Pagan Pilgrimage: New Religious Movements Research on Sacred Travel within Pagan and New Age Communities

Abstract

Burgeoning literature on sacred travel among contemporary Pagan and New Age communities draws on previous anthropological categories, but also offers new perspectives on important theoretical debates within pilgrimage studies. New religious movements’ adherents often travel for spiritual purposes to places traditionally held as sacred by other, more established religious traditions or to places popularly understood as secular tourist sites. This offers opportunities to think through theoretical debates in the field, including distinctions between tourists and pilgrims, and whether the pilgrimage experience is one mainly comprised of shared feelings of togetherness and community, or alternatively, one fraught with competition to define the ultimate meaning of the journey. Communitas theories, based on Victor Turner and Edith Turner’s argument that pilgrimage creates community and cooperation among fellow religious travelers, contrast with conflict theories, first offered by John Eade and Michael Sallnow, who argue that pilgrimages are grounded in competing discourses, both among pilgrims and between them and institutional religious authorities. By defining spaces in new ways and offering alternative explanations for the sacredness of particular sites, religiously motivated Pagan and New Age travelers highlight the contention, emphasized by ethnographers of more traditional sacred travel, that pilgrimages are the sites of contested meanings, in which not only different theological interpretations and values, but even different religions and cosmologies, coexist.

The perspective of religious and spiritual tourism research: a systematic mapping study

“…Further, case study or multiple case studies with 15.38 per cent (20 articles) and literature review with 10 per cent (13 articles) are the fifth and sixth most used research methods, respectively. The next frequent research method was other methods such as ethnography (Banica, 2016;Zwissler, 2011) and content analysis (Son and Xu, 2013;Hashim et al, 2007) with 6.20 per cent (eight articles). Focus group with 3.08 per cent (four articles) and grounded theory with 1.54 per cent (two articles) are the least applied research methods.…”

The New Age Tourism Brand-Wagon in Ubud, Bali: Eat Pay Love!

“…To some extent it lines up with pilgrimage tourism, but differs significantly: religious pilgrimages have long-established destinations and rituals. "New Age is a broad term encompassing many diverse belief systems that overlap with interests in transformative powers emanating from nature, from individual beings -humans, animals, plants, spirits -and sometimes from beyond the planet" [10]. It is not dependent on any one central authority [11].…”

“…Traditional religion was proving irrelevant in providing meaning and value; significance was now based on "the self". "New Age … movements frequently challenge traditional, Western definitions of religion as historical, staid, monotheistic, inflexible, hierarchical, and oriented toward collective, rather than individual, experiences [10]. Originally the domain of hippies and dropouts, and not particularly commercialized, New Age spirituality has moved from the fringes to mainstream culture [25].…”

In the Study of the Witch: Women, Shadows, and the Academic Study of Religions

“…In a similar strategy to pursuing comparative-religions work by starting from perspectives that take as normative religions other than Christianity (McClymond 2108), how might our theoretical categories-such as theology, ritual, sacrifice, mysticism, secularism-change if women and their experiences were centered, rather than marginalized (e.g., Mahmood 2005;Walton 2011;Frederick 2003;Chireau 2003;Bell 1997, pp. 237-42;Sered (1992Sered ( , 1994Duncan 2008;Fedele 2103;Bynum 1987;Jay 1992;Mizruchi 2001;Dubisch 1995Dubisch , 2009Fedele and Knibbe 2013;Scott 2011;Zwissler (2011Zwissler ( , 2018…”