ABSTRACT
Pilgrims go from here to there, and it is exactly the possibility of the arrival at the place marked on the map, or at least the wager that can be placed on the likelihood of arrival, which makes the journey worthwhile and important. After all, and admittedly somewhat before the onset of the modern deconstruction of natural artifice, it was only the seeking of ‘the holy blissful martyr’ which meant that the pilgrims ‘from every shire’s end/Of England, down to Canterbury they wend’ (Chaucer 1951:19). However, with the emergence of the modern institutions, arrangements and imaginations, the purpose lent by the martyr was replaced by rather more secular ends. Max Weber demonstrated, and indeed helped to reinforce, the acknowledgement that modernity meant the disenchantment of the world and the transformation of the religiously motivated pilgrim into a traveller who was seeking a little bit of heaven here on earth (this is, of course, part of the main story of Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis; see Weber 1930).
