personal Dimensions of the Sacred Journey: What Pilgrims Say

Abstract

A decade has passed since Victor Turner published his long and important paper defining pilgrimage as a ritual process. There and in his earlier article ‘The Centre Out There’, which appeared a year earlier, Turner provided a social explanation for the ubiquitous and still expanding phenomenon of pilgrimage. His simple model, developed from Van Gennep's ‘rite de passage’ seemed profound; it offered us a means for comparing the sacred journeys of one people with those of another, and for comparing pilgrimage with other kinds of ritual processes. Moreover, a vast amount of sociological data having to do with class, age, caste, and status of pilgrims could be usefully mobilized within this model. It continues to have some value although subsequent studies have shown that often pilgrim-groups are not as coherent or homogenous as Turner's model suggested they would become as they moved ever closer to the sacred centre of their shared faith.