220CE). Included in the collection are also poems by Liu Xiang himself and a few other poets. 4 Qi Yusheng and Xia Yuquan, eds, Shiji [Records of the Grand Historian] (Changchun: Beifang funԉ ertong chubanshe, 2002), 770. 5 Quoted in Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 108.

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disgrace to his family, but he was determined to be a filial son. Wang Wei, a great Tang poet, even built a Buddhist shrine for his mother in his own estate in Lantian area South of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) where he was to spend the three-year mourning period after his mother died. The typical abide-exodus dilemma of wang sun hence had troubled Chinese literati for millennia. One of the earliest occurrence of ‘wang sun’ can be found in a poem entitled Zhao yinshi (Summon the Recluse) in Chu ci: “wang sun’s roaming away, alas, not to return / While spring grasses are growing lush and green.”6 Then the poem ends in calling wang sun to leave the mountain and come back (to court): “wang sun, oh, come back where you belong / Mountains are no place to stay for long.”7 For some of the Confucian officials, court was still where they belonged as expressed in the poem above; for others, however, life in solitude amidst hills and streams was more desirable, as shown in Wang Wei’s (701-761CE) poem Shan ju qiu min (Autumn Twilight at a Village). The poem, presenting a beautiful landscape of a mountain and a stream after rain in late Autumn, is permeated with fresh air and peaceful aura, which leads to its natural ending: “Although the Spring fragrance has faded away / This is still the place for wang sun to stay.”8 Here, ‘wang sun’ probably refers to the poet himself. The twist in the meaning of the allusion in this poem highlights his clear preference to nature over court. Wang Wei’s life and career, like that of many other scholar-officials, was full of ups and downs. He was demoted several times to different places. Frustrating as this was, it nonetheless had a saving grace; it gave the poet many opportunities to travel. Whenever he got a chance, even during the years he served the emperor and the crown prince, he would spend time in his poetic and Buddhist retreat in Lantian, wandering in the hills and along streams, enjoying what nature had to offer. His life and poetry epitomize the paradox between service and withdrawal.9

6

This poem was attributed to Prince Liu An (179-122BCE), or one of his hangerson known as Huainan Xiaoshan. It is said that one of the main reasons that this poem was included in Chu ci was its relevance to Qu Yuan, who was also a recluse being summoned. 7 Ju Cai, ed., Cifu yibai pian [A Hundred Pieces of Rhapsody], (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1994), 14. 8 Lin Debao et al., eds, Quan Tang Shi [A Complete Collection of Tang poetry] (Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 1998), 412-413. 9 He wrote numerous poems about the landscape surrounding Lantian and how he felt, such as: Zhongnan bie ye, Gui Wangchuan zuo, Wangchuan xian ju. See Lin Debao, et al., Quan Tang shi, 412-413.

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This chapter attempts to examine the significance of the ancient Chinese travel writing that flourished during the Tang Dynasty (618907CE), and particularly, the Song Dynasty (960-1279CE). A brief summary of the history of Chinese travel writing will be provided. Then a detailed discussion of the major modes of exilic writing, marked by interwoven and intricate themes reflecting complex, ambivalent, and often conflicting emotions of ancient Chinese literati in face of the dilemma, will demonstrate the poignant importance of these texts.

Chinese Travel Writing Of early Chinese travel writing, few texts have survived before the Tang and Song Dynasties. Those that did survive, not unlike their Western counterparts, fall, by and large, into two categories: geographical and religious. Mu Tianzi zhuan (The Chronicle of Mu, Son-of-Heaven) is probably the earliest Chinese travel account, found in the tomb of the King of Wei, who died in 296BCE. It is an anonymous travel account of an imperial tour by Emperor Mu of Zhou (1023-983BCE). Then there was Shan hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) compiled again anonymously between 320BCE and early Han Dynasty (206BCE-9CE).10 This is a more comprehensive travel account divided into eighteen sections, containing fables and myths as well as the natural features of mountains and seas. A more detailed observation of environment can be found in Li Daoyuan’s (d. 527CE) Shui jing zhu (The Guide to Waterways with Commentary), a revision of a now lost book on geographical sites along major rivers and lakes. 11 Another work of significance is Shen Kuo’s (1031-1095CE) Meng xi bi tan (Chats from Dream Stream), a comprehensive book covering seventeen different fields including geography, geology, astronomy, medicine, history, literature and music.12 10

It is a book of landscapes of more than five-hundred mountains and threehundred channels, indeed a geography in embryonic form, as well as a book of mythology. For more about this work, see Richard Strassberg, ed. and trans., A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Anne Birrell, trans., The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). 11 There have since been a few annotated editions of the book. For the latest edition, see Chen Qiaoyi and Duan Xizhong, Shuijing zhu shu [Notes on the Guide to Waterways] (Nanjing: Jiangsu gujichubanshe, 1989). 12 The original book published during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279CE) was lost, its Yuan (1271-1368CE) and Ming (1368-1644CE) versions survived.

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This encyclopaedic work listing all the great achievements in the history of Chinese civilization was described as an axis in the history of Chinese science, and its author Shen Kuo, an outstanding figure in Chinese history by British biochemist, historian and Sinologist Joseph Needham (19001995CE).13 The topic of Chinese travel writing cannot help but recall Xu Xiake (1587-1641CE) of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644CE), a traveller and representative writer of Chinese travel record literature. He travelled throughout China for more than thirty years, documenting his travels extensively which would be compiled posthumously into Xu Xiake you ji (The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake) in which he incorporated rich geographical and typographical information in the narrative description of his travel experiences.14 Another type of travel writing is religious in nature, providing accounts of religious practices and ethnic customs. The earliest of this kind traces back to Shu jing (The Book of Documents) of the sixth century BCE which contains mythicised description of ritualized tours. 15 The most important accounts of religious pilgrimages16 have to be these two books: Faxian’s (ca. 334-420CE) Fo guo ji (A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms) and Xuanzang’s (ca. 600-664CE) Da Tang Xiyu ji (Great Tang Records of the Western Regions). Faxian is one of the most renowned early Chinese travellers, who in 388CE, at the age of sixty-five, started his westward journey from Chang’an to India. He travelled along the Silk Road to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and after visiting Buddhist centers in India, he returned home at the age of seventy-eight by sea, stopping at Sri Lanka and Indonesia. A Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms 17 gives a detailed account of the 13

Needham made these comments in his introduction to his monumental sevenvolume work Chinese Science and Civilization. See Needham, Introductory Orientations, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 14 Zhu Huirong, ed., Xu Xiake you ji [The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake] (Kunming:Yunnan chubanshe, 1985). 15 Also known as Book of History. Book of Documents is one of the five ancient Chinese books canonized as the ‘Five Classics’. It is possibly the oldest example of Chinese prose, dating from the sixth century BCE. The other four books include Shi jing [Book of Songs], Yi jing [Book of Changes], Li ji [Book of Rites], and Chun qiu [Spring and Autumn Annals]. 16 For more information on the writings of pilgrimages, see Nancy E. Boulton, “Early Chinese Buddhist Travel Records as a Literary Genre” (unpublished PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 1982). 17 This is the English translation by James Legge, A Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886).

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religions, politics, economics, and customs of the lands he had seen during his long journey to the West. Even more influential is the famous Buddhist monk, scholar, and translator Xuanzang, who, like Faxian, travelled to India along the Silk Road in search of sacred Buddhist texts. The voyage took him nineteen years (626-645CE). Upon his return he orally narrated what he saw and heard on his way to his disciple Bianji, and the result is the twelve-volume account of his pilgrimage. The work inspired Wu Cheng’en (15001582CE) to write his famous novel Xi You Ji (Journey to the West), 18 which has in turn been made into a number of popular television series in recent decades.19 Xuanzang’s travel records are of great value; they provide not only important source for medieval Central Asia and India, but also rich information about Buddhism in India, and Indian history in general. The work has been translated into a few different languages. The two types of travel accounts mentioned above – geographical and religious – are not the mainstream of ancient Chinese travel writing, however. The philosophical, personal and lyrical discourse mingled with a historiographical narrative that characterizes exilic writing has dominated traditional Chinese travel writing. Such writing typically reflects upon what nature and travel can do to a disillusioned soul, and how a responsive heart reacts emotionally to a landscape. Qu Yuan, the earliest Chinese poet in the recorded history, wrote during his voyage on exile that he could not help shedding tears at the sight of mountain, and sighing upon the flowing water.20 Nature would always evoke in its beholder emotions, and strike a sympathetic chord in the heart of those scholar-officials in face of adversity. This philosophical, lyrical and reflective nature of Chinese travel writing forms a contrast with the overarching structure, dramatic events and well-developed plot that mark earlier Western travel writing such as Homer’s Odyssey and the hero’s home-coming journey after the fall of Troy. It also differs from the curious observations and rich descriptions of different cultures in the accounts of voyagers like Marco Polo in the Age of Exploration. To ancient Chinese the internal voyage was more 18 Xi you ji has been regarded as one of the four greatest fictions in pre-modern China. Although it was attributed to Wu Chen’en, its authorship still remains controversial. 19 Such as the Japanese show Saiynjki [Monkey] made by Nippon Television from 1978-1980. 20 Chou si [Sorting out Emotions] in Chu ci ed. Dong Chuping (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006), 144.

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important than the external exploration. They showed little interest in foreign cultures and had no intention in claiming colonies. Full of parochial arrogance, they believed that they were the centre of the universe, and hence, China – the Middle Kingdom – had everything it ever needed and more. Therefore Zheng He’s seven expeditions (between 1403 and 1431CE) to South Asia and Africa, did not deliver much more than just some official reports, which were kept secretly, and then disappeared.21 This emphasis on inner thoughts and emotions is also largely due to the capricious and even perilous situation ancient Chinese literati often found themselves in. By the Song Dynasty, with the reinforcement of civilservice examination as well as the economic development, and overall prosperity, the literati as a class had been firmly established as the dominant arbiters of ideology and culture. Constant political rivalry in court led to banishment and exiles, and scholar-officials, whose careers are interspersed with periods of service and exile, thus became frequent travellers, and needed a channel to vent their emotions, be it homesickness, nostalgia, frustration, disappointment, sorrow or pain. Hence the proliferation of travel writing in different forms: poetry, prose or diaries and letters. Those scholar-officials in exile, therefore, played an instrumental role in shaping the paradigm of Chinese travel narrative. The forerunner of this tradition is Qu Yuan, followed by a long list of literati, among them, Wang Xizhi (303-361CE), Tao Yuanming (365427), Xie Lingyun (385-443CE), Li Daoyuan (d. 527CE), Wang Bo (ca. 650-ca. 676CE), Wang Zhihua (668-742CE), Meng Haoran (689-740CE), Wang Wei (699-759CE), Li Bai (701-762CE), Du Fu (712-770CE), Han Yu (768-824CE), Li Ao (772-836CE), Bai Juyi (772-846CE) , Liu Zongyuan (773-819CE), Fan Zhongyan’s (989-1052CE), Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072CE), Wang Anshi (1021-1086CE), Su Shi (1037-1101CE), and Ma Zhiyuan (ca.1250 – 1321CE), to name only a few. Far apart as they are in time and space, they have one thing in common: they all travelled extensively through forced or self-imposed exiles. Their travel writings opened up a window through which we see their ideals and aspirations, as well as lost hopes and shattered dreams, but most of all, their dilemmas and quest for solutions, which were by no means homogeneous. Some, despite repeated setbacks, remained steadfast to the Confucian ideals of social service and obligation, still hoping to return to office someday; some, totally disillusioned, found refuge in Daoism and Buddhism, and 21 Fang Zhongfu and Li Erhe, Zheng He qi xia Xiyang [Zheng He’s Seven Expeditions to the Western Oceans], (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 2005).

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solace in nature. Some, proud and standoffish, viewed the world with nonchalance or even disdain. There were still others, who, enjoying the leisurely and comfortable ambiance, fully indulged themselves in the aesthetic pursuit of poetry and art as part of literati’s self-cultivation. This chapter will focus on the first three groups of scholars and their modes of travel writing.

I “The rise and fall of the world is the responsibility of every man.”22 This motto is a true reflection of the aspiration of Confucian scholars in ancient Chinese culture. Take Cao Zhi’s (192-232CE) most celebrated poems Bai ma pian (On the White Horse), for example. Written in the early years of his life, it portrays a young warrior who answers fearlessly to the need of his country. The poem ends with the following lines: If his name is to enter the roll of the heroes, He can’t be concerned about personal matters. Giving up his life for the sake of his country, He looks toward death as a journey home. 23

If the above poem overflows with youthful heroism, this spirit remains undiminished in the following poem Gui sui shou (The Tortoise Blessed with Longevity) by Cao Cao (155-220CE), Cao Zhi’s father, written when he was in his mid-fifties: An old steed in the stable still aspires to gallop 1000 miles. Noble-hearted man in advanced age, still cherishes high aspirations.24

Similar sentiment and aspirations are echoed in travel writing, where nature is a mirror of moral world, and the act of travel is endowed with ethical significance. So when Cao Cao ascended the Jieshi Mountain overlooking the sea in his Guan canghai (Viewing the Deep Blue Sea), what he saw – the surging waves, the exuberant trees, the sun, the moon 22

Gu Yanwu, Rizhi lu, Zheng shi [Daily Reminder, A Formal Beginning] in Ri zhi lu ji shi quan xian ben (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006), juan 17. 23 Zhang Peiheng and Luo Yuming, Zhongguo wenxue shi [The History of Chinese Literature], juan 1 (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue chubanshe, 1996), 317. 24 Zhang and Luo, Zhongguo wenxue shi, 314.

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and the starts – all instilled in him the same lofty ideals as expressed in Gui sui shou. 25 Ascending a tower or mountain is, as Hans H. Frankel rightly observed, one of the topoi in Chinese poetry that suggest the evocation of the past;26 it is also associated with a prospect of future, as can be seen in Wang Zhihuan’s Deng Guanque lou (Ascending Guanque Tower).27 Born into a wealthy family, Wang Zhihuan served as an official for sometime, but framed and slandered, he resigned and lived in retirement for fifteen years before taking up another position. He is best known for his poem expressing high aspirations, which ends with these two lines: “For a better view of a thousand li away / Ascend yet another flight of stairs.”28 Li Bai, one of, if not the greatest, Tang poets, said that travelling to famous mountains was his life-long passion.29 Indeed he spent most of his life time travelling around. His official career was cut short sometimes by his own choice – resignation - and sometimes by exiles. When he was twenty-six he started his long journey, trekking across the country, scaling all the famous mountains, including Mount Lu, Mount Tai, Mount Heng, Mount Song, Mount Hua, and Yellow Mountain, and fording streams such as the Yangtze River, Yellow River, Han River, as well as the Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake, and Lake Tai. Li Bai’s experiences find resonance in Pi Rixiu’s (ca.834-9020CE) lines: “The five mountains offered him words and style / while the four seas aroused in him thoughts and emotions.”30 Indeed, the shan-shui Li Bai embraced during all his travels nurtured his unique personality and literary sensibility that are marked by a bold, natural and spontaneous flair. Idealistic and ambitious, Li Bai often compared himself to a roc, soaring high in the sky as in the opening lines of his poem Shang Li yong (To Li Yong) written during his travel in

25

Zhang and Luo, Zhongguo wenxue shi, 313. Hans H. Frankel, “The Contemplation of the Past in T’ang,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, eds A. F. Wright and D. Twitchett (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 247. 27 Guanque Tower, located in present-day Shanxi Provice, is one of the four famous towers in ancient China. All of them have become literary pilgrimage sites and have attracted literati for generations. 28 Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 253, vol. 2, 979. 29 See his poem Lushan yao [Song of Mount Lu – To Censor Lu Xuzhou] in Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 173, vol. 2, 1591. 30 These two lines are from Pi Rixiu’s poem Qi ai shi [Seven Love]. See Lin, Quan Tangshi, juan 608, vol. 3, 2374. 26

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present-day Chongqing, Sichuan province: “Riding the wind, the giant roc flies / Soaring thousands of miles high.”31 During his travel in present-day Henan province after he left Chang’an with shattered hopes, Li Bai visited some ancient sites, including the Garden of Liang, where he wrote Liang yuan yin (Ode to the Garden of Liang). He was then at the ebb of his life, which was reflected in his description of the long and rough journey with bleak and desolate surroundings. Disappointed and forlorn, he nonetheless still dreamed about returning to court someday as shown in the last two lines of the poem: “The day will come when I’ll be called back to office / For the sake of mankind, it’s never too late to be of service.”32 Han Yu and Li Ao, two contemporaries, played a role in the origination of the Neo-Confucian philosophy that developed to counter, at least in part, the perceived pernicious effects of the burgeoning Buddhist and Daoist ways of thought. Li was a local official but was exiled several times for his outspoken views. His travel diary, Diary of my coming to the South documents his long voyage of his demotion from Lo Yang in the North to a post in the South, which took him six months.33 Born into an aristocratic family, Han Yu travelled with his family when his father was in exile. He was also demoted and exiled a few times, barely escaping a death penalty. Despite all this, he remained a vehement defender of Confucianism. It is not surprising, then, in his travel piece Yan xi ting ji (The Pavillion of Joyous Feasts), nature was presented as the sublime stage of the Noble Man’s purposeful activity. 34 Each of the elements symbolized an aspect of perfected character brought into harmonious balance with totality. He named a building “the Pavillion of Joyous Feasts,” alluding to a line in the Shi jing (Book of Songs); mentioned “Marquis of Lu, joyous feasts,” praising the Marquis as an exemplary Confucian Official; and lists “the Pond of the Noble Man,” “the Spring of Heaven’s Beneficience,” “the Hill of Patient Virtue,” the Valley of Humble Acceptance,” and the “Regulated Falls,” all resonant with Confucian ideals. Ouyang Xiu is one of the most important figures in the arenas of literature and politics in Song Dynasty. Like many other scholar-officials, he was also exiled and demoted a few times, and even falsely charged and imprisoned. His first demotion in 1036 sent him to a new post, which took him five months to reach. He kept a diary during the journey, and the 31

Quan Tang shi, juan 168, vol. 1, 577. Quan Tang shi, juan 166, vol. 1, 569. 33 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 128-131. 34 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 122-124. 32

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result was his Diary of my Route to Assume Office,35 a record about his water route from Kaifeng to Yi Ling (present-day Yichang of Hubei Province). Ouyang Xiu was a very versatile and prolific writer, and not just of poetry and prose. His most well-known travel writing is Zui weng ting ji (The Pavilion of the Old Drunkard), written during his second exile when he was made the Prefect of the Langya Mountain region (in presentday Anhui Province). The piece ends with a touch of humour and playfulness, revealing his concern for the people, and willingness to share their feelings: “Birds enjoy the mountains and forests, but can’t understand the joy of people; the people who are accompanying the Prefect enjoy the outing, but don’t know that the Prefect enjoys their joy.”36 Love for humanity found its best expression in Fan Zhongyan’s famous lyric travel account Yueyang lou ji (The Pavilion of Yueyang) in which he encourages others as well as himself “to be concerned about the worries of the world before others, but enjoy the pleasure of the world after others.”37 During the Qing Dynasty (1616-1912), the whole piece, copied by a distinguished calligrapher, was engraved and placed inside the pavilion, which has become one of the great attractions of literary pilgrimage. Despite disillusionment and setbacks, very few of the scholar-officials really renounced public life; many kept forging ahead to pursue their success, The shan-shui they enjoyed during their trips and exiles gave them a strong sense of history and vocation. For some others, however, the trips and exiles carried them further away from social engagement, but closer to nature.

II Disillusioned by the political unrest, and wearied by the constraints of official life, many scholar-officials in search of answers looked beyond Confucian ethics and found Daoist and Buddhist worldviews appealing. Indeed the idea of eliminating desires and living a natural and simple life offered them an alternative. Nature – be it idyllic or rustic – as providing a source for meditations on the cosmos as well as personal life, attracted many of the literati. Nature and life in reclusion thus constitute the majority topics of travel writing by nature poets.

35

Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 162. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 164. 37 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 158-159 36

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The first name that comes to mind has to be Tao Yuanming, who asked himself a rhetorical question in his rhyming prose Gui qu lai ci (On Going Back): “Why not go back, the fields at home are lying wasted.”38 This is a recurrent theme in his oeuvre. He declares in his poem Gui yuan tian ju, no. 1 (Returning to live on the Farm) that he was born with a love for hills and mountains, was out of place in the vulgar world, and that he was simply led astray to follow the path of officialdom – “fallen into the net of human world” – which he regretted. His desire to retire to the country and live a life of a free farmer-recluse is vividly portrayed in two images in the poem: “a caged bird longing for his previous forest,” and “a pond-confined fish yearning for his deep water.”39 The poem ends with a happy tone that after being a captive in a cage for so long, he is finally able to return to the free world of nature. Similarly, many of his other poems describe his simple and rustic life in retirement: working in the fields like a farmer, and wandering around as a hermit, climbing hills to breathe fresh air, walking along streams to chant poems, and drinking to heart’s content; a carefree life like clouds, drifting unrestrained. For Tao Yuanming, seclusion is as much, if not more, about a state of mind as about a physical environment. If one is able to make his journey to the spiritual realm, then he will be able to enjoy the solitude anytime and anywhere, even amidst hustle and bustle. This is best articulated in the opening lines of his poem Yin jiu, qi wu (On Drinking Wine, no. 5): Built my hut amongst dwellings of men, Yet I hear no noise of carriages and horses. Asking how this could be the case? A heart that is kept distant leads to its own solitude places.40

Tao Yuanming also describes in his prose fantasia Taohua yuan ji (The Tale of Peach Blossom Spring Valley) a fairyland accidentally discovered by a fisherman. 41 This account of the utopian world is retold by many other Chinese writers, including Wang Wei, whose poetic rendition begins with a description of the spring scenery the fisherman sees as he rows down the stream, and how, entranced by the flaming peach blossoms, he 38 Cao Minggang, ed., Wei Jin Nan Bei chao sanwen [A Collection of Pross from Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000). 39 Zhang and Luo, Zhongguo wenxue shi, vol. 1, 357-358. 40 Zhang and Luo, Zhongguo wenxue shi, vol. 1, 359. 41 “Taohua yuan ji” in Cao Minggang, ed., Wei Jin Nan Bei cha sanwen, (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000).

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forgets how far he is from home. Then the poet goes on to describe how the fisherman followed a winding path leading to a beautiful valley with people living a simple, carefree, and happy life in complete harmony with nature, and therefore: “Tumbling onto this fairyland, I have no desire to go back.”42 Wang Wei, one of the greatest nature poets, managed to alternate between his service in court, and life in seclusion in his own estate in Lantian by the Wang Stream, where he composed numerous pieces on landscape and travel. In Shan zhong yu xiucai Pei Di shu (A Letter from the Mountains to the Cultured Talent Pei Di) for instance, he depicted the beautiful surrounding vividly with a lyric sensibility, and ended the letter with an invitation to Pei Di to travel with him in springtime: “Can you travel with me? Aren’t you someone who is endowed with a pure and remarkable character? When could I ever invite you to enjoy such leisurely pursuit?”43 In most of his poems about his life in the estate Wang Wei describes how he would often wonder alone in the mountain, loitering along brooks, watching the movement of the clouds, and if he occasionally ran into an old acquaintance, he would happily chat away. Totally absorbed in the tranquil and leisurely life, he became a self-effacing participant in the scene. It is not hard to see the Daoist and Buddhist influences on him from the dictions and images associated with emptiness, tranquillity and solitude that feature so prominently in his poems. For example: “The mountain is empty with no-one in sight” (The Deer Enclosure); 44 “Sitting alone in bamboo groves / … In the deep forest, nobody knows / Only the bright moon shines on me” (Hut in the Bamboo Groves);45 “Man is quiet; sweet osmanthus falls / The night is still; the spring mountain is empty” (Birds Singing Brook).46 Drawn to Buddhism, Wang Wei would look for Buddhist sites on his trips, such as described in Guo xiang ji si (Paying a Visit to Incense Storing Temple): “Not knowing where the Incense Storing Temple is, I ascended a few li up the peak high amidst clouds.”47 Chang Jian’s (708765CE) poem Ti Poshan si hou chan yuan (In the Rear Buddha Hall of the Broken Hill Temple) is replete with Buddhist references and images, visible in the lingering tone at the end: 42

Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 125, vol. 1, 406. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 114. 44 “Lu chai” in Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 128, vol.1, 421. 45 “Zhu li guan” in Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 128, vol.1, 422. 46 “Niao ming jian” in Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 128, vol.1, 422. 47 Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 126, vol.1, 412. 43

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To Stay or to Leave The light-lit mountain delights the birds, While shaded pond empties human hearts. Silence now reigns all things, Except for bells and chime tinklings.48

Many Chinese scholar-officials also embraced the Daoist worldview that language was inadequate, and one only needed to have a responsive heart to communicate with nature. This is how Tao Yuanming ends his poem Yin jiu (On Drinking Wine, no. 5): The mountain air is fresh at the dusk; And birds are flying back in a flock; In this true meaning resides; I wish to explicate, but have forgotten the words.49

Liu Zongyuan’s Eight Pieces from Yong Prefecture (Yongzhou ba ji, 809-812CE) are regarded as one of the earliest masterpieces of lyric travel accounts in Chinese history.50 The eight travel pieces were written during the nine years when Liu was demoted to Yong Prefecture (present-day Lingling in Hunan Province). Though he was only a vice-prefect, the position gave him the opportunity to travel through the area. In Shi de Xishan yan you ji (My First Excursion to West Mountain) he wrote: I have been in a state of constant fear ever since my exile to this prefecture. Whenever I had a free moment I would roam about, wandering aimlessly. Everyday I hiked in the mountains accompanied by friends with similar fates. We would penetrate into the deep forests, following the winding streams back to their source, discovering hidden springs and fantastic rocks – no spot seemed too remote.51

Liu went on to say that when they reached a place, they would drink till drunk, fall asleep, and start dreaming. Drinking was one of the favourite pastimes for literati; wine seemed to give them inspiration and offer them an outlet for emotions. More importantly when intoxicated they could free themselves from official duties and other worldly worries, as Wang Wei portrayed his friend Pei Di in his Wangchuan xianju zeng Pei Xiucai Di (Retirement at Wangchuan):

48

Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 144, vol.1, 475-76. Zhang and Luo Zhongguo wenxue shi . vol. 1, 359. 50 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 141-147. 51 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 141. 49

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The Sun is setting down at the ford, A wisp of smoke from village arises You’re just like crazy Jieyu, drunk, Chanting wildly before the five willow trees.52

Here Wang Wei used two allusions: Jieyu of the State of Chu (ca. 1030223 BCE) feigned craziness to avoid service in the government, while ‘Five Willows’ was the name of a hermit Tao Yuanming invented in one of his pieces, so named because he planted five willows by his dwelling.53 It is very clearly a self-portrayal of the author. Meng Haoran is another pastoral poet. Like Wang Wei, he spent his whole life struggling between the pursuit of official position and disappointment of failure. Most of his poems were written on his way of travel, describing the landscape and the emotions it evoked in him. For example: ġ Move the boat to a misty islet to moor, The sunset evokes in the traveller a new sorrow. With wildness so vast, the sky lowers towards trees, With water so clear, the moon floats close to me.54

A bleaker landscape was painted by Ma Zhiyuan, a Yuan official, poet and playwright. Disgusted with the public life, he left the court to live in seclusion. His poem Tian jing sha: qiu si (Autumn Thoughts: to the Tune of Tian Jing Sha), echoed loneliness and sorrow in his heart vividly through a cluster of images: Withered vines, old trees, crows at dusk, A little bridge, flowing stream, and houses, An ancient road, west wind, an emaciated horse. The sun is setting down in the west, A heart-broken traveller at the edge of the world.55

III In other travel writings, the interest in climbing the ladder of social success, or alternatively, the intention to retreat from it, are marked by a sense of self-pride, which usually engenders aloofness, even a mocking 52

Quan Tang shi, juan 125, vol.1, 409. “Wuliu xiansheng zhuan” in Cao, Wei Jin Nan Bei chao sanwen. 54 “Su Jiande jiang” in Quan Tang shi, juan 160, vol. 1, 549. 55 Zhang and Luo, Zhongguo wenxue shi, vol. 2, 78-79. 53

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disdain for social life and conventions. For instance Wang Bo’s Qiuri deng Hongfu Tengwangge jianbie xu (Preface to Poems from the Pavilion of the Prince of Teng) is coloured by his unyielding pride. A child prodigy, Wang Bo’s talent won him a place in court quite early, serving as a tutor to the Prince. However, he was soon expelled because of his satirical writing that angered the emperor Gao Zong (649-683CE). Although he was reinstated as an administrator in a Prefecture for a while, his career experienced a downward spiral thereafter: he was sentenced to be executed; and although later pardoned, his official career ended. This also brought disaster to his father who was subsequently demoted to a remote area. Wang Bo was probably on his way to visit his parents when he was invited to a feast at the Pavilion of the Prince of Teng, where poems were expected to be composed on the occasion. Wang Bo improvised a preface to the collection of poems, in which he wrote: Alas! Times are unfavourable to me, and my fate has taken many turns… I believe in the Noble Man accepting his poverty and in the man of affairs understanding his fate. His resolution only increases with age... Never does he lower his lofty ambition.56

This sense of pride and superiority is evident in many travel writings. Liu Zongyuan, for example, compared himself to the big mountain, standing head and shoulders all above others in My First Excursion to West Mountain: “I understood the prominence of this mountain, which distinguishes it from mere hills. I felt myself expanding, fusing with the cosmos atmosphere, unable to comprehend its extent.”57 Apart from the eight travel pieces, Liu Zongyuan also wrote many poems on travel and landscape. In the poem below, for instance, Liu portrays a solitary man, braving the cold and defying snow, wilfully fishing on a snow-covered river, showing contempt for worldly gains, and desire to keep his integrity clean, as symbolized by the pure white snow. A thousand mountains devoid of birds’ flight, Ten thousand paths extinct of human sight. An old man with a straw hat in a solitary boat, Fishing all alone in the cold river snow58

56

Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 108. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 142. 58 Lin, Quang Tang shi, juan 356, vol. 2, 1356. 57

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Wang Anshi, a statesman, reformer, and writer, travelled extensively at an early age with his father who was a magistrate. His own official career was nothing short of frustrations, either. He held a very high position, but his reform met with strong resistance from conservative forces in court. He was forced to resign. Later he returned to office, but soon retired again. Despite all the setbacks, he kept his high-mindedness. In his travel account “A Trip to Baochan Mountain” (You Baochan shan),59 he uses the act of exploring nature metaphorically to suggest that the most splendid scene often lie hidden in the dark, remote and even dangerous places, and it takes travellers unusual courage and strength to “take the path less travelled by” to discover those hidden wonders. In his poem Ascending the Flying Peak, Wang stands, as it were, like a crane among chickens, proud and aloof: “Not worried about clouds blocking my sight / All because I am at the upmost height.”60A similar sentiment is echoed in a poem by Du Fu, one of the greatest poets of Tang Dynasty: “I’ll climb to the top of the mountain, lo / And all the hills around look small below.”61 Li Bai’s lofty and unyielding character is best expressed in his poem Meng you Tianlao yin liubie (Ascending Mount Skyland in a Dream – A Song of Farewell): “How can I stoop and bow to the men in power, and so deprive myself of happy hour?”62

Discussion Differences in life experiences, worldviews and literary styles notwithstanding, most of ancient Chinese literati, as discussed above, shared something in common: they all had to face a dilemma in life, and there was no easy way out. When they embarked on an official career, they were destined to travel on a rough and bumpy road with many turns. Richard E. Strassberg has this to say about a literatus in exile: “As a sublime substitute for the world he left behind, the landscape became both a refuge for the persecute official and a mirror of his virtuous misunderstood self.” 63 Indeed, a metaphor that prevail most of the travel writing – such as Liu Zongyuan’s eight travel pieces – is that of a neglected scene of natural beauty, signifying the exiled official ignored, misunderstood, and abandoned by the court. In a society where Confucian values were deeply rooted, 59

Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 175-77. “Deng feilai feng” in Wang Anshi shi ji [The Poetry collection of Wang Anshi] (Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1974). 61 Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 216, vol. 2, 762. 62 Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 174, vol. 1, 594. 63 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 37. 60

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however, many of these frustrated and battered scholar-officials still found it hard to tear themselves away from humanity and commitment, just as Qu Yuan wrote in his Bei huifeng (Lamenting Whirlwind): “Even though I live in seclusion, I cannot help worrying.”64 Thus, weighed down and torn apart, the Chinese scholar-official waded along on their spiritual as well as physical journey searching for answers and comfort. Qu Yuan was the first to set out on this spiritual and emotional quest: “Long and winding is the road ahead, / I will keep searching and probing between heaven and earth” (On Encountering Sorrow).65 Qu Yuan was not only one of the greatest poets in China, but also a statesman, a minister of King Huai of Chu during the Warring States period (403-227 BCE). Unfortunately, he was slandered by treacherous court officials, banished from the court, and sent into exile three times. During his exiles he wrote On Encountering Sorrow, his most well-known long poem, expressing his most poignant, albeit ambivalent, feelings. He used highly imaginative and ambiguous images to vent his grievances that his virtue and talent were not appreciated, and to express his profound sorrow that he was unable to do anything for his State. The realisation that the world was too muddy and impure a place for him, and that he “cannot change himself to conform / therefore he will inevitably remain bitter till the end” gnawed his heart.66 Overwhelmed by a deep sense of despair, he drowned himself on the road of his long exile, and died, as he had wished, with an untarnished integrity. like a piece of unblemished jade in clean water. The journey is by no means easy for Li Bai either, as seen from his depiction of the road he travelled on in present-day Sichuan province: “Alas! so steep and perilous is the road to Shu / Climbing is as hard as reaching the sky blue!”67 Should he keep climbing up or go back down? Should he give up for good, or retreat and wait for a bole, a Noble man with an eye for talents, to discover him? Li Bai, like many other scholarofficials, was baffled by the dilemma as shown in Xing lu nan (Hard is the Way of the World): I cannot cross the Yellow River covered with ice; Nor can I climb Mount Taihang shrouded in snow.

64

Dong, Chu ci, 171. Li Sao in Dong, Chu ci, 24. 66 Jiu zhang in Dong, Chu ci, 135. 67 Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 162, vol, 1, 554. 65

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I’ll thus sit beside a stream with a fishing-pole68 Or dream about sailing close to the Sun 69 Journeying is hard, Journeying is hard, So many roads diverge, Which one is for me?70

The paragon of virtue of noble men was often compared to lofty, firm and constant mountains, and the scholar-official in exile would sigh that noble men who appreciated virtue and talent no longer existed, as is apparent in the poem Deng Youzhou tai ge (Ascending Youzhou Tower) by Tang poet Chen Zi’ang (661-702CE) after he was demoted from his position: Where were the sages of the past? Nor can I see any in future years. Sky and earth forever last, I alone burst into sorrowful tears!71

Li Bai, however, managed to stay more positive; he still held on to the thread of hope, dreaming about returning to court someday, as evident in the closing couplet of Hard is the Way of the World: “Time will come when I ride the wind and cleave the waves; ploughing the rough sea with sail soaring amidst clouds.” Insomuch as finding a solution to the dilemma, it is anything but straightforward; the scholar-officials all have to go through internal turbulence as suggested by the title Qu Yuan’s poem Lamenting Whirlwind, in which he says, “I’m trying to decide what to do / but unable to make up my mind.”72 Even Confucius himself cannot be totally free from this predicament. An advocate for social service and obligations, he sometimes also had to look for alternatives when he was overwhelmed by frustrations. We find 68

This line alludes to Jiang Ziya (1156-1017BCE), a very famous statesman, who encountered, while fishing, King Wen of Zhou, and was given very important role in court. He helped the King Wen, and King Wu of Zhou to defeat Shang. 69 This allusion refers to Yi Yin (ca.1630-1550BCE), one of the earliest statesman, who played an instrumental role in helping King Cheng of Tang, Shang Dynasty (1600-1046BCE) to put an end to Xia Dynasty (ca. 2070-1600 BCE). He allegedly had dreamed of sailing close to the Sun before he was discovered by the King, and put to important use. 70 See Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 162, vol. 1, 556. 71 See Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 83, vol. 1, 290. 72 See Jiu zhang [Nine Chapters] in Chu ci, 174.

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this account in Analects: Once Confucius asked four of his students – Zhong You (zi Zilu), Ran Qiu (zi Ziyou), Gongxi Chi (zi Zihua), and Zeng Dian (zi Zixi) – to talk about their ideals. Three of them expressed their desire to become successful in their career, and to serve the state and people. Zeng Dian, however, had different aspirations: “Late Spring time when it’s getting warmer, and we’re wearing comfortable spring dress, I’ll go to have a bath in the River Qing with five, six adults, and six, seven boys, enjoying the spring breeze on the terrace before chanting our way back.” Confucius’ preference for Zeng’s inclination may come as a surprise, but in fact, like so many scholar-officials, Confucius, too, had to turn around and find a way out when he came to a dead end - where the Dao was not accessible, in his own words. The alternative, then, is not that different from Daoist approach: abandoning politics and returning to nature: “When there is no Dao, take a raft to float on the sea.”73 Confucius has also allegedly said that “when the Dao prevails, one should come forward, but when Dao is prostrated, one should retreat.”74 Indeed, the contradiction between escaping from court and returning to nature on the one hand, yet when back in nature, still yearning to re-enter the political world they despised or condemned, was a complex that had tormented the psyche as well as body of Chinese literati. In dealing with the dilemma, nature played a pivotal role in the lives of those scholarofficials. For them nature was the locus where solace and inspiration were abundant. Many suggested that this was where they would eventually return as it was here that they found life’s fulfilment, just as Bai Juyi put it in his travel piece Cao tang ji (The Cottage): The Hermit Mountain has received me with the spiritual beauty of its scenery. Heaven has provided me with the opportunity; Earth has provided me with the place. Finally I have been able to obtain what I have desired, so what more is there for me to search for? … I must wait for the future when my siblings have all been married off, when my term as vice-prefect is completed, when I can decide on my own whether to serve or retire.75

Bai Juyi enjoyed a relatively long official career, albeit not without interruptions of banishment and relegation. It was during his exile in present-day Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province that he discovered and fell in love with the beauty of the Hermitage Mountain (Lu shan), where he built the cottage for himself right there on The Censer Peak (Xianglu feng). 73

Confucius, Analects, 5.8. Confucius, Analects, 8.13 75 Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 136. 74

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By the end of the Song Dynasty, many major writers used travel writing as a vehicle to express their views about cosmos and life, recovering the identities of nature and themselves as well as the relationships between them. Su Shi gave an account of his travel in a boat with some guests during his exile in Huang Prefecture in his Qian chibi fu (Red Cliff), one of the most well-known travel piece written in the form of fu rhapsody. Upon hearing one of the guests’ laments of the futility of human ambition and the insignificance of man amid the magnitude of time and space, Su Shi asked: Do you really understand the water and the moon? Water flows by, yet never leaves us; the Moon waxes and wanes, but doesn’t really changing its size. If you look at things as changing, then Heaven and Earth do not last for even the blink of an eye; but if you look at them as unchanging, then you are with everything and join the eternal.76

Su Shi somehow was able to find strength in nature to help him transcend hardships in life. Even during his exile to Hainan Island, a remote and backward place with appalling living conditions, he was still able to find joy in little things in nature. The following sketch about a trip he took with his third son Guo is a good illustration: “The moon appeared when we reached the river. We struck at the ripples in the middle of the current, scooping up the watery pearls and the jade-disc moon.”77 Perhaps the dilemma between service and retreat is best expressed in two lines in Xie Lingyun’s poem Deng chishang lou (Ascending the Tower on the Pound): “Wishing to advance in career, but lack of means / Wishing to retreat to farm, but short of strength.”78 Xie Lingyun is widely regarded as the originator of Chinese landscape poetry. Born into one of the most prominent gentry families, he too had no way to be exempted from the misfortune of constant career setbacks. Disappointed with the politics in court, he took sick leave, and tarried in his hometown for sometime, but more often he was demoted and exiled. When he was finally summoned back to court again, he only found himself in a more atrocious situation resulted from offending the emperor, which irretrievably led to his demise: decapitated at the age of forty-nine.

76

Strassberg Inscribed Landscapes, 187. “You bai shui shu fu Guo” in Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, 194. 78 “Song shi” in Lu, Xianqin Wei Jin Nan Bei chao shi, 1147. 77

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Xie’s affinity with nature is well manifested in his landscape writing, which also allowed him to give vent to his frustrations and grievances. Ascending the Tower on the Pond was written when Xie was banished from the capital and demoted to a remote place for the first time. The dilemma of advance and retreat was embodied in the contrasting images in the opening two lines of the poem – that of the legendary small dragon hidden in the water, symbolizing retreat and detachment; and that of the swan, flying high in the sky, symbolizing lofty ideals and high aspirations. The poet went on to say that he yearned for success, but felt ashamed in front of the flying swan; and he wanted to retreat, but was embarrassed by the hidden dragon – reality always fell short of his wishes. A few lines down, Xie alluded to wang sun’s dilemma, something he could not be extricate from: “A thousand thoughts torment me day and night / Ten thousand emotions harass me, from dawn to dust.”79 Even Tao Yuanming, living in seclusion, was not free from the torture of the dilemma: The Sun and the Moon go despite of man, High aspirations have no place to display, And this fills me with grief and pain, Disturbed all night through I remain.80

Ambitious and idealistic as he was, Li Bai also tried to live in isolation whenever he could. While he longed for a successful career, he also expressed his desire that once he succeeded, he would retreat to a river or a forest, for after all, “birds love green mountains far away, and fish enjoy deep blue sea.”81 Likewise, Su Shi could not escape from this dilemma. As much as he admired heroes and aspired after success, as shown in his lyrics, Su Shi still wished that he could “vanish with his little boat, floating on the sea for the rest of his life” (Lin Jian xian).82 While Su did not really live in seclusion as Tao Yuanming, Wang Wei, or even Li Bai did, he nonetheless built a small dwelling during his first exile, and lived on a farm called Dongpo (meaning ‘the East slope’), which was to become his literary pseudonym. In many of his writings he proudly stated that he was born with a love for mountains and streams, and that he had travelled far and wide not least because of frequent demotions and exiles. During some of his exiles he wrote his famous travel pieces, revealing his philosophical 79 These two lines are from Xie’s poem Ru Pengli hu kou [Entering the Mouth of Pengli Lake]. See “Song shi” in Lu, Xianqin Wei Jin Nan Bei chao shi, 1147. 80 Za shi [Miscellaneous poem] in Lu, Xianqin Wei Jin Nan Bei chao shi, 989. 81 “Liu bie Wang Sima song” in Quan Tang shi, juan 174, vol. 1, 594. 82 Tang, Quan Song ci, vol. 1, 287.

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view on nature and human life, including The Red Cliff poem cited above, which is tinged with a sober mood at the end: “Life is but a dream / and I’ll drink to the moon.” Influenced by a Daoist and Buddhist outlook, many of the literati would turn to nature for inspiration and comfort. By choice or by force, they would leave the court and take to the road, as Li Bai writes in his poem Xuanzhou Xie Tiao lou jianbie xiao shu shu Yun (Farewell to Uncle Yun, the Imperial Librarian, at Xie Tiao’s Pavilion in Xuanzhou): “When despaired of human affairs, / I roam a boat with loosened hairs.”83 Some of the scholar-officials might have been more content than others with their lives, but by and large most still experienced a tug-of-war within themselves, agonising over the dilemma. In his most well-known lyric Shui diao ge tou (To the Tune of Prelude to Water Melody) Su Shi uses images and metaphors to subtly suggest this tragic plight: Don’t know what time of the year In the palace above tonight would be? I long to ride the wind to return to the palace, Yet I fear it might be too high and cold for me.84

Su Shi, a victim of political factions, was banished from the court, and demoted and exiled may times. By the time he wrote this lyric he had been in Mizhou (present-day Zhucheng, Shangdong province) for a couple of years, but it must have seemed much longer to him. It was the night of the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, a time for family reunion. Being on exile he felt even more homesick on this occasion; he especially missed his younger brother, whom he was very close to. However, this lyric suggests much more than just homesickness. He was struggling within himself – should he return to court or not? His desire to return is damped by the apprehension that the court might be “too high and too cold” a place for him, and he thus wondered in the ensuing lines if life away from the court might be better off after all. Unlike Qu Yuan, though, Su Shi seemed to be able to transcend bitterness, and was more inclined to accept the vicissitudes of life with optimistism as can be discerned from the tone at the end of the lyric: Men have happy and sad times, they meet and part, Just as the moon has its waxing and waning cycles, Things have never been perfect since ancient times. 83 84

Lin, Quan Tang shi, juan 177, vol. 1, 605. Tang, Qan Song ci, vol. 1, 280.

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To Stay or to Leave I only hope we enjoy a long life-span, And share the moon's beauty even though we are far apart.

Conclusion The scholar-officials mentioned above, and many more, might have set out on their journeys with the same destination in mind, but despite their best efforts, very few could reach the goal. Most of them were derailed from the tracks by rough winds and wild storms of the political climate of their times, and were forced to take different paths, wandering and pondering: to be or not to be; to stay or to leave. Some kept climbing in order to get a better view; some managed to find an anchorage in calm and tranquil water for meditation, but not without melancholy; some decided to ride the wind and cleave the waves, but unfortunately only to find their boats engulfed; still others, totally overcome by exhaustion and despair, but unwilling to give in, chose to make shan-shui their final destination; the ultimate resting place. The landscape of Chinese travel writing is thus dotted with a trail of footprints of travellers, or rather exiles, wavering at the crossroads. Silhouetted against mountain ranges and reflected in clear water are a file of figures. Among them: Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Liu Zongyuan and Su Shi. Whatever their destinations, all of them, weatherbeaten, undertook long and hard journeys, leaving in their wake ineffaceable marks not only amidst shan-shui, but also in the course of Chinese intellectual history.

Bibliography Sources in Chinese Cao Minggang, ed. Wei Jin Nan Bei chao sanwen ⇋໏વਨફങધ [A Collection of Proses from Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties]. Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2000. Chen Qiaoyi and Duan Xizhong, eds. Shuijing zhu shu ≤㓿⌘⮿ [Notes on the Guide to Waterways]. Nanjing: Jiangsu gujichubanshe, 1989. Cheng Junying, ed. Shi jing 孿兞 [Book of Songs]. Shanghai: Shanhai guji chubanshe, 2006. Dong Chuping, ed. Chu ci ၙോ [Songs of the South]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe DongChuping, 2006.

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Fang Zhongfu and Li Erhe, eds. Zheng He qi xia Xiyang 恹ਮ೻ৣਧஞ [Zheng He’s Seven Expeditions to the Western Oceans]. Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 2005. Gu Yanwu. Ri zhi lu Zheng shi ᰕᘇ↓࿻ [Daily Reminder, the Formal Beginning] in Rizhi lu ji shi quan xian ben, juan 17 [A Complete Collection of Rizhi lu]. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006. Hu Daojing. Menxi bitan jiaozheng ᜂ᪥㷘宰ૅਫ [Chats from Dream Stream]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1957. Ji Xianlin, ed. Da Tang Xiyu ji পརਧୠ存 [Great Tang Records of the Western Regions]. Beijing: Zhonghuashuju, 1985. Ju Cai, ed. Cifu yibai pian 䗎䍻аⲮㇷ [A Hundred Pieces of Rhapsody]. Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1994. Lin Debao, Le Jun and Ni Wenjie, eds. Quan Tang shi ‫ ޘ‬ୀ 䈇 , [A Complete Collection of Tang Poetry]. 4 volumes. Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 1998. Qi Yusheng and Xia Yuquan, eds. Shiji ਢ䇠 [Records of the Grand Historian] Changchun: Beifang funԉ ertong chubanshe, 2002. Tang Guizhang, ed. Quang Song ci ৸ᅱ孵 [A Complete Collection of Song Lyrics]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979. Wang Anshi. Wang Anshi shi ji ⦻ᆹ⸣䈇䳶 [The Poetry Collection of Wang Anshi]. Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1974. Zhang Peiheng and Luo Yuming, eds. Zhongguo wenxue shi রবધ৾ఴ [The History of Chinese Literature]. Shanghai: Fudan Daxue chubanshe, 1996. Zhu Huirong, ed. Xu Xiake you ji ᗀ䵎ᇒ⑨䇠 [The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake]. Kunming:Yunnan chubanshe, 1985.

Sources in English Birrell, Anne, trans. The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Boulton, Nancy E. “Early Chinese Buddhist Travel Records as a Literary Genre.” Unpublished PhD thesis, Georgetown University, 1982. Confucius. The Analects. Translated by D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Eitel, E. J. trans. “The Chronicle of Mu, Son-of-Heaven.” China Review 17, no. 4 (1888): 223-240; and no. 5, 242-258. Frankel, Hans H. “The Contemplation of the Past in T’ang.” In Perspectives on the T’ang, edited by A. F. Wright and D. Twitchett. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973.

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Legge, James trans. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms; Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fâ-hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline. Oxford, 1886. Mitchell, W. J. T. ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Needham, Joseph. Introductory Orientations, volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. Strassberg, Richard. Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Strassberg, Richard, ed. and trans. A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE SHLUCHIM, THE REBBE, AND THE TIGGUN OLAM: THE TWO PILGRIMAGES WITHIN THE WORLD OF THE CHABAD LUBAVITCH SIMON THEOBALD

Introduction This chapter provides an ethnographic study of the Chabad Lubavitcher Hasidic dynasty and their pilgrimage practices, arguing that the Lubavitcher Hasidim have configured the notion of traditional pilgrimage into two atypical religious journeys; one to the grave (Ohel) of the late Chabad Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and the other to the spiritual heart of the individual Jew as part of their outreach program. To do this, it revisits the traditional scholarship of Mircea Eliade, focusing on the pilgrimage as a journey (physical or not) to the axis mundi, as well as advocating an attempt to recognise the emic discourse that explains pilgrimage from within the Kabbalistic worldview of Chabad. It accepts the criticism of traditional theories offered by Coleman, Eade, and Sallnow, yet continues to support the validity of these earlier works, albeit with modern adaptations that shy away from deterministic definitions of pilgrimage. In this way, this chapter perceives visitation to the grave of Schneerson as representing an informal pilgrimage, that helps builds a sense of communitas among the Hasidim, and particularly among the new shluchim (missionaries) before they begin their second, formal pilgrimage as part of the Chabad outreach program. While on these ‘missionising’ activities, the shluchim perform the second pilgrimage, where the sacred is perceived as both transcendent and imminent, and the spiritual journey is understood as a voyage to the heart of the divine, mediated by the Yechidah, the soul of the Jew. This chapter concludes by arguing that no

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one theory is able to surmise the diversity of different pilgrimage types, while concurrently suggesting that a synthesis of academic and religious thought best reflects the unusual nature of Chabad pilgrimage in the twenty-first century.

Chabad Pilgrimage in its Context: The Problem of Pilgrimage in the Post-Temple Period Unlike the other great religious traditions, the Jewish practice of pilgrimage has been made problematic by the absence of a focal point of pilgrimage. Specifically, the destruction of the Jewish temple in the first century CE has meant that Jews are unable to fulfil the religious obligated journey to appear before the spirit of Yahweh present in the Kodesh HaKodashim (the holy of holies). This has meant that academic discourse has tended to overlook the practice of pilgrimage within Judaism, tending instead towards the more obvious pilgrimages of Islam (hajj), Christianity (to Jerusalem, specifically the Holy Sepulchre), Hinduism (to the Ganges), etc. Alternatively, what research that has been conducted has looked overwhelmingly at the practice of the visiting of the graves of saints, the tzaddikim. While both these practices remain a legitimate area of academic inquiry, it has meant that contemporary Judaism, particularly Judaism in the Diaspora populations of North America, has been bereft of scholarship that focuses on pilgrimage. Even the practice of visiting Holocaust sites by secular Jews has seen scant attention. Similarly, academic research into the Chabad Lubavitcher dynasty, an organisation that has saddled the divide between the ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jewish worlds, has focused heavily on their outreach efforts, but almost always through the lens of theories of mission. As such, this chapter recognises that Chabad is soon to be, if not already, one of the preeminent bodies within the Jewish world, and that our analysis of the organisation has been painfully lacking rigour. As such, this chapter should be understood as attempting to address the absence of research into pilgrimage in contemporary Judaism by focusing on the practice of atypical pilgrimage within the Lubavitcher Hasidic group, and in doing so, it hopes to move towards developing both new methods of understanding pilgrimage, and adding further depth to the study of an aspect of the Chabad movement that has thus far been overlooked.

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A brief history of Jewish pilgrimage The practice of formal Jewish pilgrimage began with the final redaction of the Torah following the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem in 520BCE under Persian auspices. The return of the Israelites began the domination of an exclusive cult of Yahweh-El and ended the existing heterodox religious environment that had seen competition between the priesthood based in Jerusalem that had focused on Yahweh, and the more common polytheistic practices of the local populace.1 With the final redaction of the Torah, it was at this point the beginning of pilgrimage to Jerusalem became firmly established in halakha, with the law insisting that “Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God.”2 These three harvest pilgrimage festivals (Shlosha Regalim ʤʹʥʬʹ ʭʩʬʢʸ) regulated the agricultural calendar that dominated Jewish ritual life.3 The first, in late spring, became Pesach (Passover), the next, in midsummer, Shavuot (Pentecost), and the final, in early autumn, became Sukkoth (Tabernacles). It is arguable however that Sukkoth festival, with the creation of tents that Jews are mandated to live in, represents residual cultural practices from the earlier nomadic lifestyle of the Israelites prior to their settling in the Levant.4 Pilgrimage continued as long as the temple existed. However with the spread of the Jewish community out of Judah and into Egypt, other communities in the Levant and as far as Europe, the pilgrimage was religiously reorientated from an obligatory commandment to a non-obligatory but highly meritorious act.5 This period of formal pilgrimage came to an end in the Jewish revolt during the 60s CE, following the Jewish revolt against Roman rule. The revolt failed, and in 70CE, the victorious armies of the Emperor Vespasian, commanded by his son Titus, ended the siege of Jerusalem, sacking and destroying the Temple.6 Visiting the ruins of the temple was made impossible following the Second Jewish Revolt (also known as the Bar Kokbha Revolt) under the rule of Emperor Hadrian, with the vast majority of Jews expelled from the Holy Land.7 1

Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (MacMillan Publishing: New York, 1952), 184187. 2 Exodus 23:17; Exodus 34:23; Deuteronomy 16:16 3 Gil Daryn, “Moroccan Hassidism: The Chavrei Habakuk Community and its Veneration of Saints,” Ethnology 37, no. 4 (1998): 352. 4 Weber, Ancient Judaism, 62. 5 Nicholas de Lange, “Pilgrimages in Judaism,” UNESCO Courier (May, 1995): 2. 6 Daryn, ‘Moroccan Hassidism,” 352. 7 Daryn, ‘Moroccan Hassidism,” 352.

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The spread of Jewish communities out of Israel, and into other lands, did however see the development of local Jewish pilgrimages, built around the gravesites of tzaddikim (saints or holy people). In Morocco in particular, a large Jewish community based around the Atlas Mountains developed hundreds of shrines to local saints, with an estimated total of nearly five-hundred and seventy-one different shrines, including twentytwo to female saints.8 The widespread practice of saint worship among the Sephardim of Morocco should be understood as reflecting the cultural syncretism between Islam and Judaism in the country, with Clifford Geertz suggesting that; Islam in Barbary was – and to a fair extent still is – the Islam of saint worship and moral severity, magical power and aggressive piety, and this was for all practical purposes as true in the alleys of Fez and Marrakech as in the expanses of the atlas or the Sahara.9

This religio-cultural synthesis in Morocco points also to the mutability of Jewish religious practice, and the tendency to develop localised religious rituals and localised pilgrimages with the emergence of relatively isolated and autonomous communities in the Diaspora. Localised pilgrimage would appear equally among eastern European Ashkenazim, also focused on the graves of tzaddikim, but was also a feature of many religions, with the Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage emerging in part following the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslims and the need to create a Christian pilgrimage within the world of Western Orthodoxy. With the large-scale emigration of Moroccan Jews to the newly founded state of Israel in the decades post-1948, the practice of creating local saints once again emerged to satisfy the religious needs of the community.10 Similarly, the El Ghriba synagogue on the island of Djerba, in Tunisia, continues to be a place of pilgrimage for the Jews of Tunisia and their descendants in France and Israel during the Lag Ba’Omer holiday.11 In the contemporary era, aside from the nominal notion of the return to Jerusalem (which is invoked, for instance, at the end of the Pesach feast), the idea of a religiously obligated pilgrimage has been relegated to the past as a “temple tradition” which can no longer apply in the absence of its 8

de Lange, “Pilgrimages in Judaism,” 3. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 9. 10 Daryn, “Moroccan Hassidism,” 534. 11 Shlomo Deshen, “Near the Jerba Beach: Tunisian Jews, an Anthropologist, and Other Visitors,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no.2 (1997): 92. 9

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locus.12 Nevertheless, this notion of yearning remains strong in Judaism (and Christianity), with the concept of a “next year” creating a perpetual chronology that is linked to the locative; the sacred space of Jerusalem. The romantic notion of the ideal Jerusalem appears heavily in Ladino poetry, including the work of the premier Hebrew poet of the Middle Ages, Judah HaLevi, whose religious work heavily focuses on the return to Eretz Yisrael.13 Similarly, the perfected Jerusalem also features strongly in the Book of Revelation. Judaism has also long had an informal pilgrimage practice, even during the existence of the temple. Held to be the final resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron has long served as a place of pilgrimage for Jews (and later, Muslims) aside from Jerusalem.14 This dual practice also has commonalities with the visiting of the shrines of saints in Kashmir, which are holy to Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. There are similar pilgrimage shrines in Tsfat, which, following the expulsion of Jews from Spanish possessions in 1492, became a focal point of Kabbalistic practices and wisdom, with Isaac Luria (the originator of contemporary Lurianic Kabbalah) and Joseph Caro (the author of the definitive guide to Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch) having their resting places here.15 Tiberias, on the shores of the lake of the same name, became another place of pilgrimage within Eretz Yisrael, as the place where the Jerusalem Talmud was redacted, and in the sixteenth century, a place of advanced Rabbinical learning, holding the relics of many learned Rabbis, including Maimonides, who although moving to Egypt from Spain, ultimately died in Tiberias.16 Among secular Jews, the tragedy of the Holocaust has reconfigured the landscape from Germany to Russia not just of persecution, but to a sacred realm to those who made the ultimate sacrifice, doted with the reliquaries of the bones of saints in the form of the death camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor.

12

de Lange, “Pilgrimages in Judaism,” 3. See Joseph Yahalom, Yehuda Halevi: Poetry and Pilgrimage (Tel Aviv: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2009). 14 Noga Collins-Kreiner, “Graves as Attractions: Pilgrimage-Tourism to Jewish Holy Graves in Israel,” Journal of Cultural Geography 24, no. 1 (2006): 72. 15 Collins-Kreiner, “Graves as Attraction,” 72. 16 Tamar Alexander-Frizer, The Heart is a Mirror: The Sephardic Folktale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 202. 13

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A very brief history of the emergence of Hasidism In order to adequately describe the contemporary practice of pilgrimage within the Lubavitcher world, it is necessary to briefly deviate and provide a redacted history of the Hasidic movement, one of the most influential groups in contemporary Jewish history. The mutually antagonistic camps within the Jewish world that existed at the time of the Second Temple (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, Essenes, and Christians) would ultimately disappear in the wake of its destruction, leaving only two substantial ‘Jewish groups,’ the Pharisees and the early Christians.17 The Pharisees managed to outlast the destruction of the temple by focusing Jewish ritual life on exegesis of the Torah, the Mishnah (the oral law, codified along with commentaries in the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds), and the Midrash (non-binding mythic stories).18 As the Jewish people increasingly separated from their traditional home in the Middle East to communities across the world, adherence to the rituals and the proscriptions of the Rabbis would eventually become the markers of Judaism.19 As the centuries progressed, the largest division within the Jewish world was the marginally different ritual practices between Ashkenazi Jews (those Jews who lived in Christian Europe, particularly from Germany eastwards into Russia) and the Sephardic Jews (who lived mainly in Spain and North Africa, and later the Ottoman Empire after the expulsion of Jews from Spain following the reconquista). In Eastern Europe in particular, which gradually came to demographically dominate worldwide Jewry, the authority of Rabbinical Judaism was damaged by series of messiah claimants, the most notable being Shabbatai Tzvi (16261676), who despite being a Sephardic Jew, encouraged many Ashkenazim to follow him with popular outpourings of piety, only to disappoint his followers by ultimately converting to Islam.20 Those who followed Tzvi into Islam became a tiny minority in the Ottoman Empire referred to as the Dönmeh, outwardly Islamic while clandestinely adhering toJewish ritual in secret, much like the conversos in Spain following the reconquista, who

17

W. O. E. Oesterley, The Jews and Judaism During the Greek Period (New York: MacMillan, 1941), 252-254. 18 Weber, Ancient Judaism, 404. 19 Weber, Ancient Judaism, 404. 20 Martin Buber, Origin and Meaning of Hasidisim (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 31.

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were frequently accused of being Judios escondidos or marranos, false Christians who continued to adhere to Judaism.21 In this depressed environment, a charismatic movement that aimed to allow simple rural Jews access to religious ecstasy without the necessity of advanced Rabbinical knowledge emerged under the Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer (known as the Baal Shem Tov) (1698-1760), whose ability to redact the esoteric teachings of Sephardic mysticism to an eastern European context made him a leader par excellence.22 The movement, which ultimately became known as Hasidism (meaning ‘the pious ones’), was originally declared heretical by the Rabbinical authorities under the auspices of the Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (the Vilna Gaon), who became the leader of those opposed to Hasidim, referred to as the Mitnagdim (opponents).23 Following the Napoleonic Wars, and the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment – the Haskalah – the opposition between the Mitnagdim and Hasidim would fade as both came up against the threat of assimilation and the emergence of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, such as Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism.24 The rise of the antireligious and anti-nationalist Bolshevist movement in Russia, and the Russian revolution, saw the uprooting of many dynasties, with the Lubavitch, Breslov, Chernobyl, and Ruzhin dynasties all abandoning Eastern Europe.25 The Hasidic world would again be turned upside down by the Holocaust, with the vast majority of Hasidic dynasties and their followers murdered in the Nazi death camps, leaving a population greatly diminished at the end of the war.26 Following the Holocaust (shoah in Hebrew), those Hasidic communities who survived the war left the ravages of Europe behind them seeking a safer life in the New World. Both New York and Montreal would become home to a substantial population of Hasidic Jews, joining an already wellestablished Jewish community that had been in the continent since as early as 1492. The United States and Canada would become the refuge of the Bobover, Satmar, Skver, and Lubavitcher Hasidim, while other dynasties made aliyah to Israel instead, focusing on settlements in Bnai Brak and Jerusalem. Today, it is estimated that there are over half a million Hasidic 21

See Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (New York: Stanford University Press, 2009). 22 Buber, Origin and Meaning of Hasidisim, 25. 23 Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper Perennial, 1987), 297. 24 Johnson, A History of the Jews, 298. 25 Steven Lapidus, “The Forgotten Hasidim: Rabbis and Rebbes in Pre-War Canada,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes 12 (2004): 2. 26 Johnson, A History of the Jews, 512.

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Jews worldwide, although high birth rates within Hasidic families mean that Haredi Judaism is likely to become the most commonly practiced form of Judaism within the United States by 2050.27 In Israel, Haredi Jews currently comprise only 10% of the population, although they are the majority in settlements like Bnai Brak, Kfar Chabad, and parts of Jerusalem. Population estimates suggest that Haredi and Arab children will compose nearly 70% of the school age population of Israel by the 2050, compared to just 24% now.28 Although not the largest of the Hasidic dynasties, the Chabad Lubavitcher Hasidim are still estimated to include at least 200,000 members, and through their outreach efforts, have become by far the most well known, and it estimated that at least one million Jews attend a Chabad service every year.29 These demographic changes should point also to potential, if not the certainty, that Haredi Judaism is likely to become the normative form of Judaism by 2050, overturning nearly three hundred years of demographic domination by non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. With this looming reality, it is time that scholars came to grips with and focused more heavily on the rising influence of Haredi Judaism, both in Israel and the Diaspora, as this chapter attempts at least in part to achieve.

The First Chabad Pilgrimage: The Role of the Tzaddik in Hasidic Thought and the Power of the Rebbe’s Grave In Hasidic thought, every generation gives rise to certain exceptional leaders who are able to communicate with the divine in a way that ordinary Jews are unable to do so. These saints, the tzaddikim, offer lesser Jews their teachings in order that they may be able to communicate better with the HaShem. In death, the power of the tzaddik is imbued in the place of his burial. The Shulchan Aruch suggests that visiting a grave in general is a meritorious deed, as it arouses feelings of mourning, diminishes the yetzer hora (evil inclination), and encourages Jews to (re)turn towards God in remembrance.30 The Lubavitchers have a long pedigree of rhetoric

27

Jason Koutsoukis, “Haredi Way of Life Poses an ‘Existential Threat’,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 14, 2010, accessed August 29, 2012, http://www.smh.com.au/world/haredi-way-of-life-poses-an-existential-threat20100813-12358.html. 28 Koutsoukis, “Haredi Way of Life Poses an ‘Existential Threat’.” 29 Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1993), xiv-xv. 30 Orach Chayim 559:10.

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surrounding the role of the tzaddik within the community, and the power of the grave. The Lubavitcher Rabbi DovBer Hasidim (the Mittler Rab) suggests that; When a person goes to the grave [of a tzaddik], although [the tzaddik’s passing] was forgotten for a long time, the person will remember, [and take it to heart] to the extent that he will cry very bitterly. This will cause his heart to open entirely, enabling him to cry over his sins, until his heart is utterly contrite and crushed, [leading] to excessive tears.31

For those who knew the tzaddik in his lifetime, attending his grave encourages a further sense of humility, in much the same way that the attendee would be humbled by the presence of the tzaddik while he was alive, their greatness only increases in their death, and thus they are further humbled.32 Free from his physical body, the absolute power of the soul enables the devotee to enter a state of yirah ilaah, sublime fear, that nearly extinguishes the self, entering the individual into ecstatic union with God.33 In the Tanya, it is suggested that the tzaddik’s soul is ultimately subordinate to, and totally a part of the Ein Sof (God’s infiniteness).34 In this way, the devotee inspires his own divine spark, which reaches out to closer contact with the Ein Sof, enabling the devotee to achieve the ilaah teshuvah, the divine return, which is more meritorious than the regular teshuvah.35 As the Mittler Rebbe suggests: Simply put, the journey [to the resting place] with great desire reflects the generation of an arousal from below. Afterwards, when [the person] reaches [his destination], his great power of faith will cause him to negate his personal existence entirely. And he will prepare himself to approach Gd with a truly contrite spirit, giving over his soul, and pouring out his words before G-d from the depths of his heart, [feeling remorse over] the utter distance.36

31

Rabbi DovBer, “Kuntres HaHishtatchus,” Chabad.org website, accessed August 28, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/88978/jewish/KuntresHaHishtatchus.htm. 32 Isaiah 4:3 33 Rabbi DovBer, “Kuntres HaHishtatchus.” 34 Tanya, ch. 2. 35 Kesubos 111b; Sifri, commenting on Devarim 11:22 36 Rabbi DovBer, “Kuntres HaHishtatchus.”

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Furthermore, Kabbalistic thought holds that all prayers must pass through several spiritual layers to ultimately reach the Ein Sof, but that in order to do this, they must first go through the entrance to the Gan Eden, which the Zohar holds is located at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Israel.37 As such, prayers held at the Cave of the Patriarchs are the most meritorious, and will reach the Ein Sof most quickly, in contrast to prayers said in the ritually impure lands of gentiles, which, according to the Baal Shem Tov, can linger for years.38 Like the Cave of the Patriarchs, the graves of tzaddikim act as channels for the prayers, so that any Jew, regardless of whether he or she is a devotee of the tzaddik or not, can be ensured that their prayer will be accepted.39 With the so much messianic pretension surrounding the late Menachem Schneerson, the final Rebbe of the Lubavitcher, his grave in Queens has become a place of veneration for members of the dynasty. While Kabbalistic explanations offer an insight into the emic justification for such pilgrimage practices, it is critical to examine scholarly opinion as well. Erik Cohen offers a typology of places of pilgrimage that focuses on the unique nature of different forms of pilgrimage, differentiating between the ‘formal’ and ‘popular’ pilgrimages.40 Formal pilgrimage centres are those in which issues of import and the sublime take centre-stage, with the ritual activity of the pilgrimage typically being highly formalised, in accordance with traditionally established precepts.41 The principal motivation for the pilgrim in these journeys is the fulfilment of a fundamental religious obligation.42 Examples of this form of pilgrimage would include the hajj in Islam, and the three previously mentioned obligatory pilgrimages to Jerusalem. By comparison, popular centres represent those areas where the folkloric takes precedence over the orthodox.43 In this case, the pilgrim’s primary motivation, Cohen suggests, if not for recreation or entertainment, is the fulfilment of a vow or a personal request.44 Typically, vows can

37

Zohar, vol. I, 81a, Zohar Chadash (Midrash HaNe’elam), Vol. I, 21a. Maamarei Admor HaEmtza’i, Derushei Chasunah, Vol. II, 448; Shivchei HaBesht, 106. 39 Rabbi DovBer, “Kuntres HaHishtatchus.” 40 Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres: Central and Excentric,” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no.1 (1992): 36. 41 Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres,” 36. 42 Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres,” 36. 43 Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres,” 36. 44 Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres,” 37. 38

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include things as simple as success in romantic and business life, a desire for good health, and healing.45 The notion of ‘popular’ pilgrimage is strongly represented in the popular piety that surrounds the Rebbe’s Ohel (grave). The constant stream of visitors, Jew and (occasionally) Gentile, who come to ask for the Rebbe’s advice in matters of life, indicates that these prayers represent a desire for solutions to personal problems, rather than to matters of formal religiosity. The fact that the Ohel is in New York, once the treyfe medina, is no longer a hindrance to adoration, with Shifa Epstein noting that New York, like Israel, is now a focal point of Jewish revival since the Holocaust, and as such, has become a place of neo-pilgrimage.46 The grave has become a focal point of community worship in the period after Schneerson’s death, giving a fractured body of believers a continued sense of purpose and mission, and ultimately reassuring the borders of the community. In his definition of communitas, Victor Turner offers three potential permutations: existential or spontaneous communitas that happens at a particular moment with audience participation, normative communitas that transforms the spontaneous into a lasting and cohesive social structure, and finally, existential communitas that is understood as the “outward form of an inward happening.”47 Particularly popular among young Lubavitchers preparing for religious ministry, the visitation of the Ohel serves to entrench spontaneous communitas among Lubavitcher shluchim, while the space of the Ohel becomes the locus for the social transition between the pre-missionary childhood, and missionary adulthood. At the Ohel, the young shluchim participate in the ‘happening’ of the event, typically praying that the Rebbe guide their journey into the rest of the world, symbolically ending their association with the closed world within Chabad, and the new world outside of the social confines of the Hasidic community. In this way, at the Ohel, the shluchim move between established social classes, Victor and Edith Turner’s notion that the pilgrimage enables the novice to transition to a new status; it is therefore a liminal space that not only connects the mundane to the divine, but bookends the social transition of young Lubavitchers.48 That the Ohel is open to Jew and 45

Cohen, “Pilgrimage Centres,” 37. Shifa Epstein, “Going Far Away in Order to Better Understand the Familiar: Odyssey of a Jewish Folklorist into the Bobover Hasidic Community,” The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 444 (1999): 200. 47 David Leeming (with Kathryn Madden and Stanton Marlan), Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (New York: Springer, 2010), 162. 48 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 94. 46

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Gentile alike further reinforces the Ohel’s potential to create a spontaneous communitas, as the fundamental experience of the sacred at the moment transcends the traditional border between the two distinct groups. Friendships made at the ‘happening’ of the Ohel ensure that transitory nature of communitas at the vouchsafing prayers is transformed into a longer lasting normative communitas, a process that is further entrenched, I will argue later, in the ‘second’ Chabad pilgrimage. More recently, communitas has been criticised by several academics, including John Eade and Michael Sallnow, who have argued that contrary to the Turner’s assertion that the pilgrimage annihilates boundaries, it instead reinforces them, with power plays between competing forces creating schisms between official and private discourse concerning the role of the shrine.49 However, the fact that the Ohel is equally open to Jews and Gentiles, as well as to moschiachists (those within the Lubavitch movement who argue for a public revelation that Schneerson is the prophesised messiah) and anti-moshciachist (those within the movement who resist any public declaration of Schneerson as the messiah) forces within the dynasty, indicated that the visitation of the grave does appear to transcend these divisions, as belligerent forces come together asking for guidance on matters that typically have little to do with halakhah. That said, the ongoing conflict over other possessions of Schneerson, most notably his chair, point to a reality of conflict, if not at the Ohel, then certainly elsewhere.

The Second Chabad Pilgrimage: Shluchim, Outreach, and the Tikkun Olam Hasidism at its core is driven by the mystical teachings of Lurianic Kabbalah, based on rabbinical exegesis of the Zohar and other esoteric works of Jewish theology. Quintessential to these is the concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world), that derives from Kabbalistic cosmology. At the creation, the Kabbalah holds, the Ein Sof withdrew from himself in order to create space for the world that was to come into existence.50 In the process, parts of the divine were ‘shattered’, spreading throughout the whole of existence, where they became the Yechidah, the highest of the

49

John Eade and Michael Sallnow, “introduction,” in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, eds John Eade and Michael Sallnow (London; Routledge, 2000), 5. 50 Buber, Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 78.

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five souls in Jewish thought, and the true “divine quintessence.”51 The teachings of Moshe Chaim Luzatto, an eighteenth century Italian Rabbi, suggested that the physical world is linked to the spiritual one, and that Jews, as a nation of priests, have the capacity to influence the spiritual with their physical actions, by performing the six-hundred and thirteen mitzvoth.52 In the thought of Chabad, the Jewish ability to aid the divine in the restitution of the divine sparks to the Ein Sof is a way of hurrying the return of the moshiach (the messiah), who will usher in the world to come. As such, the Chabad shliach is mandated to bring as many Jews back to Orthodox Judaism as possible, encouraging them to practice the mitzvoth wherever they can, in order to liberate the divine particles. The process is described by Elad Nehorai: You just left the physical world. You ceased to exist. You united your mind with your heart. You turned a piece of the world from evil into good. You exposed a long-dormant part of yourself, a part that only a small percentage of the world possesses that has been crying out for you to tap into. You just reaffirmed the fact that you and everything else in this world, and beyond, are all one. You just touched infinity.53

With the absence of the formalised pilgrimages since the destruction of the Temple, Chabad’s quest to bring Jews “back to Judaism” serves as replacement for the formal pilgrimage. The way in which the tikkun olam is formulated in Chabad thought finds parallels in Mircea Eliade’s notion of the axis mundi. Eliade suggests that pilgrimage represents a religiously motivated journey to the centre of the world (the axis mundi), or a homologous representation.54 The axis mundi, Eliade suggests “is the meeting point of heaven, earth, and hell.”55 Because Hasidic dynasties, and particularly Chabad, envision a deity which is not removed from the world, but instead, an integral part of it, the whole landscape of creation, including all living things, becomes a sacred place that is interwoven with the nature of HaShem. This makes the Chabad shluchim what Noga 51 Chabad.org, “Key word: Yechidah,” Chabad.org accessed August 27, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/search/keyword_cdo/kid/11233/jewish/Yechidah.htm. 52 Derech Hashem I:5:4-5 53 Elad Nehorai, “To Light a Spark: Creating for Dummies,” Chabad.org blog site, August 29, 2010, accessed August 30, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/blogs/blog_ cdo/aid/882031/jewish/To-Light-A-Spark.htm. 54 Mircea Eliade, The Quest and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969), 69. 55 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 12.

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Collins-Kreiner refers to as “existential pilgrims,” pilgrims for whom the whole voyage, and arguably, the whole nature of reality, is religious.56 Because the whole nature of space is sacred, the pilgrimage and the pilgrimage site becomes an even more elevated place of communion with the divine, in a “sacred within the sacred” hierarchy. Particularly, the particles of the Ein Sof that are left within each Jew, the Yechidah, become the point of contact with the transcendent¸ and therefore the focus of the pilgrimage. By travelling overseas to the furthest reaches of the world in search for Jews who do not know Judaism, the Chabad shliach performs a physical journey across a sacred landscape which then takes him to the real axis mundi inside the soul of his fellow Jew, where the microcosm of the soul ultimately reflects the macrocosm of the universe, with every mitzvah performed furthering the action of creation. The shliach need not travel to the ends of the earth to achieve this, however, and reaching the soul of a Jew in the neighbourhood is as valid as that of one in the wildernesses of Siberia. In this way, the pilgrimage can also be reinterpreted not as a journey to the sacred, but rather a sacred journey, where, as Alan Morinis suggests, “the pilgrimage is a journey undertaken by a person in quest of a place or a state that he or she believes to embody a valued ideal.”57 Here, the ideal becomes the desire to bring the Jew back to his religion, liberating the divine within, which transforms the pilgrimage from an external act to an internal act. As mentioned previously, it is at this point that the spontaneous communitas of the Ohel is permanently transformed into the normative communitas of the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty as an institution, creating a lasting social system for both the Lubavitcher shluchim, and, potentially, for the Jew who has re-discovered his Judaism. As Eliade suggests, the pilgrimage thus becomes “a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divine. Attaining the centre is equivalent to a consecration,”58 with the consecration applying equally to both the shluchim and the baalei teshuvah. The outreach program is not entirely atraditional however, with practice of the mitzvoth, particularly the placing of tefillin upon men, serving as the indicators of the continued orthodoxy of the pilgrimage. These aspects of the ritual should be understood with reference to the performative aspects of the pilgrimage, where the public declaration of 56

Collins-Kreiner, “Graves as Attractions,” 86. Alan Morinis, “Introduction”, in Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage, ed. Alan Morinis (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), 4. 58 Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 18. 57

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faith is as important as the private change within. The wrapping of tefillin and the donning of the tallit, either by the shliach as exemplar or the individual who is rediscovering their journey, reflects an interpretation of the pilgrimage as “kinetic ritual.”59 These rituals are also primarily public acts, where the shluchim seek out Jews in plain view of the rest of society, creating what Erving Goffman refers to as a ‘setting’ involving scenery (the public space) and props (the tefillin and tallit gadol), once again creating a liminal space between the profane public space, and the private and sacred space of communion with the divine, where, following from Chabad’s pantheistic theology, the public is stripped of its profanity, and reinterpreted as an open space for divine experiences.60 Within Goffman’s schema, the shluchim act until they have brought their participant to an appropriate place (having said the shema with the tefillin and tallit on), and then are able to terminate the performance and leave, having briefly created a ‘highly sacred’ moment. Although Eliade’s notion of the axis mundi has been strongly criticised, it remains a useful trope with which to examine Chabad’s practice of outreach, given that Chabad refuses to recognise the program as constituting “mission”, and, if we are to accept their own emic discourse, then an alternative paradigm must be applied. In this way, the notion of the axis mundi as the spiritual soul of the Jew acts as an unusual, albeit highly successful method of interpretation. In lieu of these competing theories of pilgrimage though, Simon Coleman has argued, convincingly that It is important that people continue to try to define what they mean by ‘pilgrimage’, but I am not convinced that the content of any single definition matters very much. I mean here that we should always be made aware of what a given author thinks he or she is talking about, but should not assume that over time we shall collectively achieve an ever more precise and universally applicable set of criteria with which finally to pin down ‘the’ activity of pilgrimage.61

In light of this argument, we should ultimately conclude that, despite a panoply of different potential interpretations, the practice of pilgrimage, 59

Simon Coleman and John Eade, “Introduction: Reframing Pilgrimage,” in Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, eds Simon Coleman and John Eade (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 2-3. 60 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: The Overlook Press, 1973), 22. 61 Simon Coleman, “Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation, and Beyond,” Anthropological Theory 10, no.1-2 (2010): 362.

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particularly within the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, remains an illusory and obtuse concept.

The Trappings of the Pilgrimage: Dress, and Ritual Practice Unlike other forms of pilgrimage that often have obligatory religious dress codes, the visiting of the Rebbe’s Ohel and the outreach programs of the Chabad shluchim require no mandated religious attire. Nevertheless, as a group that continues to adhere closely to Orthodox Rabbinical exegesis, all Lubavitchers must adhere to certain standards of modesty, broadly under the Halakhic concept of tzniut.62 Like other Hasidic dynasties, the Lubavitchers maintain a dress code that is reminiscent of fashion styles from the bygone era of Eastern European shtelekh (predominantly Jewish villages), although more than any other lineage, the Chabad Lubavitchers have chosen to update their choice of clothing to represent an essentially modern, albeit very conservative, mode of dress. As such, typical dress code for Lubavitcher men, all year round, will be a contemporary black suit jacket, black woollen pants, black business shoes, and a white business shirt. Lubavitcher men wear hats, although in their quest to keep the organisation relevant, the preference is now for black fedoras, with the traditional shtreimelech (a velvet and fur hat worn for special occasions) and spodikim (a taller, cylindrical version of the shtreimel) of other groups no longer part of the Chabad tradition.63 The preference for black clothing typically represents a minhag, a custom, rather than any mandated religious obligation.64 Other Chabad-trained Rabbis have asserted that the custom of all men wearing the same clothes represents the fact that they are disconnected from worldly and material affairs like fashion, allowing them to instead focus purely on religious matters.65 Despite this dismissal of contemporary fashion, the Talmud reminds Orthodox Jews of the 62

Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “Tznius of Dress,” trans. Sholom B. Wineberg, Chabad.org, accessed August 27, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_ cdo/aid/72872/jewish/Tznius-Of-Dress.htm. 63 Aron Moss, “Why the Jacket and Hat?,” Chabad.org Questions and Answers, accessed August 26, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/ 160970/jewish/Why-the-Jacket-and-Black-Hat.htm. 64 Yerachmiel Tilles, “Why the Long Black Coat?,” Chabad.org Ideas and Beliefs, accessed August 28 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3186/ jewish/Why-the-Long-Black-Coat.htm. 65 Moss, “Why the Jacket and Hat?”

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importance of clothing and maintaining a high standard of dress as part of honouring the lord and one’s brother.66 Mandated religious clothing that all Chabad Lubavitch men will wear include a black velvet kippah, typically hidden under the fedora, as well as the tallit katan, a four cornered garment with tzitzit attached that is worn like a singlet under the shirt, enabling religious Jews to fulfil the mitzvah of having tzitzit (tassels that are knotted in a particular way to remind the wearer of the mitzvoth) attached to their corners at all time.67 At the Ohel, it is obligatory for male Jews and Gentiles to wear a hat or a kippah, and it is also customary for members of both sexes not to wear leather shoes.68 Within the Ohel, there are special antechambers for men and women, reflecting a Middle Eastern preference to segregate the sexes.69 It is also common to insist that people walk backwards after leaving the Ohel.70 While on their outreach program, all Chabad shluchim are likely to carry with them tefillin and a larger tallit gadol. The tefillin, also known as phylacteries, are two straps of leather with leather boxes attached, which contain the shema and other commandments from the Torah. The boxes are then strapped to the arm and the head, fulfilling the mitzvah to bind the law as “a sign upon your hand, and they should be for a reminder between your eyes.”71 These two items are carried with the Chabad shluchim on their outreach program as part of the Schneerson’s “tefillin campaign,” which became the hallmark of the outreach program as a whole. Typically, a Chabad shliach will go to a city, wait in a busy public area, asking male passersby whether they are Jewish. If they say that they are, the shliach will then ask them to put on the tefillin and recite the shema, fulfilling the mitzvah and enabling the Jew to very publicly rekindle his connection with his religion. In addition to their clothing, Jewish men are also mandated to maintain particular styles of appearance. In particular, the beard is not allowed to be trimmed, meaning that all Chabad shluchim have long beards, and they are encouraged not to trim the “corners of the head.”72 The hair that grows 66

Talmud Shabbat, 113a. Chabad.org, “Tzitzit,” Chabad.org Mitzvah Minute, accessed August 29, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/619467/jewish/Tzitzit.htm. 68 Ohelchabad.org, “Appropriate Conduct at the Ohel,” Ohel Chabad Lubavitch, accessed August 26, 2012, http://www.ohelchabad.org/templates/articlecco_ cdo/aid/78447/jewish/Conduct.htm. 69 Ohelchabad.org, “Appropriate Conduct at the Ohel.” 70 Ohelchabad.org, “Appropriate Conduct at the Ohel.” 71 Deuteronomy 6:8 72 Leviticus 19:27 67

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here, typically referred to as peyot (meaning ‘corners’), also known as sidelocks, has mystical significance within the Kabbalah, although unlike other Hasidic dynasties, the Chabad Lubavitch follow the practice of Isaac Luria and trim their peyot before they touch the beard.73 Unlike Lubavitcher men, Lubavitcher women are less confined by the minhag of dress codes, typically wearing more modern clothing, with greater variety. They are equally bound by the notion of tzniut though, which is typically stricter from women than it is for men, and again, stricter for married women, than it is for unmarried girls. Prior to marriage, Chabad girls will typically wear long dresses that cover the arms, legs, and collar bones, with stockings on legs to ensure the potential for immodest uncovering is reduced. Chabad women are forbidden from wearing pants or jeans, as such outfits would negate the mitzvah against cross-dressing.74 After marriage, Chabad women are required to cover their hair in public, as the hair remains visible only to her family from that point on.75 As such, women will typically wear either a wig over their real hair, a scarf, a hat, or a snood (a tight-fitting scarf that covers the whole head).76 Among some members of the dynasty, there has been a tendency to move towards more conservative poskim (rabbinical decrees), which has mandated that married women shave their heads, and then wear a head covering, lest there be even the potential for the immodest showing of hair in public.77 Chabad women are not typically referred to as shluchim, although the preference to get married young and have families early means that most Chabad shluchim are married by the time they are nineteen, living with their wives in whatever destination they have been sent to. As the face of Chabad abroad, both men and women are expected to maintain conservative and formal standards of attire at all times. The dress of the Chabad shluchim has strongly reflects Goffman’s notion of the twofold nature of communication; the expression that an individual gives, 73 Yosef Y. Jacobson, “Kabbalistic Hair Styles,” Chabad.org Kabbalah spirituality, accessed August 29, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/ 380701/jewish/Kabbalistic-Hair-Styles.htm. 74 Deuteronomy 22:5 75 Aron Moss, “The Meaning of Hair Covering,” Chabad.org The Jewish Woman, accessed August 27, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_ cdo/aid/336035/jewish/The-Meaning-of-Hair-Covering.htm. 76 Hana-Bashe Himelstein, “Partying With the King,” Chabad.org The Jewish Woman, accessed August 28, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/ article_cdo/aid/611969/jewish/Partying-With-the-King.htm. 77 Louise Tondeur, “Shaving Grace,” openDemocracy, January 22, 2003, accessed August 29, 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-hair/article_910.jsp.

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and the expression that he gives off, with Chabad physical appearance representing a non-verbal form of performance that is at least partially designed to encourage a sense among observers of seriousness and commitment to a religious ideal.78 As with particular dress, there are no specific rituals that pertain to the visitation of the Rebbe’s grave. Typically, the Lubavitchers will read prayers alongside the grave, swaying backwards and forwards in a motion that is commonly referred to as shuckling, a Yiddish term meaning ‘to sway’.79 As part of their outreach program, the Chabad have a more formalised ritual, with the placing of tefillin requiring careful precision in order to adhere exactly to years of collected wisdom on how the tefillin should be worn, with each of the knots in the binding representing letters from the Hebrew alphabet, which in turn has mystical symbolism.80

Conclusion This chapter has provided a variety of sometimes competing, sometimes mutually compatible interpretations of two different types of ‘pilgrimage’ within the world of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim. It has suggested that, only by synthesising religious theory, with academic discourse, old and new, are we able to fully understand the practice of pilgrimage within the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty. In the case of the visitation of the grave of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the pilgrimage is best understood as an representing Cohen’s notion of a popular pilgrimage practice that is place orientated, focusing on the sanctity of the holy person, and the potential of the sacred place to develop a sense of spontaneous communitas among participants. With the Chabad outreach program, the notion of a voyage to the axis mundi, provides a firm methodological footing, yet its focus on a physical journey struggles to encapsulate the nearly pantheistic understanding of the cosmos that reflects the position of the Chabad Lubavitcher Hasidim, who perceive all reality as sacred, rather than just at certain places. To fully understand the nature of Chabad however, we must accept flexible and changeable definitions and methodologies of pilgrimage that do not privilege the academic over the religious, or the new necessarily over the old. Only by maintaining such flexibility can we 78

Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, 2. Ask the Rabbi, “Shakesprayer,” Ohr Somayach, accessed August 29, 2012, http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/142/Q1/. 80 Chabad.org, “Tefillin,” Chabad.org, accessed August 28, 2012, http://www.chabad.org/library/howto/wizard_cdo/aid/272667/jewish/1-Place-onArm.htm. 79

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merge both the mystical inner teachings of the dynasty, which focus on the soul as the essence of God and the sacred, and the point of true pilgrimage as internal rather than external, enabling us to understand that each shliach performs a pilgrimage to the centre of the divine at the core of the Jew.

Bibliography Alexander-Frizer, Tamar. The Heart is a Mirror: The Sephardic Folktale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Buber, Martin. Origin and Meaning of Hasidisim. New York: Horizon Press, 1960. Cohen, Erik. “Pilgrimage Centres: Central and Excentric.” Annals of Tourism Research 19, no.1 (1992): 33-50. Coleman, Simon. “Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation, and Beyond.” Anthropological Theory 10, no.1-2 (2010): 355-368. Coleman, Simon and John Eade. “Introduction: Reframing Pilgrimage.” In Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, edited by Simon Coleman and John Eade, 1-25. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Collins-Kreiner, Noga, “Graves as Attractions: Pilgrimage-Tourism to Jewish Holy Graves in Israel.” Journal of Cultural Geography 24, no. 1 (2006): 67-89. Daryn, Gil. “Moroccan Hassidism: The Chavrei Habakuk Community and its Veneration of Saints.” Ethnology 37, no.4 (1998): 351-72. De Lange, Nicholas. “Pilgrimages in Judaism,” UNESCO Courier (May, 1995): 1-5. Deshen, Shlomo. “Near the Jerba Beach: Tunisian Jews, an Anthropologist, and Other Visitors.” Jewish Social Studies 3, no.2 (1997): 90-118. Eade, John and Michael Sallnow. “Introduction.” In Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited by John Eade and Michael Sallnow, 1-29. London; Routledge, 2000. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965. —. The Quest and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969. Epstein, Shifra. “Going Far Away in Order to Better Understand the Familiar: Odyssey of a Jewish Folklorist into the Bobover Hasidic Community.” The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 444 (1999): 200-212.

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Geertz, Clifford. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: The Overlook Press, 1973. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper Perennial, 1987. Lapidus, Steven. “The Forgotten Hasidim: Rabbis and Rebbes in Pre-War Canada.” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes 12 (2004): 1-30. Leeming, David (with Kathryn Madden and Stanton Marlan). Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. New York: Springer, 2010. Morinis, Alan. “Introduction: The territory of the anthropology of pilgrimage.” In Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage, edited by Alan Morinis, 1-28. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1992. Oesterley, W.O.E. The Jews and Judaism During the Greek Period. New York: MacMillan, 1941. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism. MacMillan Publishing: New York, 1952. Wertheimer, Jack. A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary Americai. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Yahalom, Joseph. Yehuda Halevi: Poetry and Pilgrimage. Tel Aviv: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2009.

Websites Ask the Rabbi. “Shakesprayer.” Ohr Somayach. Accessed August 29, 2012. http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/142/Q1/. Chabad.org. “Key word: Yechidah.” Chabad.org. Accessed August 27, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/search/keyword_cdo/kid/11233/jewish/ Yechidah.htm. —. “Tefillin.” Chabad.org. Accessed August 28, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/library/howto/wizard_cdo/aid/272667/jewish/1 -Place-on-Arm.htm. —. “Tzitzit.” Chabad.org Mitzvah Minute. Accessed August 29, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/619467/jewish/Tzitzit.htm. Himelstein, Hana-Bashe. “Partying With the King.” Chabad.org The Jewish Woman. Accessed August 28, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/ theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/611969/jewish/Partying-With-theKing.htm.

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Jacobson, Yosef Y. “Kabbalistic Hair Styles.” Chabad.org Kabbalah spirituality. Accessed August 29, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/ kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/380701/jewish/Kabbalistic-Hair-Styles.htm. Koutsoukis, Jason. “Haredi Way of Life Poses an ‘Existential Threat’.” Sydney Morning Herald, August 14, 2010. Accessed August 29, 2012. http://www.smh.com.au/world/haredi-way-of-life-poses-an-existentialthreat-20100813-12358.html. Moss, Aron. “The Meaning of Hair Covering.” Chabad.org The Jewish Woman. Accessed August 27, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/theJewish Woman/article_cdo/aid/336035/jewish/The-Meaning-of-HairCovering.htm. —. “Why the Jacket and Hat?” Chabad.org Questions and Answers. Accessed August 26, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_ cdo/aid/160970/jewish/Why-the-Jacket-and-Black-Hat.htm. Nehorai, Elad. “To Light a Spark: Creating for Dummies.” Chabad.org Blog, 29 August, 2010. Accessed August 30, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/blogs/blog_cdo/aid/882031/jewish/To-Light-ASpark.htm. Ohelchabad.org. “Appropriate Conduct at the Ohel.” Ohel Chabad Lubavitch. Accessed August 26, 2012. http://www.ohelchabad.org/ templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/78447/jewish/Conduct.htm. Rabbi DovBer. “Kuntres HaHishtatchus.” Chabad.org. Accessed August 28, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/88978/ jewish/Kuntres-HaHishtatchus.htm. Schneerson, Menachem Mendel. “Tznius of Dress,” translated Sholom B. Wineberg. Chabad.org for ‘Beautiful Within’. Accessed August 27, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/72872/jewish/ Tznius-Of-Dress.htm. Tilles, Yerachmiel. “Why the Long Black Coat?” Chabad.org Ideas and Beliefs. Accessed August 28, 2012. http://www.chabad.org/ library/article_cdo/aid/3186/jewish/Why-the-Long-Black-Coat.htm. Tondeur, Louise. “Shaving Grace.” openDemocracy, 22 January 2003. Accessed August 29, 2012. http://www.opendemocracy.net/artshair/article_910.jsp.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN OUT WITH THE TIDE: COLIN MCCAHON AND IMAGINATIVE PILGRIMAGE ZOE ALDERTON

Introduction Colin McCahon (1919-1987), one of New Zealand’s major modern artists, dedicated a significant portion of his oeuvre to a spiritual exploration of the beach environment, which may be read as a site of imaginative pilgrimage.1 Created as a means of engaging with death, McCahon’s ‘beach walk’ artworks correlate the MƗori walk to the afterlife with the Stations of the Cross ritual, based the journey Christ took before his execution. There is a clear performative aspect to these artworks. The viewer is asked to join in and journey with the artist. This is an act of spiritual travel that is aimed at a refinement of the self. McCahon uses the beach at Muriwai, Ahipara, and Cape Reinga as the backdrop for a

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This chapter will frequently employ the term ‘spiritual’ to describe the content of McCahon’s artwork and the nature of the pilgrimage he encourages. Wade Clark Roof provides a neat summary of the differences between the terms ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’. He uses ‘religious’ to mean “the outward and objectified elements of a tradition” including myths, moral codes, communities et cetera. This implies some degree of grounding within a symbolic universe. Conversely, ‘spiritual’ is referred to as a concept related to seekership. Roof uses it as a term that “may refer to the inner life that is bound up with, and embedded within, religious forms” or in a broader sense to self-transformation towards greater potential. See Wade Clark Roof, “Religion and Spirituality: Toward an Integrated Analysis,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Michele Dillon (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that McCahon was not a religious person. Rather, his Christian religiosity was not closely linked to a particular institution or community.

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metaphoric walk, based on MƗori mythology, which bridges the living with the dead. His foggy beach environment creates a liminal space where the physical world changes form and permits a visionary experience. McCahon recounts the presence of dead companions during his beach walks and dedicated several of these artworks to his friend, the recently deceased poet James K. Baxter. McCahon’s artworks dealing with beach walks and the Stations of the Cross present a disintegration of reality via thick fog and incomplete or confused mathematical equations. McCahon negotiates this zone as a site of learning and vision. His journey through liminality is geared towards the transformation of his audience via the alleviation of their spiritual blindness and grief. On one level, McCahon intended to address himself with this message. His beach walks allowed for both the healing of personal grief and the annunciation of the cyclical nature of human life via references to his own family. McCahon also addresses his audiences as individuals. He attempts to teach his viewers to use the local landscape in a meaningful way, travelling with McCahon as guide in an intimate and intense painted environment. The artist also speaks to the audience as a whole, encouraging their participation in a broader worldview. His artworks encourage the development of a pluralistic faith system that encourages ecological conservation. These different levels are thoroughly intermingled and can be observed in complex relationships with one another in McCahon’s art.

Art as Pilgrimage An important factor to consider in these journey-based artworks is McCahon’s history in stage design.2 His art employs a language that is born of the theatre and the comic book. Although the physical journey involved in walking past these artworks is no longer than a few metres, the

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For example, McCahon and Rodney Kennedy designed and constructed stage sets for ‘The Insect Play’ and ‘Professor Mamlock’, performed by the Dunedin Left Book Club, while they were art students. See Rachel Barrowman, A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950 (New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1991), 72. McCaw agrees that his work in the theatre is important in terms of style and approach. She writes, “[i]t is both the realization of the auratic nature of the landscape, and its potential role as a theatrical set in which richer meanings can be played out that informs McCahon’s particular vision.” See Caroline McCaw, “Art and (Second) Life: Over the Hills and Far Away?,” Fibreculture 11 (2008), accessed June 15, 2010, http://journal.fibreculture.org/ issue11/issue11_mccaw.html.

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mental movement involved may be compared to more traditional modes of pilgrimage with the canvas as the environment of travel. Through these artworks, McCahon presents the natural world as a background for sacred drama. He guides us through an interactive narrative sequence, often relying on the comic book style of progressive panels. McCahon has constructed the following images as rituals to be played out by his viewers.3 His symbolic lexicon, including the footsteps of Christ and number sequences, is aimed at moving the viewer across the image and through a spiritually oriented journey. This imaginative, visual pilgrimage functions as a transition from one state to another. Critical frameworks concerning physical pilgrimages help to illuminate this notion of ritualistic transition. Arnold Van Gennep identifies the “symbolic and spatial area of transition” in all ceremonies that “accompany that passage from one social and magico-religious position to another.”4 As such, Victor Turner elaborates on this transitional phase, illuminating it as a point through which society or individuals may undergo a transformation. He states that rites of passage “indicate and constitute transitions between states.”5 Turner includes “ecological conditions” and the “physical, mental or emotional condition” of a person or group within his definition of ‘states’.6 Thus, a rite of passage is able to create a transition of ecological constructs within a culture, or to morph the emotional state of a person or community. By structuring his artworks as a transitional ritual, McCahon is able to instigate a change in state within his



3 When considering the ritualistic nature of a journey, it is appropriate to consider the nature and impact of pilgrimage. To this end, Van Gennep’s seminal text The Rites of Passage (Les Rites de Passage) contains a useful threefold critical framework. He speaks of the pre-liminal separation phase, the liminal phase of transition, and the post-liminal reincorporation phase. McCahon’s journey-based artworks create a ritual that may be viewed in terms of van Gennep’s ‘territorial passage’. He notes that the crossing of frontiers may have a “magico-religious aspect” connected to the notion of sacred terrain. Van Gennep ties this notion to outdated anthropological categorisations of civilized, semi-civilized, and uncivilized peoples. Although these value judgements are no longer useful to the study of ritual, the author’s methodology is still a highly valuable framework and will be extracted in this thesis sans racial commentary. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 11-15. 4 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 18. 5 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1967), 93-94. 6 Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 93-94.

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audience. This relates to his construction of a Promised Land via the alteration and creation of cultural norms within New Zealand. The idea of audience transformation is paramount within McCahon’s oeuvre. Also worthy of consideration is the way in which an artwork may function as a site of imaginary pilgrimage or as a tool that assists in the contemplation of such a journey. The potential liminality and pseudoreligious nature of the art object has been explored by theorists such as Carol Duncan who draw attention to the way in which artistic material culture helps a society to define and create itself. Ducan describes the art gallery as a locale for “secular ritual.” She refers to the gallery space as a liminal zone where exultation, and potentially communion, can be reached via engagement with the art objects.7 This kind of lens accounts for the possibility of actual religious experiences when connecting with an artwork. The fact that McCahon’s art may create a transformative liminal space without causing the viewer to tour long distances illuminates the notion that travel can be viewed as an idea or an internal concept rather than a strictly physical act. A visual image can ‘move’ a viewer in an imaginative manner, shaping their perceptions of place and offering a threshold into new spiritual viewpoints. The locations that McCahon paints in the following artworks are based on actual sites, but sites that are rendered through a very particular religious vision that turns them into didactic lessons for personal and communal transformation.

The Syncretic Spiritual The following artworks feature one particular phase of McCahon’s religious development and the ever-increasing complexity of his spiritual vision. McCahon’s religiosity was tied to the spiritual value of the land, which was connected to notions of peace, which were directly informed by his construction of a national culture. These interconnected strands are neatly summarised by the artist’s early statement on his desired reaction to his painting Harbour Cone From Peggy’s Hill (1939): I imagined people looking at it then looking at the landscape and for once really seeing it & being happier for it & believing in God & then the brotherhood of men & the futility of war.8

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Carol Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, ed. Gerard Corsane (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2005), 78. 8 Colin McCahon to Toss Woollaston [1939] in Gordon H. Brown, Elements of Modernism in Colin McCahon’s Early Work (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, 2003), 34.

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In his self-perceived role as artist/prophet, McCahon aimed to use the landscape as a meaning-making structure, which would bond together the New Zealand community in a peaceful manner and encourage a genuine faith in God and the redemptive powers of Christ. This fundamental aim remained throughout most of McCahon’s career, and was expanded and aided by his further spiritual discoveries. In the late nineteen-sixties, McCahon became seriously engaged with MƗori culture. Soon after, he became particularly interested in the Christian Stations of the Cross. Underpinning both these interests was his passion for communicating via numbers and sequential journeys. It is this particular period that this chapter draws upon. McCahon takes many of his notions of the hereafter from MƗori mythology. Congruently, Baxter, to whom many of these works give commemoration, was involved in a similar effort to synchronise traditional MƗori and Catholic PƗkehƗ cultures. Towards the end of Baxter’s life, he embraced poverty and created various communes to enact his cultural aims. Perhaps the most famous of these was Hiruharama, called so after the MƗori word for Jerusalem.9 Trevor James describes the poetry he created at this time as a synchronisation of MƗori and Roman Catholic associations of place, presenting the natural world in terms of a communion with divine presence.10 Again, we see an interaction between natural site and divinity that encourages the viewer or reader to associate New Zealand with the real presence of God. This is, interestingly, achieved via a consideration of non-Christian MƗori relationships with the land. In terms of McCahon’s work, his painting On Going Out with the Tide (1969) quotes and elaborates upon a tract from indigenous writer Matire Kereama’s book The Tail of the Fish: MƗori Memories of the Far North (1968).11 This text is a retelling of MƗori myth in its original

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For a detailed account of this open community, see Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent, Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 38ff. 10 Trevor James, “‘Pitched at the Farthest Edge’: Religious Presence and the Landscape in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry,” in Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, eds Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housely (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), 144. 11 Matire Kereama, The Tail of the Fish: MƗori Memories of the Far North (Auckland: Oswald-Sealy, 1968).

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language. Kereama’s stories belong to the Te Aupouri group who lived in the area of Cape Reinga.12 On Going Out with the Tide introduces the concept of death as natural and inevitable. McCahon suggests that one must “Raise your hand in farewell – on Haumnj hill” and then exit as the water does.13 The repetition of the ebb and flow of the tide is correlated to the generations of humans. McCahon concludes his work with “WHEN ONE GENERATION FALLS, ANOTHER RISES.” For Matiu: Muriwai (1969) elaborates on this concept. It states: EINGA ATU ANA HE TETEKURA. E ARA MAI ANA HE TETEKURA when one generation falls another rises. Ours is not the death of the moon

This is likely to have been inspired by Ecclesiastes 1:4, which reads: “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.”14 The chapter explores the cyclic repetition of nature and concludes that everything on earth has its time. Human passing is presented as something minimal in the grand scheme of creation. The MƗori text is a quotation from Kereama, which is translated as “one chief falls, another rises and takes his place.”15 There are very personal elements to this statement. For Matiu: Muriwai is dedicated to Matiu Carr, McCahon’s grandson. The family carries on in one of its younger members.

 12

Neil Rowe, “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC,” Art New Zealand (1977-1978), accessed August 21, 2009, http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues1to40/ mccahon08nr.htm. 13 The spiritual significance of Haumnj Hill has been known to PƗkehƗ historians for some time. In his 1867 recount of the conversion of the MƗori, the bishop William Williams mentions this sacred site. He writes: “The last resting-place of the spirits was on a hill called Haumnj, from whence they could look back on the country where their friends were still living, and the thought of this caused them to cry and cut themselves.” See William Williams, Christianity Among the New Zealanders (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1867), 206. 14 We can be certain that McCahon eventually read this verse as he quotes from Ecclesiastes 1:10 in his final paintings such as Is There Anything of Which One Can Say Look This Is New? (1982). 15 Wystan Curnow, “The Shining Cuckoo,” in Interpreting Contemporary Art, eds Stephen Bann and William Allen (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 43.

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This idea of filial life and death was further emphasised in 1973 when McCahon’s mother died.16 This became further motivation to consider death and the journey of life and grief for those left behind. His beachside ruminations on death can be viewed as supra-cultural synchronisations of New Zealand mythologies and deeply personal ruminations on the cycle of human life. The natural world provides McCahon with a rich vocabulary for his spiritual explorations. McCahon did not categorise these particular works as ‘paintings’ and wished for them to remain unframed. He described his pieces as “just bits of a place I love and painted in memory of a friend.”17 The notion of memory is important within McCahon’s beach walk imagery, as these pieces are designed to conjure those who have passed. Interestingly, Edmond provides a Nietzschean reading of the Stations, calling them “contemplation of a system of cruelty,” which aid in the function of memory. Indeed, McCahon walks the viewer through painful memories of loss, designed to invoke the death (and the potential afterlife) of Christ, and also that of deceased companions.

The Walk Series McCahon took the religious dimensions of these works quite literally. In 1972, he painted Jim Passes the Northern Beaches as a tribute to the recently deceased Baxter. It has been commonly read as a means of healing their disrupted friendship.18 Similarly, a poem McCahon dedicated to the memory of Rita Angus contains the lines “Rita going north./ Northland./ Kauri.”19 McCahon also felt the presence of Charles Brasch and Ronald Mason on walks during white-out.20 This may be connected to traditional MƗori ideas. Barry Mitcalfe recounts a local legend that the voices of the dead can be heard “[o]n white, misty days when the cloud is lying close to the land.” He describes it as Te Reo Irirangi, a high singing that signifies the passing of spirits.21 Anyone who has walked through

 16

Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Auckland: Reed, 1993), 174. Colin McCahon to Peter McLeavy in Gordon H. Brown, “The Autobiographical Factor,” in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988), 19. 18 See for example, Brown, “The Autobiographical Factor,” 20. 19 Colin McCahon, “(IV) Titirangi,” in Rita: Seven Poems by Colin McCahon, ed. Peter Simpson (New Zealand: Fernbank Studio, 2001). 20 Rowe, “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC.” Baxter, Mason, and Brasch all died within nine months of each other. 21 Barry Mitcalfe, “Te Rerenga Wairua: Leaping Place of the Spirits,” Te Ao Hou: The New World 35 (1961): 38. 17

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thick, low cloud will be familiar with the heaviness and tactility of the air. Dense fog creates a liminal zone where the familiar world is swallowed up by whiteness and remains deconstructed and unformed until the weather passes. Turner describes the realm of the liminal period as one that “has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state;” it is unstable and ill defined.22 The marginal phase of McCahon’s beach journey is indicated quite clearly via the metaphor of all-encompassing mist. Baxter was deeply engaged with MƗori culture, making this mist a fitting posthumous tribute. In this manner, the Walk artworks present a journey along the beach, coupled with spiritual rumination.23 Series A (1973) uses mist on Muriwai beach as a way of discussing spiritual blindness and the opportunities of illumination that lie beyond it.24 McCahon acts as guide, taking the viewer along his metaphorical Muriwai.25 The works read like a comic, although they are generally devoid of text or human form. Instead the comic-style partitioning speaks of a moving narrative, taking the audience on a progressive walk. The canvases that make up McCahon’s journey are filled with haze. Helpfully, Lois McIvor explains this fog as ‘white-out’, a sensation caused by low cloud.26 On a metaphorical level, Gordon H. Brown calls this mist the ‘wall of death’. He believes this wall must be penetrated as “a veil of sorrow is slowly parted.”27 On one hand this is a metaphysical discussion of the redemptive power of Christ to transcend death like a shaft of light in a dark void. In addition, it is a record of the

 22

Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 94. The classification of a particular Walk series is debatable. This thesis conglomerates the works of 1973 that deal with beach walks, expressed as sequential and individual panels, under this umbrella heading. The Colin McCahon Image Library Database (http://www.mccahon.co.nz/) categorises the works in this segment as being part of series titled Blind, Series A, and Series B. Other variations are possible. McCahon’s particular mode of categorisation is not clear. 24 The delicate and undefined application of pigment and the presence of floating rectangles are reminiscent of Rothko. While both artists evoke a similar sense of the sublime, McCahon’s images are tied to the physicality of the beach. 25 This kind of journey is conveyed through the progression of one-dimensional images. Green refers to this technique as a manifestation of the modernist inclination to flatten out a picture space. He highlights McCahon’s supposition that an observer is on the move. See Tony Green, “McCahon and the Modern,” in Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988), 30-31. 26 Lois McIvor, “Remembering Colin McCahon,” Art New Zealand 49 (19881989): 99. 27 Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 173. 23

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light passing through the daytime fog of Muriwai that brings hope and happiness to a grieving mind. Both are ways of overcoming grief: one theological and the other physical. The transparency of these worlds, constructed by the mist, supports this overlayed meaning. The foggy shapes emerging from the A4 panel reveal McCahon’s typical depiction of Oaia Island, a gannet nesting colony. The layers of colour on A5 show the froth of a breaking wave. The churning ocean spray blends into the domineering fog. Further nuancing the meaning of the fog, Neil Rowe sees this ‘white-out’ as a theme of blindness, and the source of visionary experiences.28 This paradoxical reading reveals the tension between artist and his perception of his community. On one hand, McCahon alludes to spiritual blindness and the inability of his audience to see what is placed before them.29 On the other, he uses this sensory deprivation as a means of transcending physical reality and communing with the dead.30 Series B of the Walk artworks, created in 1973, focuses on a final walk with Baxter. This walk exists in an imaginary realm and functions as a way of farewelling an estranged friend via a mental ritual. B1 indicates Muriwai beach via a black strip representing volcanic sand. The liminal atmosphere of ‘white-out’ is evident in the foggy sky. The painting is over two metres long, requiring the viewer to walk past it, playing their own part in the ritual. Up close, the uneven application of paint injects tactility into the scene. The viewer is invited to participate in this rumination on death and the journey to the hereafter. Anthony Green explains the rough canvas sackcloth that the works are painted on as a sign of mourning for Baxter.31 The Biblical notion of ‘wearing sackcloth and ashes’ denotes

 28

Rowe, “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC.” This idea of spiritual blindness, particularly as it is connected to Paul and the experiences of the prophet, will be unpacked in greater detail via the forthcoming Blinds. 30 McCahon was known to experiment with sensory deprivation as a means of establishing a new way of seeing. He was influenced by the psychology lecturer T.H. Scott who told him of the visual effects caused by the restoration of sight after deprivation for a week. A person in this circumstance would be initially blinded by brightness, then experience vague and colourless shapes after some minutes. Following this, colours would appear with exaggerated intensity. With Scott’s teachings in mind, McCahon experimented by running outside upon waking so that the surrounding bush would be his first vision after the night’s blindness. See Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 59-60. 31 Tony Green, “Colin McCahon’s ‘Necessary Protection’ in Auckland,” Art New Zealand 11 (1977), accessed April 8, 2011, http://www.art-newzealand.com/ Issues11to20/mccahonissue11.htm. 29

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penitence and grief. This may reflect McCahon’s regret over losing Baxter before their differences could be reconciled. Similarly, Francis Pound reads McCahon’s use of non-art materials such as unframed hessian as a means of expressing “unmediated emotion.”32 This artwork aims, in keeping with McCahon’s style, for a direct and sentimental statement. Series C (1973), moreover, seeks to unite McCahon’s physical beach walks, the steps of Baxter’s life, and the steps of Christ before his death. It is a clear reflection of the multiple meanings and lessons behind McCahon’s Walk series. On one level, this artwork depicts various viewpoints from a walk by the ocean. McCahon shows us different patterns in the ocean and sky that could be experienced on this journey along the beach. He also memorialises the life of a dear friend. Usefully, Brown explains how this image uses the appearance of the surf and the conditions of the weather to reflect the phases of Baxter’s earthly existence, including obstacles that he overcame.33 The number of panels, fourteen, is also a conscious attempt to link the beach environment and the MƗori walk after death with the Christian Stations of the Cross. McCahon felt that the Christian and MƗori walks had much in common.34 He also uses this as an opportunity to help Baxter, posthumously, combine the MƗori and Catholic worldviews that he admired and subscribed to in life. McCahon accepted Baxter “as a new MƗori” who would perform the customary beach walk. He continued, “I put the barriers of the stations in his way.”35 In this sense, the work becomes a means of recording Baxter’s ability to meet and overcome struggles.

Blindness and Vision As can be seen, The Walk series repeatedly engages with the notion of blindness and fog.36 The implications of this complex symbology are further unpacked in the Blind artworks (1974). Consisting of five panels, the Blind artworks are literally painted onto the surface that provides their



32 Francis Pound, The Space Between: PƗkehƗ Use of MƗori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art (Auckland: Workshop Press, 1994), 62. 33 Brown, “The Autobiographical Factor,” 19; Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 174. 34 McCahon to McLeavy in Brown, “The Autobiographical Factor,” 19. 35 McCahon to Brown [August 1973] in Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 174. 36 As another interesting connection between the two creative forces, Baxter is known for his character ‘The MƗori Jesus’ who appears in a poem of the same name. This Jesus reflects the blindness of society to a divine message. The poem runs backwards though the Christian creation myth, ending as light is removed from the earth.

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name. This may be viewed as an impact of the post-object genre, which influenced the New Zealand art scene during the creation of this work.37 Indeed, McCahon is described as reinstating art objects to replace the inertia surrounding them.38 Gregory Burke illuminates the demotic nature of the movement, which aimed to challenge the exclusive zone of the art museum via the employment of media belonging to the industrial and impoverished sphere.39 This would have suited McCahon’s views on the role of paintings as humble media. It also engages with the notion of layered meaning. Rowe points out the pun created by this medium. He describes the artworks as a reference to “an endemic national blindness to spiritual values.”40 This reading is recurrent. McCahon’s reference to blindness works on multiple levels. In support of Rowe’s assertion, the information accompanying this work at its Christchurch Art Gallery location states that the work denotes an “absence of vision” and “inability to see the real essence and value of things.”41 This material suggests that ‘blind’ refers to New Zealanders who could not appreciate the land around them. The lack of love and reverence for the natural world frustrated and alienated the artist. Because McCahon tied spiritual values to values of conservation, he saw his fellow citizens as simultaneously blind to spirituality and blind to the benefits of a reciprocal relationship with the landscape as axis mundi. Brown takes this even further, calling the blindness a reference to the “spiritual void” of those who cannot see beyond the surface of things. He argues that this shallow mindset is like a “veil cutting off the beauty” of the landscape.42 Simpson also agrees with Rowe’s reading of spiritual blindness. He sees the blurred shapes as a representation of how the landscape would appear to someone

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Another such example is Untitled (Cupboard Door) (1972). This artwork shows a green hillside and subtle Tau cross. It is painted on the unusual canvas that informs its title. It is quite reasonable to believe that this piece is intended to function as a door into the landscape. 38 Wystan Curnow, Christina Barton, John Hurrell and Robert Leonard, introduction to Action Replay: Post-Script (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster, 2002), 10. 39 Gregory Burke, “River Deep, Mountain High: The Periphery as Paradox,” in TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999), 14-15. 40 Rowe, “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC.” 41 Christchurch Art Gallery, accessed February 22, 2010, http://collection. christchurchartgallery.org.nz/search.do?view=detail&field=id&keyword=2517 42 Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 178.

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with visual difficulties.43 Based on Simpson’s approach, the Blind panels can be read as beach landscapes, much the same as the Walk artworks. The panels connote the beach in fog and can be experienced as a sequential journey through the scenery. It is possible to see yellow sand, black sand, and smudges that allude to drenching water. On this note, Brown calls this liquid technique an allusion to the elements weeping for those who cannot or will not see.44 Furthering this tactile vision, the black horizontal lines swell out and look like mountains on the horizon of a foggy ocean. The ambiguity of what is land or sky seems to mutate and delineate these basic laws of nature. Instead of the horizon’s usual disambiguation, we are left with a liminal and near-fantastic scene. Again, the world and the self are deconstructed in this journey through the beach landscape and through the boundaries between life and death. McCahon suggests that the deconstruction of reality can lead to greater understanding. Blindness can become a visionary experience. Like a person on a beach walk during fog, a lack of stimulus can lead to hallucination. Rowe puts forth a connection between this series and the blindness of Paul on the road to Damascus.45 These works may imply that blindness need not be permanent. It may be a state that leads to revelation. Another reading offered by Simpson is that the squares may be windows covered by blinds with the horizontal lines as their sills.46 This intimates that the blinds can be raised to let in the light. From the negative comes the positive. McCahon does not condemn the spiritual blindness of his community. He offers a way out through the artistic journey he structures. To engage with McCahon’s work is to hear his prophecy and to emerge from the fog. Perhaps, in doing so, one may also transcend the ghosts who tie them to grief. Read alongside their sister artwork, Song of the Shining Cuckoo (1974), the Blind panels are further illuminated. The Stations of the Cross are overtly evident in this artwork, making another connection between the beach walk of the Blind series (both mundane and mythological) and the journey taken by Christ to death. The Song of the Shining Cuckoo is

 43

Peter Simpson, “From ‘Sacred’ to ‘Scared’,” Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2002, accessed November 30, 2009, http://www.govettbrewster.com/Publications/ Visit+Online/simpson.htm. 44 Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 178. 45 Rowe, “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC.” This is reasonable, as McCahon had employed Paul as a symbol previously. The figure of Paul is also connected to long missionary journeys, which provides a pleasing continuity with the idea of a spiritual walk as explored by McCahon. 46 Simpson, “From ‘Sacred’ to ‘Scared’.”

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influenced by Tangirau Hotere’s poem ‘Te Tangi o te Pipiwhararua’, based on a traditional chant.47 Ralph Hotere mailed a copy to McCahon explaining that the text “refers to the spirit on route to Te Reinga & resting for a bit on a sand bank in the Hokianga harbour.”48 McCahon also provided a personal translation in his workbook, which reads as follows: The Song of (Grief of) The Shining Cuckoo Glow Glow & tell us Te Tui: pierce us and Join us together Bird: alight on the beach alight, my friend alight, my friend alight and rest

Once more the act of grieving is connected to McCahon’s painted journey. The cuckoo is a meaningful symbol in this regard. John Caselberg recalls McCahon hearing the sound of the cuckoo towards the beginning of spring. He believes that his friend may have also heard the hokioi cuckoo call that some MƗori groups once identified as a presager of death.49 This reading evokes the beginning and ending of earthly existence that the MƗori journey to the afterlife helped McCahon to ponder. Importantly, Caselberg translates the phrase “TUIA TUI” as a call for the dead to assemble.50 He feels that Mason, Baxter, and Brasch51 are summoned by this work in order to irradiate the living with wisdom and make the path of death less fearful.52 This artwork can be read as a story of connectivity, perhaps a petition to be bound once more with deceased souls. The beach acts as a locus for this reunion, with the sand banks acting as a place where



47 The inscription at the top of the work states that Tangirau Hotere (Ralph Hotere’s father) allowed the sacred words contained in the artwork to be used. See John Caselberg, “Colin McCahon’s Panels, ‘The Song of the Shining Cuckoo’,” Islands 5:4 (1977): 407. 48 Ralph Hotere to McCahon in Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 161. 49 Caselberg, “Colin McCahon’s Panels,” 405. 50 Caselberg, “Colin McCahon’s Panels,” 406. 51 McCahon wished to donate the painting to Hocken, a gallery to which these friends were connected. He named it as a gift in their honour. See McCahon to Caselberg [March 16, 1976] in Peter Simpson, Patron and Painter: Charles Brasch and Colin McCahon (Dunedin: Hocken Collections, 2010), 40. 52 Caselberg, “Colin McCahon’s Panels,” 408.

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the soul may rest.53 In addition, Elwyn Lynn sees the possibility for a political reading of The Song of the Shining Cuckoo based on MƗori dispossession. He asks if they are blind windows (as suggested by Curnow) or tombstones.54 The grief felt for lost friends may also be a statement on the loss of land and the slaughter of historical MƗori figures. McCahon implies that the blending of MƗori and Pakeha cultures may be a way around the divisions created by an aggressive colonial past. Such a subsumption is primarily concerned with easing the guilt of the dominant culture. The untranslated phrase ‘Te Tui’ can mean sewing or stringing on a thread.55 This relates to the subsequent verbs ‘pierce’ and ‘join’. The line of dots across the artwork looks like a row of stitching, creating a horizontal journey across the vertical progression of the Stations. McCahon frequently promotes birds as a motif for the human spirit. In a letter to Peter McLeavey, the artist makes it clear that his dotted line is indeed the pathway of this avifaunal symbol. He writes, “I’ve painted the bird flying through the panels and although all panels are fenced in I’ve left gates.”56 McCahon presents the journey of birds along the beach and souls in the footsteps of Christ as a mechanism for healing the rifts of death and cultural turmoil. His artwork combines the language of two traditions. Importantly, Caselberg identifies the MƗori phrases painted on the work as a chant to welcome visitors to Northland maraes.57 McCahon invites his viewers into a sacred space. His language is embracive and warm. It anticipates a future of cultural harmony. The beach and the birdsouls give vigour to the dry, numerical Stations. They inject a feeling of ongoing life and lived experiences of a sacred site. McCahon suggests that the Stations of the Cross have vitality and purpose. They merge within the



53 It is easy to tie this in with aforementioned artworks. The idea of a bird alighting on the beach as recalled in the poem suggests the journey of the departed soul across the beach, the jets over Muriwai, and the final leaping point of Cape Reinga. To be understood fully, these beach artworks must be read as part of a unified whole. Obviously this is problematic for the casual viewer. 54 Elwyn Lynn, “Colin McCahon: The View From Across the Tasman,” Art New Zealand (1984), accessed February 11, 2011, http://www.art-newzealand.com/ Issues31to40/5thbiennale.htm. 55 Jasper Buse and Raututi Taringa, Cook Islands MƗori Dictionary, eds Bruce Biggs and Rangi Moeka'a (Suva: Ministry of Education, Government of the Cook Islands, 2006), 520. 56 McCahon to Mcleavey [October 13, 1974] in Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 178. 57 Caselberg, “Colin McCahon’s Panels,” 405.

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cycle of life and death, exist as part of a primal landscape, and function as an ointment to sorrow.

A Journey With Numbers The Song of the Shining Cuckoo also bridges stylistic variations and helps to unify McCahon’s beach walk images with those exploring the Stations of the Cross in a primarily numerical manner. One such example is the Walk With Me I and Walk With Me II artworks (1974). In these paintings, the white fog becomes a Tau cross gateway and a representation of Christ (and enlightenment) transcending through the darkness. The letters INRI emphasise this oft-made correlation between Christ and the light in the darkness. This symbolism also relates back to Baxter, who McCahon had previously referred to as the ‘candle in a dark room’. The artist’s command of “WALK WITH ME” indicates his role as a guide along the Stations of the Cross and a psychopomp who points out a posthumous journey. He writes with light like words on a blackboard, revealing the didactic nature of his spiritual belief. Through the Walk With Me artworks, McCahon bridges his beach walks with older Stations of the Cross artworks such as Numerals (1965). This artwork takes the viewer on a journey as they count upwards from zero (nothingness) to ten. The painting is nearly nine metres long, again inviting a physical journey in the gallery space that encourages a congruent mental voyage. It is composed of the familiar panel format, which places black and white imagery in a brown frame. The artist makes a subtle allusion to transcendent light and beach walks.58 McCahon states that this artwork functions “as a painting and as an environment. They are where we are in one way; and, in another way, if we could walk on from 10 where we would get to.”59 Through this dense and ambiguous explanation, McCahon seems to connect the artwork to temporality and the human condition. It is a reflection of humanity’s environment, perhaps in a psychological or moral sense as well as the physical. McCahon also raises the possibility of walking beyond the familiar. The last four Stations, not represented in this painting, involve the actual death and burial of Christ. This particular walk ends at the Station where Jesus is disrobed for his execution. Comment has been made on the

 58

There is also an obvious connection here to teaching and words on a blackboard, which shall be discussed shortly. 59 Colin McCahon, Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972), 32.

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meaning of this ending. Unsurprisingly, writers such as Brown note the “inviting white light” of the last panel.60 The panel reading ‘123’ is similarly illuminated, most likely as a reference to the Trinity. This could lead to a simple reading of divine figures as a source of light in the darkness, certainly a reading that McCahon has insinuated before. This artwork may also be read as an incomplete journey. For example, Brown points out repetitious elements in the numerals such as the “ever continuing circumference of a circle” that is very clearly indicated at the start, middle, and end of the artwork. Brown feels this reinforces a sense of a continuum.61 This may indicate the perpetual renewal that one finds in the Stations ritual. Another reading, which fits within McCahon’s aforementioned statements about this artwork, is that is deals with a ‘move beyond’. Ron O’Reilly sees McCahon’s numbers as “congealed energy,” created by human acts of counting, measuring, and computing. Working on Brown’s hypothesis that McCahon’s numbers refer to cybernetic activities, he sees them as a possible reference to missiles and spacecraft. He feels they allude to a journey beyond the “usual confines of art.”62 Perhaps in asking us to walk beyond ten – the end of the artwork – McCahon concedes that he can only lead his audience towards the end point of his lesson. He brings us to the brink of death and constructs an environment in which his audience, as individuals, must consider what follows. McCahon’s ‘blackboard-style’ number paintings also belong within this paradigm of beachside theology. Although they may seem to be entirely devoid of earthly terrain, these images are part of McCahon’s guided walk through spirituality and contain numerous symbolic clues that reveal their obtuse landscape elements. In these works, McCahon uses the visual structure of a blackboard to indicate his position of teacher. As a prophet, McCahon wished to guide his audience towards a spiritual relationship with the land in order to usher in a Promised Land of loving fraternity and ecological consciousness. These numerical blackboard artworks are didactic. McCahon uses them as a way to experiment with the Stations of the Cross, exploring their theological meanings, truncating them, rearranging them, and playing with possibility. In turn, he provided his audience with lessons gleaned from his trials, hoping to provide a similar feeling of expansiveness and spiritual experimentation. Such an act renders Christianity as a real and living force; something to engage with

 60

Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 135. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 135-136. 62 O’Reilly, introduction to Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition, 14. 61

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and understand as opposed to something fixed and distant. His allusions to the landscape help to anchor faith in lived experience. McCahon looked upon his ‘failed’ artworks as “good and proper teachers.”63 These paintings can be read as a means of building upon a lack of success. McCahon’s mathematics and renditions of the Stations may not always be perfect and logical, but they intend to share a story of personal and dynamic faith.

Teaching Aids McCahon’s Teaching Aids series (1975) is a further example of his number play and guided lessons.64 In person, McCahon was cryptic about his artworks and rarely explained them.65 Artworks such as the Teaching Aids series were intended to instruct by themselves. Displayed like giant blackboards filled with mathematical equations, the Teaching Aids series turns the art gallery into a schoolroom where McCahon makes his intentions as a spiritual tutor quite apparent. Indeed, Brown believes these artworks refer to the sacredness of the learning process itself.66 The salient feature of the images is the stark contrast of white text on a black backdrop. This is an obvious nod to a classroom blackboard with white chalk. Complicating this immediate impression, Curnow asks what the darkness signifies. “The deep space of night, the Tomb, or the flat plane of the blackboard?”67 McCahon’s symbolic lexicon certainly demonstrates engagement with Christ as a figure of illumination, and places value on breaking through blindness. Working with this visual metaphor, the artist remarks that he painted Teaching Aids “for ‘children’ who could see.”68 McCahon’s use of numbers also plays into the idea of a journey through the artwork. He encourages us to count and move across the canvas in a dynamic pattern. As John Hurrell writes:



63 Colin McCahon, “19 Painters & Their Favourite Works: Colin McCahon,” Islands 10 (1974): 397. 64 Visually, comparisons can be made to the works of Rosalie Gascoigne. 65 Lois McIvor, Memoir of the Sixties (Auckland: Remuera Gallery, 2008), 131. 66 Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 181. 67 Wystan Curnow, “Thinking About Colin McCahon and Barnett Newman,” Art New Zealand 8 (1977-1978), accessed April 8, 2011, http://www.art-newzealand. com/Issues1to40/mccahon08wc.htm. 68 Colin McCahon to Wystan Curnow [1975] in Teaching Aids (Auckland: The NEW Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, 1995), 10

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Out With the Tide: Colin McCahon and Imaginative Pilgrimage Teaching Aids were about using numbers to get viewers walk a zigzagging mental path. There no track was laid other than their ability to make connections themselves ... and ‘join the dots’ … there was a sense of thought processes at work, with elements of hesitancy, at times erasure.69

Hurrel points out the disorderly nature of McCahon’s numerals. Furthering discussion of this disarray, Brown believes they demonstrate the “life game” in which a person makes choices and takes risks that lead in many directions.70 McCahon’s sums are indeed aimed towards the construction of an uncanny realm in which the viewer reads, divides, and plays with the stages of the crucifixion. This deconstruction can be viewed as a representation of the liminal phase of our journey through the artwork and through the unknown equations of a human life. McCahon has created the Teaching Aids series as a space in which the viewer becomes absorbed and altered. McCahon expressed joy in painting beyond the stations, discovering he knew more of them than he had anticipated.71 These artworks seem to be an act of spiritual intuition and progression into new knowledge. McCahon teaches himself as well as his audience.72 Although they are concerned with an abstracted mental landscape, the Teaching Aids paintings offer clues that tie them to the notion of a walk along the beach. Just as the Beach Walk series can be viewed as a physical journey with a spiritual counterpart, Teaching Aids can be viewed as a spiritual journey that comes out of the physical landscape. Signs of the Muriwai coastline can be more clearly observed in the July Teaching Aids 2. The blurry smudges contained therein suggest erasures on a blackboard. As well as connoting ideas of doubt and revision, these smudges also evoke a feeling of fog. They remind us of the clouds above Muriwai and the liminal zone of ‘white-out’, conditions that McCahon presents as potentially visionary and connected to the Stations of the Cross.73

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John Hurrell, “Can Paint Save Us? Will Words?,” Artbash, September 13, 2006, accessed September 9, 2010, http://www.artbash.co.nz/article.asp?id=822. 70 Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, 139. 71 McCahon to Curnow [1975] in Teaching Aids (Auckland: The NEW Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, 1995), 10. 72 Leonard agrees, claiming that McCahon’s Stations “invite and confound our hermeneutic zeal.” See Robert Leonard, “Colin McCahon,” in TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, (Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999), 32. Like an engaging mentor, the artist permits his audience to explore the practice of Biblical interpretation. 73 William McCahon believes that all these markings are purposeful. He sees forms repeated from North Otago Landscapes, Paddocks for Sheep (this artwork was later remodelled and renamed On Building Bridges), and the Walk series. See

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Conclusions McCahon’s symbolic exploration of Muriwai epitomises both the serial nature of his communication, and the problems presented by such a complex means of addressing his audience. McCahon was devoted to his Christ-centred message of peaceful social change and environmental conservation. The special redemptive powers of nature are emphasised in his approach to Muriwai and connected locales. If a viewer is able to engage with McCahon’s body of work as a whole, the subtle and multifarious dimensions of symbols such as the Tau cross become apparent. So too is his social conscious made clear in the long, engaging ‘paintings to walk by’. McCahon’s beach walk messages work on three levels, which may be summarised as follows: i) Addressing the self: McCahon uses his spiritual walks as a way of expressing and coping with his own grief and frustrations as a prophet. The beach environment is a language through which he reforms his relationship with Baxter, comes to terms with the endless cycle of human life and death, and the difficulties in transmitting information across generations.74 ii) Addressing the audience as individuals: McCahon speaks to his viewers in an intimate fashion. His beach walk artworks teach the viewer to use the New Zealand landscape as a way of coping with their own spiritual concerns. His paintings create an intimate space in which an audience member is asked to open their eyes and receive a vision of Christ and sacred terrain. McCahon acts as a psychopomp who journeys with the viewer through death and the afterlife. iii) Addressing the audience as a whole: McCahon’s artworks speak to the citizens of New Zealand en masse. His synchronisation of Christian and MƗori belief systems blends an appreciation of the local environment as sacred with a less terrestrial soteriological narrative. The Stations of the Cross are a gateway into a pluralistic faith system that promotes crosscultural identity and ecological preservation. McCahon attempts to tell his audience that the Stations of the Cross are a dynamic life tool, providing a ritual to bond us with the dead. His

 William McCahon, “Teaching Aids,” in Teaching Aids (Auckland: The NEW Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, 1995), 3. 74 This is comparable to artists such as Grace Cossington Smith who used the waves at Thirroul as a means of expressing and negotiating her psyche after the death of her mother in the painting Sea Wave (1931). Bruce James describes it as “a life-cast of the psyche, subtly paraded as landscape.” See Bruce James, Grace Cossington Smith (Roseville: Craftsman House, 1990), 86-87.

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construction of a misty liminal zone may be read as a genuine imaginative pilgrimage. So too are his numerical landscapes intended as didactic spiritual pieces with important lessons on the journey of faith.

Bibliography Barrowman, Rachel. A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand 1930-1950. New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1991. Brown, Gordon H. “The Autobiographical Factor.” In Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, 13-26. Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988. —. Colin McCahon: Artist. Auckland: Reed, 1993. —. Elements of Modernism in Colin McCahon’s Early Work. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, 2003. Burke, Gregory. “River Deep, Mountain High: The Periphery as Paradox.” In TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, 1217. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. Buse, Jasper and Taringa, Raututi. Cook Islands MƗori Dictionary, edited by Bruce Biggs and Rangi Moeka’a. Suva: Ministry of Education, Government of the Cook Islands, 2006 [1995]. Caselberg, John. “Colin McCahon’s Panels, ‘The Song of the Shining Cuckoo’.” Islands 5:4 (1977): 404-408. Curnow, Wystan. “The Shining Cuckoo.” In Interpreting Contemporary Art, edited by Stephen Bann and William Allen, 27-46. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. —. “Thinking About Colin McCahon and Barnet Newman.” Art New Zealand 8 (1977-1978). Accessed April 8, 2011. http://www.artnewzealand.com/Issues1to40/mccahon08wc.htm. Curnow, Wystan; Barton, Christina; Hurrell, John; and Leonard, Robert. Action Replay: Post-Script. New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster, 2002. Duncan, Carol. “The Art Museum as Ritual.” In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, edited by Gerard Corsane, 78-88. United Kingdom: Routledge, 2005. Green, Tony. “Colin McCahon’s ‘Necessary Protection’ in Auckland.” Art New Zealand 11 (1977). Accessed April 8, 2011. http://www.artnewzealand.com/Issues11to20/mccahonissue11.htm. —. “McCahon and the Modern.” In Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys, 27-40. Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988.

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Hurrell, John. “Can Paint Save Us? Will Words?.” Artbash, September 13, 2006. Accessed September 9, 2010. http://www.artbash.co.nz/ article.asp?id=822. James, Bruce. Grace Cossington Smith. Roseville: Craftsman House, 1990. James, Trevor. “‘Pitched at the Farthest Edge’: Religious Presence and the Landscape in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry.” In Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, edited by Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housely, 131-152. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. Kereama, Matire. The Tail of the Fish: MƗori Memories of the Far North. Auckland: Oswald-Sealy, 1968. Leonard, Robert. “Colin McCahon.” In TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, 26-33. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. Lynn, Elwyn. “Colin McCahon: The View From Across the Tasman.” Art New Zealand (1984). Accessed February 11, 2011. http://www.artnewzealand.com/Issues31to40/5thbiennale.htm. McCahon, Colin. “19 Painters & Their Favourite Works: Colin McCahon.” Islands 10 (1974): 367-397. —. Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition. Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972. —. Rita: Seven Poems by Colin McCahon, edited by Peter Simpson. New Zealand: Fernbank Studio, 2001. McCahon, William. “Teaching Aids.” In Teaching Aids. Auckland: The NEW Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, 1995. McCaw, Caroline. “Art and (Second) Life: Over the Hills and Far Away?.” Fibreculture 11 (2008). Accessed June 15, 2010. http://journal. fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_mccaw.html. McIvor, Lois. “Remembering Colin McCahon.” Art New Zealand 49 (1988–1989). —. Memoir of the Sixties. Auckland: Remuera Gallery, 2008. Mitcalfe, Barry. “Te Rerenga Wairua: Leaping Place of the Spirits.” Te Ao Hou: The New World 35 (1961): 38-42. Pound, Francis. The Space Between: PƗkehƗ Use of MƗori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art. Auckland: Workshop Press, 1994. Roof, Wade Clark. “Religion and Spirituality: Toward an Integrated Analysis.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon, 137-148. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Rowe, Neil. “Notes Towards a McCahon ABC.” Art New Zealand (1977– 1978). Accessed August 21, 2009. http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues1to40/mccahon08nr.htm. Sargisson, Lucy and Tower Sargent, Lyman. Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Simpson, Peter. “From ‘Sacred’ to ‘Scared’.” Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2002. Accessed November 30, 2009. http://www.govettbrewster.com/Publications/Visit+Online/simpson.htm. Simpson, Peter. Patron and Painter: Charles Brasch and Colin McCahon. Dunedin: Hocken Collections, 2010. Teaching Aids. Auckland: The NEW Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, 1995. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1967. van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage, translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Williams, William. Christianity Among the New Zealanders. London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1867.

CONTRIBUTORS

Zoe Alderton is a tutor for the Writing Hub at the University of Sydney. She has recently completed a doctorate in the department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Her thesis explores the reception of Colin McCahon’s Christian evangelism within secular New Zealand. Zoe is co-editor of the journal Aesthetics, and her main research interests include art and religion, museum studies, and new atheism. Zoe has published peer reviewed journal articles on outsider artist Norbert Kox, the music of Nick Cave, Theosophy in modern Australian art, and political reactions to the Blake Prize. In addition to these topics, Zoe has presented domestic and international conference papers on the development of religious motifs in modern art, themes of death in the photography of Juan Manuel Echavarría, New Atheist aesthetics, Reg Mombassa’s support of refugees, McCahon’s ideologies of framing, and the problematic symbols of McCahon. Morandir Armson is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney in the department of Studies in Religion. His thesis explores the interrelations between popular occultism, contemporary Paganism and online communities, connected by an examination of the role which chaos magic and paradigm shifting has had on all of these areas. Morandir has published on the historical and Theosophical origins of tarot cards, and on the social creation of ‘Satanic ritual abuse’. He has also presented conference papers on discrimination against members of UFO-based religions, and on themes of occult resurrection in Golden Age and Dark Age superhero comics. Forthcoming publications include an article that examines the shifts in meaning in occult dichotomies, which popular, Internet-based occult communities have wrought, a paper on how paranormal, UFO, and cryptozoology enthusiasts construct their reality, and a co-authored paper on racism in contemporary Paganism. Morandir is also a traveller, a food blogger, a scholar of the occult, an amateur cook, a martial artist, an enthusiastic Fortean, and a transplant recipient. He volunteers as both as an ethics teacher in primary schools, and as a wildlife rescuer, rehabilitating possums and bats.

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Contributors

Sarah K. Balstrup is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Completing her undergraduate thesis on the religious dimensions of romantic love in the modern West, Sarah’s research interests are focused upon the experiential aspects of contemporary religious culture, and the association between sacredness and particular emotional states. In particular, Sarah is fascinated by the seemingly essential components of reality, such as sacredness, beauty and time, that reveal themselves to be culturally constructed. Sarah has presented at a variety of conferences and has published on the evocation of abject emotion in contemporary art. Sarah is presently employed as a tutor in the Department of Studies in Religion, and as research assistant to Prof. Carole M. Cusack. Sarah has worked as an assistant copy-editor, and production editor of Literature and Aesthetics, playing an instrumental role in the re-launch of this journal as Aesthetics, where she currently holds the positions of Secretary-Treasurer and Reviews Editor. Carole M. Cusack is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney. She trained as a medievalist and her doctorate was published as Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (Cassell, 1998). Since the late 1990s she has taught in contemporary religious trends, publishing on pilgrimage and tourism, modern Pagan religions, new religious movements, and religion and popular culture. She is the author of The Essence of Buddhism (Lansdowne, 2001), Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate, 2010), and The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 2011. She has published widely in edited volumes and scholarly journals, and is the editor (with Christopher Hartney) of Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Garry W. Trompf (Brill, 2010) and (with Alex Norman) of Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Brill, 2012). With Christopher Hartney (University of Sydney) she is editor of the Journal of Religious History (Wiley) and with Liselotte Frisk (Dalarna University) she is editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions (Equinox). She serves on the Editorial Boards of the journal Literature & Aesthetics, the Sophia Monograph Series (Springer), and the Histories of the Sacred and Secular monograph series (Palgrave Macmillan). Glenys Eddy is the author of Becoming Buddhist: Experiences of Socialization and Self-Transformation in Two Australian Buddhist Centres (Continuum International Publishing, 2012), based on her doctoral thesis, undertaken in the department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Her area of research, Western Buddhist belief and practice, derives from her

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ongoing interests in many related fields of inquiry such as Buddhism, alternative religious practices in the West, religious experience and selftransformation, Western Esotericism, Jungian Psychology, meditation, and mind-body practices. Renée Köhler-Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Notre Dame, Sydney. Previous to this she was a researcher and academic assistant at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where she defended her doctoral dissertation, From Head to Foot Set in our Place: Sacred Space as the Expression of Religious Experience and Imagination. She has also lectured in Philosophy in Rome, Italy. Her publications reflect her main research areas of Philosophy of Culture, Philosophy of Religion, and Ethics, ranging from reviews of current writings about Christian Architecture and Applied Ethics to articles concerning the continuing influence of Augustine, the work of contemporary philosopher William Desmond, and the roles of sacred space. These include: “Elemental microcosms: Sacred Space and the City,” in The Sacred and the Metropolis, Van Herck and Gomez (eds) (Continuum Press, 2012); (with Sydney Palmer) “‘What Do You Know of My Heart?’ The Role of Sense and Sensibility in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” in The Philosophy of Ang Lee, Robert Arp (ed.) (University Press of Kentucky, 2013); “Gifted Beggars in the Metaxu: a Study of the Platonic and Augustinian Resonances of Porosity in God and the Between,” in Louvain Studies, 2013. Joanna Kujawa (PhD) received her BA and MA at the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Subsequently, she was awarded a PhD by Monash University. Her research is focused on early medieval philosophy, Medieval travel, and the philosophy of travel. She is a researcher at the Australian International Tourism Research Unit, lecturer at the School of Applied Media and Social Sciences at Monash University and an editorial assistant at Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Apart from her academic research she is committed to popularising medieval studies and philosophy of travel for general public. She has published essays on history of travel and philosophy of travel in major Australian journals and magazines (The Griffith Review, Financial Review, et cetera.). She is also a seasoned traveller and loves visiting pilgrimage sites around the world. In 2012, she published a bestselling travel guide to Jerusalem: Jerusalem Diary: Searching for the Tomb and House of Jesus.

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Contributors

Alex Norman is a Lecturer in the Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney. He is also a sessional lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, and Managing Editor of the Journal of Sociology. His book Spiritual Tourism (Continuum 2011) examines the intersection of travel and secular spiritual practice by contemporary Westerners. With Carole M. Cusack he is co-Editor of the Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Brill 2012). He has also published on World Youth Day and the Camino de Santiago, and on the history and reception of the Biodynamic agricultural techniques promoted by Rudolf Steiner. His research interests include tourism and religion, new religious movements, food, photography, and the practice of secular spirituality in the everyday. His latest research project looks at the various ways in which travel events and traditions have impacted the formation of new religious movements. He hopes to make tourism a more thoroughly examined subject in the study of religion. Johanna J. M. Petsche graduated with a PhD in Studies in Religion from the University of Sydney in 2013. Her dissertation, entitled Music For Remembering: The Gurdjieff/de Hartmann Piano Music and its Esoteric Significance, examined Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and his little-known piano compositions. In 2011 she travelled through Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Russia as fieldwork for her dissertation, and her experiences and discoveries are documented in her chapter in this book. Johanna is also a lecturer, tutor, and research assistant at the University of Sydney. She co-edited and contributed to a special issue of Literature & Aesthetics on ‘The Legacy of Theosophy’, and has published a number of articles and book chapters on Gurdjieff, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and pianist Keith Jarrett in Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production and Literature & Aesthetics. In her spare time she performs in a musical trio on clarinet and studies the Gurdjieff Movements. Robert Saunders is a PhD scholar at Monash University, where his research focus is on the outcomes and benefits of long-distance walking, with particular reference to the nature of attitudinal and behavioural change processes, and the enhancement of well-being in adults. His personal interest in long-distance walking has evolved from formative experiences in the wilderness of South-west Tasmania and an early career management role for the Australian Alps Walking Track, to a broader involvement in leadership training, guiding and interpretation. With more than thirty years’ experience in national park and heritage management,

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Robert also works as a consultant in the areas of visitor interpretation and communication, park and heritage policy and planning, visitor research, and guide training. His qualifications include a Master of Environmental Science from Monash University. Simon Theobald is a Master’s of Arts candidate at the Australian National University, specialising in social anthropology. He has published previously on ultra-Orthodox Judaism, including in the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, Literature and Aesthetics, and most recently in the Ashgate Research Companion to Contemporary Religion and Sexuality. He continues to be fascinated by the lived experience of religiosity, particularly in how ‘enclaved’ communities such as the Lubavitchers negotiate relations with the external world. His current research relates to these same themes in the context of KhyberPakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, examining identity formation and civic participation among the indigenous non-Muslim Kalash population of the Chitral District. Ping Wang is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia. She received her Master’s degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, and her PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia. She has taught at universities in China, America as well as Australia. She is a recipient of a few fellowships, including Artist-in-Residence, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and Affiliated Fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research covers a broad area of classical Chinese literature, philosophy and art. Her research in the field of philosophical texts has resulted in the publication (co-authored with Ian Johnston) of Daxue and Zhongyong, the Biligual Edition by Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. This publication is an extensive study of commentaries on Daxue and Zhongyong, two of the “Four Books” considered amongst the most critically important Confucian classics and Chinese philosophy more broadly. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Zhuangzi. The interdisciplinary approach marks her research in classical Chinese literature, in particular ci-poetry, one of the most important classical poetic genres in the history of Chinese literature. She has published numerous articles on poetry and Chinese literati tradition.

292

Contributors

Lisa Worthington holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications from the University of Western Sydney and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in human geography from the University of Sydney. In 2011 she was also awarded a Master of Arts (Honours) degree from the University of Western Sydney for her thesis on the public sphere activities of Muslim women in Sydney Australia. Currently Lisa is a PhD candidate at the Religion and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney where she also teaches in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology. Her PhD research plans to investigate the social implications of gender practices in progressive Muslim movements. Her research interests include gender rights in Muslim societies/communities; Islamic gender rights movements and Muslims living in a minority context.

INDEX

Abbey Church of St Denis, 89, 104 Abbot Suger, 89, 103, 104, 107 absorption, 28, 29, 41 achievement, 27, 28, 43 Adab, 202, 204, 205, 208, 214 adventure tourism, 24 Alfassa, 148 aliyah, 249 Analects, 217, 236, 242 Angus, 271 Ani, 165, 167, 172, 173, 174, 183, 184, 188 Apache, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 83, 85, 86 art, 90, 91, 98, 103, 105, 106, 107, 146, 153, 205, 214, 266, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281, 282, 285, 286, 287 Ashkenazim, 246, 248 Auroville, 135, 148, 152, 153 Australia, 24, 33, 35, 39, 40, 44, 82, 86, 116, 145, 178, 181, 183, 199, 203, 212, 213 authenticity, x, 1, 2, 16, 27, 109, 119, 122, 159, 174, 178, 191, 192, 193 Avebury, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66 Bachelard, Gaston, 71, 80 Basso, Keith, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 85 battlefield tourism, 24, 25 Baxter, James K., 266 beach, 265, 266, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 283 Bede, 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 19, 20 birds, 5, 230, 233, 239, 278

Birgitta of Sweden, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127 Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna, vii, 8, 129, 130, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 173, 174, 176 blindness, 266, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 281 Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre, 180 Bodhghaya, 193 Boudhanath Stupa, 179, 193 boundaries, 48, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 213, 254, 276 Buddhism, viii, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 147, 154, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 222, 224, 230 Buddhist, 132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 145, 152, 154, 162, 163, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 217, 219, 221, 222, 226, 228, 229, 230, 239, 242 Cao Cao, 224, 225 Cao Zhi, 224 Carmichael, David L., 69, 74, 75, 78, 84, 85 Catholic, 2, 8, 10, 18, 20, 111, 123, 189, 269, 274

294 Chabad, viii, 243, 244, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264 Chambers, Ryan, 136 Chartres cathedral, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98 Christ, 7, 76, 82, 83, 85, 90, 93, 94, 100, 102, 104, 117, 118, 119, 120, 149, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272, 274, 276, 278, 279, 281, 283 Chu ci, 218, 219, 222, 234, 236, 241 civil religion, 40 community, 6, 7, 47, 49, 52, 63, 64, 70, 76, 79, 88, 89, 91, 105, 165, 203, 208, 209, 211, 212, 245, 246, 249, 251, 253, 265, 267, 269, 273, 276 Confucius, 217, 218, 236, 242 Connolly, Daniel K., 91, 97, 98 conversion, 15, 95, 116, 180, 181, 188, 270 Cornwall, 51, 54, 65 crop circles, 47, 52, 59 Crusades, 100 Cuthbert, vii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Cuthbert’s Way, 1, 16, 17 Dalai Lama, 134, 147, 165 Daoist, 217, 226, 228, 229, 230, 236, 239 David-Néel, Alexandra, 147, 153 death, xiii, 1, 5, 12, 35, 51, 64, 93, 100, 101, 114, 115, 117, 118, 122, 125, 136, 144, 146, 153, 164, 167, 224, 226, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 256, 265, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279, 283 Dharamsala, 133, 134, 135, 151, 154 Discovering Buddhism course, 179 Du Fu, 223, 233 dualism, 69, 72, 75 Duby, Georges, 90

Index Durham Cathedral, 6, 7, 10 Easternisation, 143 Echmiadzin, 172 Eleonor of Aquitaine, 125 emotion, 26, 28, 32, 39, 192, 274 extraordinary experience, 28, 33, 39, 40, 42 Fan Zhongyan, 223, 227 Faxian, 221, 222 fear, 94, 117, 200, 201, 206, 230, 239, 251 fiqh, 206, 207, 208, 212 flow, 28, 29, 30, 39, 41, 270 fog, 266, 272, 273, 274, 276, 279, 282 Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 186, 189, 194 framing, 27, 36, 38, 64 frontiers, 199, 200, 203, 205, 213, 267 gender, 79, 110, 119, 199, 200, 201, 210, 212, 213 genuine fakes, 4, 12 Giorgiades, Giorgios, 170 Glastonbury, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 65 God, xi, xiv, 5, 7, 9, 18, 19, 88, 89, 94, 95, 101, 103, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 207, 211, 245, 250, 251, 262, 268, 269 Goddess, 50, 55, 65, 66, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 182, 193, 196 Gothic, 51, 65, 89, 90, 97, 103, 107 Grace Cathedral, 95, 104 grief, 238, 266, 271, 273, 274, 276, 278, 283 Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich, viii, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Gyumri, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174 halakhah, 254 Han Dynasty, 218, 220

Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning Han Yu, 223, 226 Hasidim, 243, 249, 251, 258, 261, 263 Heidegger, 72, 79, 82, 85 heritage, 1, 3, 9, 18, 31, 55, 61 hermeneutic, 25, 282 Hindu, 64, 133, 140, 145 Holy Island, 1, 6, 13, 15, 21 Hubbard, L. Ron, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 173, 174, 175 identity, x, 1, 2, 8, 9, 18, 35, 39, 42, 43, 73, 78, 83, 129, 131, 134, 135, 180, 181, 186, 211, 212, 283 India, vii, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 165, 184, 189, 221, 222, 242 India Syndrome, 136 indigenous, 26, 27, 40, 69, 84, 143, 269 initiation, 78, 161, 165, 179 inner journey, 28, 71, 89 Introduction to Buddhism course, 178, 179 Iona, 4, 6 Islam, 60, 142, 166, 199, 202, 203, 204, 210, 212, 214, 215, 244, 246, 248, 252, 263 itinerary map, 98, 99 Jerusalem, 60, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 112, 114, 119, 120, 122, 124, 136, 153, 165, 172, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 269 Jerusalem Syndrome, 136 Joanna of Naples, 121, 122 Jones, William, 140 Jordan, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213 Jungian archetype, 78, 93, 94

295

Kabbalah, 247, 254, 260, 264 Kachoe Ghakyil Nunnery, 193 karma, 56, 150, 186, 187 Kars, Turkey, 167, 171, 172, 173, 174 Kereama, Matire, 269, 270, 286 Kern, Howard, 92 knowledge, ix, 17, 19, 62, 82, 83, 89, 90, 103, 119, 138, 143, 144, 145, 160, 162, 164, 174, 178, 182, 188, 192, 193, 194, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 249, 282 Kokoda, vii, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 Kopan, viii, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 141 labyrinth, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 Labyrinth Society, 91, 107 Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, 179 Lama Tsong-kha-pa, 179 Lama Yeshe, 184 landscape, 2, 3, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 60, 70, 129, 207, 217, 219, 222, 229, 231, 233, 234, 238, 240, 247, 255, 256, 266, 268, 269, 275, 276, 279, 280, 282, 283 Lauren Artress, 93, 96 legitimisation, 209 Li Bai, 223, 225, 226, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240 liminal, 71, 78, 84, 89, 110, 125, 165, 253, 257, 266, 267, 268, 272, 273, 276, 282, 283 Lindisfarne Gospels, 6, 7, 8, 19 Literati, viii, 217 Lonely Planet, 131, 137, 138, 155, 172, 175 long-distance walking, 24, 30

296 Lubavitcher, 243, 244, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 256, 258, 260, 261 mahram, 209 male domain, 213 MƗori culture, 269, 272 mappae mundi, 99, 102 Margery Kempe, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128 McCahon, Colin, 265 McCullough, David Willis, 92, 102, 103, 107 medieval, xiii, 2, 3, 8, 11, 12, 13, 18, 49, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 123, 124, 125, 129, 172, 222 meditation, xiii, 87, 94, 133, 134, 136, 177, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 240 Meetings With Remarkable Men, 159, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175 Melrose, 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 21 Merkurov, Sergey Dmitrievich, 167 Mernissi, Fatima, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 213, 214 Minotaur, 93 motivation for travel, 31, 32, 35, 160, 252, 271 mourning, 219, 250, 273 Muriwai, 265, 270, 272, 273, 278, 282, 283 myth-making, 39, 40, 43 narrative, 28, 33, 39, 41, 42, 78, 79, 93, 94, 104, 120, 129, 138, 200, 221, 222, 223, 267, 272, 283 nature, 5, 8, 13, 17, 24, 30, 33, 42, 49, 55, 59, 64, 69, 70, 71, 75, 80, 84, 87, 88, 94, 97, 101, 116, 133, 160, 166, 178, 180, 185, 186, 187, 188, 200, 201, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227,

Index 228, 229, 230, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 252, 254, 255, 260, 261, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270, 275, 276, 279, 282, 283 New Age, 48, 54, 55, 67, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 94, 96, 106, 135, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 160, 175, 181, 190, 196 New Zealand, 70, 76, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 278, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286 niqab, 209, 212 Northumbria, 4, 5, 13, 14, 19, 20 numinous experience, 28, 31 objective reality, 71 Orientalism, 151, 156, 160, 161, 175 Osho, 133, 154, 157 Ouyang Xiu, 223, 227 Pagan, vii, 15, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 92, 93, 107 painting, 217, 268, 269, 273, 277, 279, 282, 283 Paris, Matthew, 98, 105, 106 peak experience, 28, 30, 31, 39 performance, 31, 34, 38, 39, 97, 186, 213, 257, 261 Pilgrimage, vii, viii, xi, xiv, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 20, 21, 33, 34, 35, 44, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 78, 85, 88, 91, 98, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 154, 165, 176, 178, 181, 182, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 244, 245, 247, 250, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 262, 263, 265, 266 place, xi, xii, 2, 6, 10, 13, 14, 15, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 40, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 92, 95, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139,

Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning 140, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 163, 165, 178, 179, 180, 189, 191, 200, 206, 209, 210, 213, 219, 228, 231, 232, 234, 237, 238, 240, 246, 247, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 261, 268, 269, 270, 271, 277 pleasure, 112, 121, 129, 209, 210, 211, 227 postcolonial, xi, 69, 82, 160 precepts, 184, 187, 252 private space, 209, 212 Promised Land, 268, 280 Public space, 209 purification, 186 Qu Yuan, 218, 219, 222, 223, 234, 236, 240 Rebbe, viii, 243, 250, 251, 252, 253, 258, 261 Reformation, 2, 8, 10, 21 refuge, 167, 179, 181, 188, 189, 201, 224, 234, 249 relic, 12, 90 religion, 2, 11, 18, 61, 70, 79, 83, 92, 94, 96, 109, 111, 115, 132, 135, 141, 142, 155, 161, 164, 177, 203, 212, 256, 259 Rishikesh, 131, 133, 135, 136 ritual, x, 16, 30, 33, 39, 49, 50, 61, 63, 70, 79, 82, 91, 180, 183, 186, 245, 248, 252, 256, 261, 265, 267, 268, 273, 280, 283 Russian Military Cathedral, 171 sacralisation, 27, 36, 39, 43 sacred, xi, 2, 9, 11, 16, 18, 26, 32, 37, 38, 40, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 92, 94, 95, 97, 101, 109, 146, 165, 167, 174, 189, 190, 202, 222, 243, 247, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 267, 270, 277, 278, 283 Sanahin Monastery, 172 Scientology, 159, 162, 163, 175, 176 Scottish Borders, 1, 11, 19

297

secular, x, 2, 3, 9, 11, 17, 18, 32, 35, 41, 92, 111, 122, 183, 189, 190, 194, 244, 247, 268 seekers, 149, 162, 181 self-exploration, 184, 190 self-transformation, 3, 16, 146, 178, 180, 181, 265 Sephardim, 246 shan-shui, 217, 218, 226, 227, 240 Shiji, 218, 241 Silbury Hill, 50, 54, 60, 61 Sima Qian, 218 Song Dynasty, 220, 223, 227, 237 spiritual tourism, 2, 18, 48, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 181, 192 spirituality, 2, 10, 18, 59, 113, 122, 132, 143, 148, 177, 181, 191, 193, 260, 264, 275, 280 Spollen, Jonathan, 136, 153 Sri Aurobindo, 148 Stations of the Cross, 265, 266, 269, 274, 276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283 Stonehenge, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 strangers, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208 study of religion, 70 Su Shi, 223, 237, 239, 240 subtle body, 81, 186 Symeon of Durham, 4, 6, 112 Synod of Whitby, 4 Tang Dynasty, 220, 233 tantric, 179 Tao Yuanming, 223, 228, 229, 230, 231, 238, 239, 240 the East, 94, 130, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 148, 149, 151, 159, 160, 161, 174, 209, 239 the self, xii, 19, 33, 62, 78, 79, 96, 101, 104, 133, 144, 180, 207, 251, 265, 276, 283 the West, xi, xiv, 50, 52, 57, 59, 62, 80, 81, 94, 102, 129, 130, 138,

298 139, 140, 143, 144, 148, 149, 153, 156, 159, 160, 165, 174, 209, 222 Theosophical Society, 8, 130, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 159, 161 Theosophy, 80, 129, 130, 141, 142, 144, 153, 157, 161, 176 Theseus, 93 threshold, 81, 165, 194, 268 Tibet, 141, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156, 161, 162, 165, 184 tourism, ix, x, xi, xiii, 1, 9, 11, 18, 23, 24, 33, 48, 52, 54, 55, 88, 109, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137, 139, 144, 150, 177, 178, 182, 194 tourist experience, x, 190 transformative tourism, 24 travel, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 2, 8, 9, 13, 16, 21, 24, 35, 43, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 58, 62, 63, 64, 76, 79, 87, 99, 101, 109, 111, 112, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 182, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232,

Index 233, 234, 237, 239, 240, 256, 265, 267, 268 Turner, Victor, x, xiv, 3, 9, 21, 25, 34, 38, 43, 45, 70, 71, 77, 86, 89, 107, 115, 125, 127, 132, 154, 165, 176, 194, 197, 253, 254, 263, 267, 272, 287 tzaddik, 250, 251, 252 universalism, 79 Vajrasattva, 179, 194 Vajrayana, 178, 180, 181, 184, 187, 188, 193, 194 Varanasi, 133, 134, 135, 155 Vikings, 1, 6 Vipassana, 180, 184, 192 wali, 206 Walsingham, 10, 11, 20 Wang Bo, 218, 223, 232 wang sun, 218, 219, 238 Wang Wei, 219, 223, 229, 230, 231, 239, 240 Wang Xizhi, 223 Wiltshire, 52, 63 women, 77, 82, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 146, 147, 151, 183, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 259, 260 World War II, 16, 23, 26, 31, 39, 139, 155 Xie Lingyun, 223, 238 Xuanzang, 221, 222 Yeats, W. B., 146, 154 Yeavering, 14, 16, 20 yoga, 134 Younghusband, Francis, 149