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A pilgrimage is a journey, often to an unknown or foreign place, where a person searches for new or expanded meaning for self, others, nature, or the highest good through experience. This can lead to personal transformation, after which the worshiper will return to their daily life. Pilgrimages often involve travelling or seeking moral or spiritual meaning. This is usually a trip to a shrine or other place important to a person’s faith and beliefs, although sometimes it can be a symbolic journey towards someone’s thoughts.
Many religions attach spiritual significance to particular places: the place of birth or death of founders or saints, or the place of their “calling” or spiritual awakening, or their connection (visual or verbal) with the divine, places where miracles were performed or witnesses, or areas where a deity is said to live or “reside”, or any place believed to have special spiritual powers. Such places may be marked by shrines or temples, which initiates are encouraged to visit for their spiritual benefit: for healing or getting answers to questions, or for some other spiritual benefit.
A person who makes such a journey is called a pilgrim. As a universal experience, pilgrimage has been proposed as a Jungian archetype by Wallace Clift and Jean Dalby Clift.
The Holy Land is the center of pilgrimages of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. According to a 2011 Stockholm University study, these pilgrims visit the Holy Land to touch and see their faith’s physical manifestations, reaffirm their beliefs in a religious context with collective excitement, and personally connect with the Holy Land.
Christian priest Frank Fahey writes that the pilgrim “is always in danger of becoming a tourist” and vice versa because the trip, in his words, constantly breaks the established way of life at home and reveals eight differences between the two.
Bahá’u’lláh decreed pilgrimage in two places in the Kitab-i-Aqdas: in the house of Bahá’u’lláh in Baghdad, Iraq, and the home of the Bab in Shiraz, Iran. Later Abdu’l-Bahá designated the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh in Bahji, Israel, as a place of pilgrimage. Certain places of pilgrimages are currently inaccessible to most Bahá’ís as they are in Iraq and Iran, respectively. Therefore, when Bahá’ís now refer to the pilgrimage, it refers to the nine-day pilgrimage, which consists of visiting the holy sites of the Bahá’í World Centre in northwest Israel in Haifa, Acre, and Bahjí.