ABSTRACT
In the twentieth and twenty-first century, scholars of anthropology, sociology, history, and theology have studied the pilgrimage practices of a variety of religious traditions. A familiar metaphoric use of pilgrim which began during Bunyan's lifetime is found in the term applied to the first Europeans to set up colonies in what came to be called New England: the "Pilgrim Fathers". The Pilgrim's Progress, however, does not end with the narrator's description of the future of Christian, Hopeful, and Ignorance. As a religious and cultural rite, or perhaps even rite-of-passage, pilgrimages are recorded in texts as ancient as the Pentateuch. With the Reformation and its awareness of the problematics of traditional pilgrimage as practiced on treks to Canterbury and Walsingham, for example, there was a sense of the continued need for opportunities of bonding. A pilgrimage is both a process and a result, a journey and a visit to a specific site or sites.
