A pilgrim's progress; From this world to that which is to come.
This month for our reflections I’d like to offer up an extended riff upon the idea of pilgrimage, of being a pilgrim and of the many ways in which lives and our language, both outward and inner, are shaped by this metaphor. I’ll also be offering an allegory, in the spirit of the thing, to see in the pilgrim’s journey a prototype for the business of therapy and the healing path more generally.
What is a pilgrim anyway?
Firstly, let’s begin as ever with some defining of terms and a little etymology. What is a pilgrim anyway?
According to the dictionary, a pilgrim is a person who undertakes a journey to a sacred place for religious or spiritual reasons. The journey, known as a pilgrimage, is often motivated by the desire for spiritual growth, penance, or for the fulfilment of a vow.
As for etymology, the English word “pilgrim” comes from the Middle English “pelerin,” which itself originated from the Old French pelegrin. This, in turn, was derived from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “foreigner” or “traveller”. The Latin word peregrinus is composed of “per-” (through) and “ager” (land or field). So this indicates a journey through foreign lands.
Equivalent terms in other languages respect the same fundamental contours of place, movement and person, such as in the Spanish peregrino, but also in Arabic: حاج (Hajj) / زائر (Zair). “Hajj” refers specifically to someone who undertakes the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, while “Zair” can mean a visitor or pilgrim in a broader sense. We see it again in Sanskrit (and Hindi): तीर्थयात्री (Tirthayatri), where “tirtha” refers to a pilgrimage site, and “yatri” means a traveller, so “Tirthayatri” denoting a pilgrim. In Chinese, we also maintain the same link: 朝圣者 (Cháoshèngzhě). In this case “Cháo” means to go towards, “shèng” means sacred or holy, and “zhě” means person, thus a pilgrim – the one whom approaches the sacred place.
Historically speaking, populations in settled regions were generally more sedentary, relative to the contemporary freedoms of movement that we enjoy. Reasons to move beyond the immediate home place were limited – mainly summarised by the need for trade and commerce – going to market; the exigencies of conflict – going to war; and the third major driver of movement among people, going on pilgrimage.
In many traditions pilgrimage was motivated by obligation or vow (the Hajj to Mecca, as we already mentioned, is the archetype of this), or it was undertaken in penance. So for instance, the Canterbury pilgrimage celebrated by Chaucer in his great work, The Canterbury Tales. That exists as a penance set by the English King Henry II as atonement for his own intemperate and ultimately murderous anger at Thomas à Becket, then Archbishop of Canterbury. A final driver of pilgrimage shared across many traditions involves seeking a miracle, and modern pilgrimages to Lourdes in France, for example, in search of healing remains to this day an excellent example of that.
Pilgrims could be expressions of the deep and enduring traditions of a given society, as with sannyasin in India, or walkers of the Camino to Santiago de Compostella in Northern Spain; or they might represent a radical, even puritanical, rededication of faith, making them marginal, even fully outsiders. The so-called Pilgrim Father’s crossing the Atlantic in the winter of 1620 from England, via the Low Countries, to New England there to settle in Massachusetts, are perhaps the most historically consequential of these.
The secular pilgrimage of today
Today we’re familiar with other functional classes of pilgrimage, many of which have only vestigial memories of the sacred dimension to attend them. For example, at some level, every act of tourism or travel for pleasure and leisure is a worldly echo of a sacred journey. The person crossing off sites from their bucket list, the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the preserved remnants of the Berlin Wall or Stonehenge, they all have in common a desire at some level to experience awe and wonder, to place oneself alongside a tradition of experience, to confirm the vividness of one’s existence.
We could extend these secular pilgrimages to the natural world too, for similar reasons. The Grand Canyon or Everest Base Camp, the Amazon basin or the Aurora Borealis, even the eruption of a volcano in Iceland or Hawaii or Italy – they all promise satisfaction of a traveller’s urge to see and experience awe, to go beyond the confines of regular life and mundane rhythms, perhaps even to fulfil a Romantic vision as regards the sublime. As in the Byronic phrase (itself an aesthetic pilgrimage) one should aspire to ‘see Venice and die’ (or ‘Vedi Napoli e poi Muori’ if Goethe is more to your taste).
In an age of secular saints (from Ghandi to MLK, Mandela to Greta Thunberg, or a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) we should not be surprised at the appetite, perhaps the soul-hunger, for meaning-making at the physical level. Nor is the pilgrim instinct reserved for the worlds of religion, art, nature and politics. There’s even a similar shape being made in respect of science too, with people flocking to see rocket launches around the world, or to visit CERN in Switzerland to fathom the mysteries of particle physics, or perhaps to follow Darwin’s paradigmatic trip to the Galapagos islands. It occurs to me that the Apollo 11 moon landings retain a pilgrimage-like quality 50 and more years on, despite being off-planet, since the Moon is perceptible from every corner of the Earth and many a museum hosts a fragment of lunar rock, like some out-of-this-world relic to be visited and wondered at in its own right.
Of course, a motivation of religious or spiritual calling continues to call millions of people on pilgrim journeys every year – the weekly crowds at St Peter’s at the Vatican or at Bodh Gaya attest to this, as do journeys to Jerusalem. The largest gathering of human beings on Earth happens also to be a pilgrimage, namely the peripatetic Hindu festival held once in every twelve years, the Kumbh Mela. Here millions and millions of people assemble in a location for a series of ceremonies and rituals, darshan and symbolic bathing, all drawn as pilgrims by the gravitational pull of tradition and consequence. The event is visible from space, so vast are the crowds, with the 2013 event at Prayagraj, India, attracting 120 million pilgrims over a 45 day period.
What to seek for when on a pilgrimage
These numbers are an eloquent testament to the continuing power and potency of the pilgrim figure and the pilgrimage journey. It is important to say, though, that there is danger of a false equivalence here in my comparing tourist travel to pilgrimage, as Paul Fussell points out – from a Eurocentric perspective it is as though “Pilgrimage becomes Exploration and then Tourism”. And as Piotr Roszak notes the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist lies in the quality and substance of relationship – ‘the tourist seeks experiences, whereas the pilgrim seeks relationships that will change them in the perspective of becoming one with God. Therefore, the pilgrim “repeats” the journey because the relationship does not bore them, while the tourist “has already been there” and is constantly looking for new things.’
One has only to tune an ear to the everyday usage of pilgrim-words, for example, how often have you heard a casual journalistic phrase such as ‘Wembley is a Mecca for football fans’ or ‘Las Vegas, the Mecca of gambling’. This is a twentieth century appropriation of the intention of sacred pilgrimage bent towards expressing important secular attractions.
If we’re not careful we risk the “consumerism of the sacred.” And as the Slovenian mystic and artist Marko Pogacnik once said (I paraphrase here from memory), what we need is ‘profound tourism’, one that remembers to serve and appreciate and add one’s energy to a place, be it in nature or the human made world, rather than the tourism of extraction, the draining of a site’s specialness and ‘baraka’. In the age of TikTok, proliferating selfies and cheap air travel the tension between those twin polarities has never seemed so vivid.
An archetypal image of the pilgrim can be found in the major arcana of the tarot, in the person of the Fool. In the words of the author of Meditations on the Tarot, ‘is he not a wanderer, a pilgrim to nowhere, an exile from everywhere, who cares not to appear as anything in particular, who wants no name or glory or authority or power or wealth or home or parents or friends?’ In this sense the ‘journey’ of the tarot itself is seen to be a magical pilgrimage, charging up and releasing the power of a secret and unceasing prayer hidden in the mysteries of the human heart.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
So now we know what a pilgrimage is and a little about the one who makes it, the pilgrim, I’d like to turn to a book. Arguably one of the most influential books ever written in English, one who’s influence compares favourably with the King James Bible and with Shakespeare, and yet is little remembered or considered today. That is, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Written in 1678, The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory about the spiritual journey of a man named Christian from his hometown, the “City of Destruction,” to the “Celestial City.” The book is divided into two parts; the first follows Christian, and the second follows his wife, Christiana, and their children. Interestingly, the text was written during Bunyan’s long imprisonment under the restored monarchy of Charles II and Bunyan, to our way of thinking, was a prisoner of conscience, jailed for refusing to stop his non-conformist preaching and persecuted for his particular expression of faith.
Whatever part his personal experience played in the crafting of his text, Bunyan’s opus takes the reader on an archetypal journey. Firstly ‘Leaving the City of Destruction’ where Christian is burdened by a great weight representing sin and guilt, leaving his home in search of salvation, guided by the first of several characters, Evangelist and prompted by vision and dream.
The path goes on to ‘The Slough of Despond’ where Christian falls into a bog that symbolises the struggles and doubts faced by those seeking redemption. He passes through ‘The Wicket Gate’ and the ‘Interpreter’s House’ on to ‘The Hill of Difficulty’ and the ‘Palace Beautiful’ (where some rest and preparation is offered for the trials ahead).
Next come ‘The Valley of Humiliation’ and the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (where he faces trials and spiritual battles, including a fight with the terrifically crafted monster, Apollyon) and the infamous ‘Vanity Fair’ (where Christian and his companion by this stage, Faithful, are arrested and mistreated in a town obsessed with worldly pleasures). As the journey winds on, Christian comes upon the ‘Doubting Castle’ and is imprisoned together with another companion, Hopeful, by the Giant Despair. The pair ultimately escape using the key of Promise.
As the text reaches its crescendo, they come to ‘The Delectable Mountains’ and the ‘Enchanted Ground’ where the going becomes easier and encouragement and guidance are given before the road comes to ‘The River of Death’ and ultimately, the ‘Celestial City’. Christian must cross a river (symbolizing death) before he can reach the gates of the Celestial City, where he is welcomed into eternal life.
Words for every generation’s pilgrimage
So much for the narrative arc and the capitalised characterisations familiar to Christian morality plays, but just think for a moment how many of these topographical reference points of Christian’s journey have entered the language and persist to this day – the slough of despond, the giant depression, the valley of the shadow of death, vanity fair. These, and others, have become by-words and way stations on a pilgrim path through life, and have in turn become initiating points for a range of other works, from poems and novels to hymns, operas and symphonia.
As with Shakespeare or Milton, so with Bunyan, the phrases and profound namings, coinings and kennings, have become structural parts of what it is to speak English, embedded into the deep layers of the unconscious of the language itself. This is especially so with The Pilgrim’s Progress because of its didactic intention – it is a teaching story and beyond that function at a very moral level, it has served for many generations from the traumatised grounds of the immediate post-Civil War society in which it was written, through the tumultuous upheavals of tradition wrought by the Industrial Revolution up through the age of the British Empire where its reach became global, as a text by which children could be taught to read.
As a result of this, as late as the First World War, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress comes to serve as the universally known frame of reference by which whole armies of men, across many ethnicities and class backgrounds, found a shared language to describe the devastation and horror of an industrial scale battlefield and the dehumanising slaughter and to find some comfort and consolation in the familiar words and phrases of Bunyan’s text.
In the First World War, if it is indeed the first literary and literate war in which combatants on all sides could, en masse, read and write thanks to systems of mass education in modern technological societies, then Bunyan’s text makes a strong claim to be the master key to their writings.
Minds shaped in the trenches continued to esteem Bunyan’s achievement, and the solace of finding a language capable of symbolising the hellscapes, sufferings and privations they endured, with an orientation toward meaning.
JRR Tolkien
JRR Tolkien’s later works embody this, especially in the Lord of the Rings, most notably perhaps in the celebrated passage where there’s the crossing of the Dead Marshes. This is itself an echo of the author’s sufferings and privations on the Western Front. The hero, Frodo, falls, as if hypnotised, into the quagmire and being pulled up once more then reports:
“They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead”.
“Yes, yes,’ said Gollum. ‘All dead, all rotten. Elves and Men and Orcs. The Dead Marshes. There was a great battle long ago….”
Bunyan’s ‘Slough of Despond’ has a similar feel, if for more metaphysical reasons, being a mire of sin:
“Now I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended this talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough that was in the midst of the plain: and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire.
Then said Pliable, ah, neighbour Christian, where are you now?
Truly, said Christian, I do not know.”
Who in life, let alone in their ‘therapeutic journey’, has not felt the ground sink beneath her feet at the margins of the quicksand on the way? The peril is real, and the psyche knows it. To awaken truly on the path an encounter with the prima materia of one’s personal ‘slough of despond’ is certainly guaranteed.
CS Lewis
CS Lewis, friend of Tolkien, and fellow Christian caretaker of language and thought, though critical of the tone and doctrine, places Bunyan alongside Dante. His own first novel was titled The Pilgrim’s Regress, ‘a kind of Bunyan up to date’ as he put it to his publisher in 1930. Thinking back on reading Bunyan at school, Lewis settles on the viscerality of the line “Christian with desire fell sick.” Lewis links this to the schoolboy’s desire for school to be over – the end of term, the school’s out feeling known to all in education. And he writes:
“How well I know that sickness! It was no mere metaphor. It thrilled and wobbled inside: passed along the spine with delicious, yet harrowing thrills: took away the appetite: made sleep impossible. And the last morning never betrayed one. It was always not less, but more, than desire had painted it: a dizzying exaltation in which one had to think hard of common things lest reason should be overset. I believe it has served me ever since for my criterion of joy, and specially of the difference between joy and mere pleasure.”
And he continues;
“Those who remember such Ends of Term are inexcusable if ever, in later life, they allow mere pleasure to fob them off. One can tell at once when that razor-edged or needlepointed quality is lacking: that shock, as if one were swallowing light itself “
(CS Lewis, “My First School” 1943).
Thomas Merton
As the American monk and author Thomas Merton writes in his spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, and I quote:
“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage.”
As above, so below – and here, as within, so without.
Therapy as an inner pilgrimage
Let us finish our excursion through the associations of pilgrims and pilgrimage with the parallel experience of therapy, of healing, and in particular, of the path of transpersonal synthesis and psychospiritual growth.
The Pilgrim as Patient
Both client/patient and pilgrim undertake a journey to a sacred destination motivated by the desire to ease trauma, psychological suffering, to find emotional maturity and spiritual growth, redemption, or fulfilment. Both face challenges, doubts, and obstacles along the way and are guided by faith, inner conviction, developing will and perhaps, spiritual mentors. In a certain sense, the recovery of Self could be said to be the primary goal of the pilgrimage, a restoration of right relations to self and other, I and Thou, the vertical and the horizontal planes of life.
Having a clear destination or goal (be it a holy site or a cessation of symptoms) marks another shared attribute of the pilgrim with the therapy client, as does the willingness to undertake a process of transformation and growth itself requiring dedication, perseverance, and resilience.
Along the way to arriving at oneself, there will be the uncovering and integrating of parts of the self that have been hidden or fragmented, a task demanding commitment, courage, and openness to change.
The work may also embody initiation, just as the pilgrim leaves the familiar behind, often driven by a profound inner calling or a sense of crisis, so a patient enters therapy, often motivated by distress, confusion, or a significant life event. Each will meet trials, relational, emotional, shadow-facing and soulful, the inner equivalents of the Slough of Despond, or the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Internal conflicts, defence mechanisms and painful memories arise. Shame, anxiety, depression, trauma, fear and betrayal may well surface and, with patience and guidance become opportunities for insight and revelation. Epiphanies and moments of self-awareness, understanding of patterns, and breakthroughs begin to empower transformation – one returns transformed, with a deeper connection to the divine and a renewed sense of purpose and with greater self-acceptance, emotional balance, and resilience.
Viewing therapy as a pilgrimage provides a rich metaphor that emphasizes the journey of self-discovery, growth, and transformation. This perspective highlights the patient’s active role in their healing process, the importance of guidance and support, and the ultimate goal of returning to one’s true nature, renewed and whole.
Of course, many real-world pilgrimages are undertaken within groups, few are conducted solo, which may also offer us an insight into the communal function of healing and awakening, and that it is not inherently private nor unwitnessed by the intentional collective. Certainly, there are challenges in that for conventional one-to-one therapy which holds as a central article of faith, the inviolability of the confidential nature of the relationship between client and therapist. Food for further thought.
Tired and hackneyed as the journey metaphor has become, through overuse and indifference (my creative journey, my health journey, my journey to recovery, my healing journey, my parenting journey, my meditation journey, etc.) actually, it remains profoundly accurate to the course of human life, and the problem, such as there is one, exists in the ‘me’ that makes claims to the ownership and possession of the journey’s unfolding. It is our egoic attachment that ensures our estrangement from the pilgrim’s inner truth – after all, true pilgrims, often Fool-like, leave their name and all markers of social distinction behind at the outset of the journey.
Selected quotes on pilgrimage
Let’s finish with a selection of quotes, two Biblical one’s first, that give a deep context for that tradition’s understanding of the pilgrim’s plight. Firstly, Jeremiah 6:16:
Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it and find rest for your souls.”
And secondly from the Gospel of John Chapter 14, the King James Bible version (this passage I read a few weeks ago at my aunt’s funeral, and deeply affecting I found it to be in that context, with these pilgrim thoughts strongly in my mind as well):
Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Let’s also hear the great poet Rumi on this matter, scintillating as always, and here quoting an earlier poet, Abdullah Ansari of Herat, in his great poem, ‘The Masnavi’:
Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
And the last word rests with Bengali Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, who so impressed Roberto Assagioli during his Italian tour in the early 1920s. This comes from the concluding movement of his long poem ‘Sishutirtha’ (The Child), which is itself a pilgrim story, the story of a pilgrimage and the events of a pilgrimage. This is the concluding stanza:
The first flush of dawn glistens on the dew-dripping leaves of the forest. The man who reads the sky cries: 'Friends, we have come!' They stop and look around. On both sides of the road the corn is ripe to the horizon, the glad golden answer of the earth to the morning light. The current of daily life moves slowly between the village near the hill and the one by the riverbank. The potter's wheel goes round, the woodcutter brings fuel to the market, the cowherd takes his cattle to the pasture, and the woman with the pitcher on her head walks to the well. But where is the King's castle, the mine of gold, the secret book of magic, the sage who knows love's utter wisdom? 'The stars cannot be wrong,' assures the reader of the sky. 'Their signal points to that spot.' And reverently he walks to a wayside spring from which wells up a stream of water, a liquid light, like the morning melting into a chorus of tears and laughter. Near it in a palm grove surrounded by a strange hush stands a leaf-thatched hut, at whose portal sits the poet of the unknown shore, and sings: 'Mother, open the gate!'
Thank you for your listening and your attention. And I hope to share another blog recording with you next month. So until then, check my website for further details of upcoming events and things that may be of interest to you. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any thoughts or comments or if you’re interested in some kind of working with me or in joining a course that I might be offering. And until then, go very well and see you further along the way. Goodbye.
