Which religions make pilgrimages

This ceremony is part of a rich indigenous Yoruba religious tradition that began in West Africa and has become one of the ten largest religions in the world, with upwards of million practitioners. Credit: Anna Branthwaite. Pilgrims climb the steps to one of the 88 temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan. Credit: Doug Dreger. Worshippers gather at the Western Wall during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Credit: Bosie Vincent. Credit: Shakeb Ahmed. Aarti, a lamp ceremony, performed in the city of Varanasi in India.

Credit: Jon Wood. Nestled within the Himalayas, Badrinath is a sacred place of the god Vishnu. Some believe that the Vyas Caves, just outside this holy town, is where the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata was written. It is primarily a place to worship Vishnu, although other gods are also represented.

It was built in the early s from marble and then overlaid with gold leaf. Inside the temple, visitors can find the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy text of Sikhism. Around the temple is a body of water called the Amrit Sarovar, or Pool of Nectar. Within the temple, one impressive site is a dining hall where volunteers serve food to 3, people in need. Subsequently, the remaining wall, Kotel, or Western Wall , became a place of worship and mourning for the old temples.

As a result, it is often called the Wailing Wall. In the shrine, meander about the Hanging Gardens of Haifa , the terraced gardens designed by Iranian architect Fariborz Sahba. In the holy city of Palitana, Shatrunjaya Hill is an important place of worship in Jainism, a belief system that revolves around non-violence toward all living things — people, animals, even insects.

Shatrunjaya is a hill of steps stretching m high. Pilgrimages are clearly associated with the extraordinary; it has often been argued that a key element in pilgrimage locales is that they exude a 'spiritual magnetism' that draws people to them. Sites of pilgrimage can therefore be seen as places where something extraordinary has happened or since legends and tales of the miraculous so often are present in the frameworks of pilgrimage places at which something extraordinary is said to have happened.

Consequently, aspects of the spiritual realm are believed to become manifest in and hence accessible at a particular physical location. Such manifestations are not necessarily associated with apparitions, such as the Virgin Mary , but can also be linked to holy figures and founders, whose traces and footsteps may form the impetus for the formation and creation of sacred geographies that become the framework of pilgrimages, as with the Buddha's footsteps, in terms of his passage through life.

The most important Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj , is also associated with the footsteps and activities of a holy figure, in that it replicates the farewell pilgrimage made to Mecca by the prophet Mohammed just prior to his death in CE.

Pilgrims on the hajj follow in his footsteps and undertake activities he is said to have performed during this farewell pilgrimage.

Sometimes such manifestations of the sacred are associated with relics of the holy - a common theme in Christianity, where relics of saints whether actual or rumoured may be the focal point of pilgrimage centres or provide the impetus that initially sanctifies a place and draws pilgrims there. Relics, too, are commonly found in and became the focal point of important Buddhist pilgrimages.

Pilgrimage places are generally marked out by the presence of striking physical constructions - temples, shrines, churches - and their accompanying objects icons, statues, tombs of holy people that mark out the physical presence of the sacred and that generally inspire - and are intended to inspire - a sense of awe in participants.

The great cathedrals at pilgrimage centres such as Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury , prominent Buddhist temples such as the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, and mosques at major Muslim pilgrimage sites, all speak of a grandeur that articulates in physical form the believed spiritual power of the place. Yet, despite the visual importance and potent attraction of such physical buildings at pilgrimage sites, one should not assume that pilgrimage sites necessarily have to have large or awe-inspiring buildings at them.

Nor do all pilgrimage sites necessarily focus on constructed sacred buildings or depend on legends or the acts of humans to turn them into especially holy places. The emphasis in Hindu culture on crossing places such as rivers, as pilgrimage sites, illustrates this point: natural phenomena and remarkable geographical landscape features may in and of themselves provide the impetus for the formation of a pilgrimage site, and serve as the magnet drawing people to them.

What remains constant is the notion of people being 'drawn' to places. Factors include legends and the expectation of miracles, narratives marking places as the locus of sacred journeys by significant religious figures, signs for example, relics and icons manifesting the presence of a sacred being or indicating the intersection of the spiritual and the physical realm, and the capacity of sites, places and routes to provide frameworks enabling pilgrims to articulate important messages and themes.

It has been often assumed that pilgrimages must to be to 'far places'.