Landscape of Faith: Interventions Along the Mexican Pilgrimage Route

FROM THE BOOK

Excerpt from “Pilgrimage and Architecture” by Daniel Saldaña París

Although the pilgrimage is associated with established religions, in reality it precedes and exceeds them. A remnant of nomadism but also a practice that lies at the basis of Western thought — from the peripatetic philosophers of Ancient Greece to the English essayists, by way of Rousseau—walking as a salve for the soul is a notion that transcends epochs and structures. When, in the fall of 1974, Werner Herzog embarked on a personal pilgrimage, walking from Munich to Paris to ask for the salvation of his friend Lotte Eisner, he was not making a comment on the history of pilgrimages, nor ceding ground to the organized magical thinking of the major monotheistic religions, but following a universal intuition that has probably defined the human species since the dawn of the bipedal adventure. The connection between walking and the processes of penitence could well lie at the very origin of faith.

Yet pilgrimages are not just about the return of the hero to Ithaca, nor the silent walk of the ascetic, nor the solitary transit of the hermit across the desert of his faith. Pilgrims are gregarious birds, subject to the formations of the flock, to the routes of a community that both precedes them and gives them meaning. “Modernity cannot be thought of as a politicization/ secularization of societies that would be reflected in a decline in pilgrimages.” The idea that humanity can do without the religious dimension altogether fed the dreams of enlightenment rationality — which produced monsters. Today, this goal appears farther away than ever. The eternal return of what has been repressed became a terrifying reality: when societies annihilated the existence of religion by decree, the state as a supreme entity took its place in the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. The secular pilgrimages of mass politics are merely the dark side of the human need to find meaning while in forward motion.

A peripatetic communion, a pilgrimage means accompanying the other on their path towards themselves. The difficulty of this internal transition, of course, must find a physical translation, a customized adversity. As Rebecca Solnit recalls: “Pilgrims [...] often try to make their journey harder, recalling the origin of the word travel in travail, which also means work, suffering, and the pangs of childbirth.” The difficulty of the pilgrimage should be proportional to the petition or the guilt the pilgrim seeks to obtain or expunge. The size of the obstacle imposed depends on the purification that must be experienced to encounter peace. These equivalences or price tables are very precise, and may be dictated by individual faith or by the shared norms of a religious profession.

In Hinduism, when someone commits the supreme offense of killing a Brahmin, they must walk in a straight line in a northeasterly direction, without regard for rivers, mountains or wild beasts, until they meet their death…