Pilgrimage without Belief

The Spread of Santiago-style Pilgrimage

Abstract

The revitalization of the Santiago pilgrimage route in the twenty-first century has been remarkable. The Camino de Santiago attracts pilgrims from all over the world. But many of them are pilgrims without belief. For them, the relics of the cathedral cannot be the object of a pilgrimage. What they value is the exchange experience of the pilgrimage process and the awareness and self-transformation. In this paper, we see this situation as the backgrounding of faith in the sense of a departure from the framework of traditional religion. A similar trend can be seen in Japanese pilgrimages that have been modeled after the Santiago pilgrimage. In other words, faith is seen as a thing of the past, and spiritual discourse is created about the present. Sometimes these spiritual discourses are also spun by actors on the side of traditional religions who should be the bearers of traditional belief systems.