The Art of Pilgrimage

On the forty-second page of “The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred” author Phil Cousineau wrote (some emphasis added):

The Sacred Call

Personal answers to ultimate questions.
That is what we seek.
—Alexander Eliot

All ancient pilgrimage not only celebrated identity," write Simon Colman and John Elsner in their book Pilgrimage, "but did so by linking it with a special place." The Great Panathenaea was an ancient procession that wove together the sacred and the secular as it wound up the Acropolis to the Parthenon, where a new robe was offered to the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena. If a spectator arrived at any other time, their circumambulation of the temple, according to the authors, "constituted a kind of proxy pilgrimage, a vicarious pilgrimage in a sacred event scheduled for a different time."

The Olympic Games were inagurated in 776 B.C.E in Olympia, Greece, in honor of the god Zeus. Thousands from all over the Mediterranean ventured there or to other events and sites such as the Pythian Games, the Isthmian games, the Nemean and Delphi, and were guaranteed safe passage by an unusual suspension of war during the games. Other sacred-center pilgrimages included Phocia, Dodona and Ammon in Libya.

More information about “The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Powell's Books
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble

(Conari Press, April 2000. Paperback, 288 pages. ISBN: 1573245097; EAN: 9781573245098.)