ABSTRACT
This chapter explores interconnections between tourism, post-modernity and spirituality. Tourists are often seen as irredeemably superficial and secular, yet in some cases they have much in common, in a post-modern way, with old-style pilgrims. It also explores the complex new object that results: spiritual tourism/post-modern pilgrimage. MacCannell points out that 'authenticity' is crucial for tourists, even if absolute authenticity can never be guaranteed. Modernism insists on strict boundaries and unilinear categories. There is only one approach to the only truth: scholarship is good or bad, and tourism is something else. The chapter illustrates the value of 'unreliable tourists' with Barbara Hand Clow's Signet of Atlantis, which was channeled, she claims, by the Pleiadians, in an intense burst after an eclipse of July, 1991, to meet a publishing deadline of mid-1992. In spiritual tourism it allows knowledge, emotion and spirituality to meet and interact, where the 'pre-modern' can be felt as a powerful presence in the post-modern touristic present.
