Inasmuch as religion was conceived spatially in the Roman world, the most basic form of ritual act in Mediterranean cultures involved movement to, through, or among the various concentric ‘‘centers’’ that gave meaning to the landscape, and then in the concrete acts of devotion one performed to signify one’s presence at a place. Processions followed routes that symbolically involved specific shrines in city or countryside. Domestic cult itself comprised acts of devotion before images in a particular part of the house, as well as trips to local and regional shrines to avail of their gods’ favors. In general, one’s social and personal relationship to a temple or even to a regional prophet was inevitably expressed through some form of travel (Belayche 1987; Frankfurter 1998b: 13-28). Even the imagery of otherworldly vision, which often guaranteed the authority of a seer, was played out across a heavenly landscape of deities, angels, the dead, and mysterious sights (Himmelfarb 1987).
It has been debated whether the term ‘‘pilgrimage’’ ought to be used to designate travel in such religious contexts, since in the ancient world ‘‘religious’’ travel could not be easily distinguished from what the modern scholar might call ‘‘tourism’’ (Bernand 1988; Elsner and Rutherford 2005). But for our purposes, the recognition of certain patterns in religious travel in the Roman period obviate the larger categories. Shrines with regional catchment areas receive regular visitors seeking resolution of concrete crises: health, advice, blessing. At Egyptian shrines like that of Bes at Abydos, or that of saints Cyrus and John at Menouthis, or even the aerie of a regional prophet like the Syrian Simeon Stylites, devotees come from area villages to resolve illnesses, agricultural dilemmas, and social conflicts (MacMullen 1981: 26-9; Dunand 1991, 1997; Montserrat 1998a; Derks 1998: 215-39). Some of these shrines and seers also gained international clienteles: in Egypt, for example, the Mandulis shrine at Talmis (Kalabsha) and the Amun shrine of Siwa, both on the very boundaries of Egypt, and by the fifth century the shrine of Saint Menas; in Palestine an entire ‘‘holy land’’ of Jewish and Christian sacred sites; Hierapolis in Syria; and the many oracle shrines in Greece and Asia Minor (Volokhine 1998: 8297; I. Rutherford 1998; and in general Maraval 1985:105-15). Appeals to these shrines, as we find in inscriptions and literary sources, often tended towards the ‘‘spiritual’’ - the acquisition of some revelatory experience - and reflected the hybrid religious sentiments of urbane Roman travelers, not just regional peasants (Nock 1934; Hohlwein 1940; Frankfurter 1998a: 217-21; Moyer 2003).
Upon reaching such shrines, travelers would express their presence and particular appeals: in graffiti - called proskynemata, ‘‘devotions’’ - on the walls of the shrine, occasionally in elaborate verse prayers; by leaving votive images of afflicted body parts, much as in healing shrines today; by endowing commemorative stelae; and by sleeping as close as possible to the holy place, a need for which many shrines, both pre-Christian and Christian, provided facilities. Pilgrimages at festival times would encounter processions, dramas, spectacles of all sorts, and various collective devotions: at Syrian Hierapolis, for example, one might witness the priestly sacrifice amidst ‘‘holy men, flute players as well as pipers and Galli [ecstatics who castrate themselves], and frenzied and deranged women’’ (Luc. Syr. D. 43; in general see Maraval 1985: 213-45).
The concentration of such activities at a traditional center, often following a difficult journey from one’s home village, invites the analytic approach of the anthropologist Victor Turner, who emphasized the religious experience particular to ‘‘limi-nal’’ situations - away from home, as part of a like-minded party, in or en route to an extraordinary place, during festival time (V. Turner 1974). Thus spatially, socially, and temporally dis-located, the pilgrim might find her perception of sacred or ‘‘real’’ things heightened; she might achieve deeper bonds with others similarly disposed; and she might undergo some permanent psychological transformation. Travel and pilgrimage literature of the Roman period alike emphasized the boundaries and frontiers of imperial civilization, the inhuman dangers, spiritual potentialities, and odd spectacles that lay beyond familiar territory; to the elite Roman, the archaic temple off on the periphery was heavy with an exotic allure that could not but have influenced his experience on arrival. Of course, literature describing such experiences often served to promote particular shrines, and regional or local pilgrimages tended to function on more of a continuum with local religious experience than international pilgrimages, which involved more of a departure.
World History
