Performing The Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites

Body & Society
http://bod.sagepub.com
Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at

Sacred Sites
Kathryn Rountree
Body Society 2006; 12; 95
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070886
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Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan

Pilgrimages and Embodiment at
Sacred Sites
KATHRYN ROUNTREE
A feature of all religions is that they designate certain places as sacred and that
these places become the foci of religious activity and destinations for pilgrims.
Neo-Paganism,1 often claimed (Williams, 2005: 1) to be one of the worlds fastest
growing religions (or group of religions since it incorporates a number of
traditions), similarly identifies a plethora of sacred places, and for the last 30
years or so Neo-Pagans have been visiting a vast range of sites in Europe and
elsewhere once connected with ancient Pagan religions, deities and ritual. Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury, Newgrange, Delphi, Crete, Ephesus, Catalhyk,
Luxor and Malta are just a very few of the popular destinations. Some pilgrims
travel by plane from the other side of the globe; some bus or walk to sites near
their homes. The journey might be the dream of a life-time or a regular weekend
outing. Organized pilgrimage tours, advertised on the internet and through
Pagan networks, incorporate visits to ancient temples and monuments, stone
circles, churches,2 tombs, sacred wells, caves, mountains and other natural
features along with lectures, visits to museums, meditation and ritual. Some
Pagan pilgrims design their own itineraries and some join tours for regular
tourists in order to gain access to sites.3
Body & Society 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 12(4): 95115
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070886
www.sagepublications.com
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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4
For modern Pagan pilgrims, making a journey to Maltas Neolithic temples,

Glastonbury Tor or Aphrodisias in Turkey might be as significant as travelling
to Mecca, Banaras or Lourdes for the members of other religions. The phenomenon of the modern Pagan pilgrimage brings the Western tradition of pilgrimage
full circle. In classical times, pilgrimages to consult the oracle at Delphi, to celebrate the Great Panathenaea festival at the Parthenon in Athens, to pay homage
to Artemis, Zeus and Aphrodite, respectively at Ephesus, Olympia and Aphrodisias, were famous, and they are becoming important again for modern Pagans.
Contemporary Paganism
Before discussing Neo-Pagan pilgrimages and bodily engagements with sacred
sites further, I should say something briefly about contemporary Paganism.
Graham Harvey summarizes it well as a diverse and pluralist spirituality; a
religion at home on Earth, an ecological spirituality, a somatic philosophy of life.
It is not a preparation for Heaven or a quest for Enlightenment (1997: vii). It is
an umbrella term for a large number of modern Western Nature religions, the
commonest being Wicca (modern Witchcraft), Druidry, Neo-Shamanism,
Goddess Spirituality and Heathenism (which draws on Germanic and Scandinavian traditions). While these are all distinctive Pagan paths (which also overlap),4
the following broad principles are shared by many Pagans:
Love for and kinship with nature, reverence for the life force and its cycles of
life, death and regeneration. These cycles are widely celebrated in eight annual
seasonal festivals including the solstices, equinoxes and the quarter days
between.
Holism: the inter-relatedness and interdependence of everything all matter
and energy often expressed in urgent concerns about ecology and ideas about
karma.
Personal freedom along with responsibility to others (including other-thanhumans), expressed as: Do what you will, but harm none.
The concept of Goddess and God as expressions of the divine reality. Pagans
are variously polytheists, animists, pantheists and panentheists.5
A great many Pagans do not, in fact, embrace a single spiritual path, preferring to call themselves eclectics and choosing whatever appeals to them from
the various traditions to create a personally customized path. There are thousands of websites about Paganism and hundreds of thousands of Pagans worldwide who use them. WitchVox alone has 70,000 profiles. My own greatest
familiarity is with Goddess spirituality and feminist witchcraft (Rountree, 2004),
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which focus particularly on female images of divinity and womens empowerment and healing; however, I have recently begun ethnographic research among
Maltese Wiccans and Pagans (where numbers of males and females appear to be
fairly even). Goddess spirituality is a sub-set of both feminism and Paganism, and
it espouses a vigorous feminist and ecological politics (as do a great many other
Pagans).
The origins and development of contemporary Paganism are complex and
have been contested among insiders and scholars, debates too lengthy to revisit
here.6 There are those, for example, who claim a Pagan heritage with roots
stretching as far as the Paleolithic, whereas there are those at the other end of the
continuum who stress the importance of the 1960s counterculture in spurring
people to look for spiritual alternatives more in keeping with their developing
green, anti-war, anti-patriarchal leanings and their antipathy to hegemonic institutions. Modern Pagans draw on numerous sources: pre-Christian religions,
contemporary indigenous peoples nature religions, Eastern religions, European
folk traditions, European ceremonial magic, the late 19th-/early 20th-century
group called the Golden Dawn, feminism and eco-feminism, science fiction and
fantasy novels, astrology, gemology, herbology, mythology, meditation, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, Gaia theory, alternative healing modalities, the
personal growth movement and more. While there are some commonalities
between Paganism(s) and the New Age movement, the New Age:
. . . pursues a transcendent metaphysical reality, while Neo-paganism seeks an immanent locus
of deity . . . New Age inclines towards a hierarchical understanding of the supernatural and has
a more passive approach to it (for example, meditation or memories from previous incarnations) compared with the more democratic model of Neo-paganism which is also more active
(particularly in relation to ritual) . . . New Age tends to de-emphasize the material and
emphasize the spiritual, while Neo-paganism is seen as perhaps more balanced; furthermore,
the New Age stresses White Light, whereas Neo-paganism incorporates both the light and
the dark. (Greenwood, 2000: 910, summarizing York, 1995)
These differences are seen as very significant by the majority of Neo-Pagans and
most eschew a close categorization with the New Age.
Neo-Pagan Engagements with Sacred Sites
The phenomenon of contemporary Pagans interest in ancient sacred sites has
recently begun to be explored in sociological and anthropological literature, most
extensively by Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis in their Sacred Sites, Contested
Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk), and by archaeologists and anthropologists interested in multivocal interpretations of historic/sacred sites (see, for
example, Bartu, 2000; Bender, 1993, 1998; Blain and Wallis, 2002, 2004 and other
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articles listed on their website; Hodder, 1998, 2003; Meskell, 1999; Pearson and
Shanks, 2001). My interest in modern Pagan pilgrimages also began with an
analysis of the ways in which historic or archaeological sites (in Malta) deemed
sacred sites by Neo-Pagans have been variously interpreted, contested and
appropriated by different interest groups (Rountree, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003).
More recently, however, I have focused more closely on Neo-Pagans embodied
experiences and performances at sacred sites. While the body as a site for analysis
has received a great deal of attention from scholars in the humanities and social
sciences in recent decades, a discourse centred on the body is only just beginning
to develop within the literature on the multivocal interpretation of sacred/
historic sites and has yet to emerge in the literature on pilgrimage. As Morinis
has said, referring to pilgrimage more generally, we are yet to investigate the
broad range of psychosomatic sensations that accompany sacred journeys and are
often the most significant aspects of pilgrimage in the view of participants themselves (1992: 17).
My concern in this article is to explore the relationships between interpretation and performance, imagination and memory as they are played out in
modern Pagan pilgrims embodied experiences at sacred places. The accounts that
have informed or are discussed in this article come from my conversations and
correspondence with pilgrimage tour leaders and pilgrims, and from pilgrims
accounts published in books, periodicals and on the internet. Most of my sources
are located within the Goddess spirituality branch of Paganism, and I do not
want to suggest that these womens experiences and beliefs are generalizable in
their specificity to other varieties of Paganism or other Pagan individuals.
However, I would venture that these Pagans deeply embodied engagements with
landscapes may well speak to or resonate with other Pagans engagements with
what all regard as a living sacred earth.
The articles founding premise is that the lived body is our primary text and
starting point for knowledge. Within the rationale of a Neo-Pagan pilgrims
worldview, I argue, several dualistic constructions dissolve and reveal themselves
as continuities: the human body and the earths body, the past and the present,
inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity. Through the lens of
human perception and imagination and through pilgrims bodily experiences,
inner and outer landscapes co-create and flow into one another.7 Through
somatic modes of attention by attending to and with ones body in surroundings that frequently include the embodied presence of others pilgrims experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective
milieu with other pilgrims and with the Earth itself (they might be more likely
to say herself).8 More radically, they often experience themselves as embodying
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the divine, a process they describe as empowering and healing. In sacred places
time and the timeless, visible and invisible worlds intersect or blur into one
another (Bolen, 1994: 119).
Pagans experiences at sacred sites also have much in common with the optimal
experiences Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1988) describes as flow. In the flow
state, individuals whether they are rock-climbing, ocean-sailing, playing chess,
making love or making a pilgrimage temporarily lose their normal sense of time,
merge action and awareness leading to a temporary loss of ego, experience an
enhanced or transcendent sense of self and an intense closeness (Victor Turners
communitas), sometimes euphoric, with others sharing their liminal state. For
Pagan pilgrims, embodiment in the environment of the sacred place can be experienced as flow of consciousness between person and place, an encounter with the
divine where there is no distinction between the divine within and without.
Mutual Inscription: Pilgrim and Place
For women in particular (and the majority of organized tours are specifically for
women),9 sacred journeys and performances at sacred sites potentially contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the
feminine can be re-imagined, re-experienced and performed differently through
symbolic activity and ritual. Moreover, in a kind of reciprocal exchange, the
places pilgrims visit are also re-inscribed through the process of making these
journeys: new meanings are created and new stories about a place are told; libations of milk and honey, water or wine might be poured; offerings of flowers and
greenery, shells, stones, crystals and precious personal objects might be left at a
site; poems or prayers written on paper might be slipped between megalithic
stones; a small altar, shrine or cairn might be created; prayers, chants, songs,
weeping and laughter might be voiced. Pilgrims often inscribe their presence on
the site by having their photograph taken there, by taking a small stone, flower
or container of water as a memento, by writing their name in the visitors book
or drawing a sacred symbol in the earth or on a rock. Mementos are felt to carry,
perhaps contagiously transmit, some of the charisma or sacred essence of the
place; they act as a mnemonic for the pilgrims imaginative reconstruction of her
journey. Through all this activity, the morphic field (see Sheldrake, 1988) of a site
is altered. Thus the relationship between sacred place and pilgrim entails a mutual
impact, though each of a different nature and order.
The business of Neo-Pagan inscriptions on sacred/historic sites is becoming
a contentious one among Pagans and non-Pagans with an interest in the same
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sites. Blain and Wallis (2004 and www.sacredsites.org.uk) discuss this in some
detail, pointing out that, whereas some Pagans become avid campaigners for sitepreservation and do their utmost not to change or damage sites, the ritual activities of others may not only change the site, but damage it irreparably (2004:
239), for example, when ritual fires are lit which could have irreversible effects,
especially on megaliths. Pagan votives left at sites and debris from rituals, termed
ritual litter by those inclined to disapprove of their deposition (including some
Pagans), might be organic, but they might also leave more permanent marks
drips of candle-wax on stones and the tagging in specific places with symbols
such as spirals or pentacles inscribed in stone on chalk (Blain and Wallis, 2004:
241). What is construed by some as ritual litter and tagging is for others sacred
activity and its accoutrements. Some of the activities carried out by Pagans are
not so different from the activities of those belonging to other religions in their
respective holy places Roman Catholics, for example, might light a candle or
write a prayer and deposit it in a special place in a church without the candle or
prayer being termed ritual litter. The difference, of course, is that, whereas
churches are generally designated as sacred places where sacred activity is
expected and condoned, places like Avebury and Ephesus and Mnajdra (Malta)
are not only, or even primarily, regarded as contemporary sacred places where
sacred activity is expected and sanctioned. They have other meanings and values
to other individuals and interest groups, and those other meanings and interest
groups tend to dominate both the interpretation and the management of the sites,
whereby they come to be seen primarily as heritage sites, historic sites or
archaeological sites.
Neo-Pagan pilgrims are not solemn and humourless in their ritual activities at
heritage/sacred sites and often their activities involve no more than listening to the
guide or chatting and having a picnic with like-minded folk. Their engagement
with a site might look to an outsider like that of any non-Pagan tourist or visitor.
Like Graburns (1989: 31) ethnic tourists, modern Pagan pilgrims are often eager
to meet the local people and taste local culture in the places they visit. Cohen
(1992: 53) has said that the tourist can be distinguished from the pilgrim in that
the pilgrim traditionally hopes to experience religious rapture, whereas the tourist
seeks mere pleasure and enjoyment. The Neo-Pagan pilgrim collapses this
dichotomy, seeking both spiritual rapture and bodily pleasure. Asceticism and
austerity are not ideals that have a place in Pagan religious philosophy where the
spirit/body split is meaningless and earthly pleasures are heartily celebrated.
Here, for example, is how the advertising material on the internet describes a
pilgrimage to Crete with Carol P. Christ, a feminist thealogian whose work has
significantly influenced Goddess spirituality since its origins in the 1970s:
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Feel her power in holy mountains

sense her mysteries in the darkness of caves,
pour out libations of milk and honey on Minoan altars.
Contact a sacred energy that will transform the way
you feel about women, yourself.
Walk on the stones of the ancient sites of Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Kato Zakros, Archanes,
Mochlos, Myrtos and Kato Symi.
Discover the matrifocal subtext of Christianity at Paliani
with its sacred myrtle tree, Kera Kardiotissa and Kritsa.
Nourish your soul in the museums of Heraklion, Agios Nicolaos and Siteia.
Descend into the caves of Skoteino, Amnissos, Psychro and Ida.
Hike in the mountains at Zaros, Zakros, Archanes, Psychro and Ida.
Stay in small villages, meet local people, dance to Cretan music,
feast on freshly cooked fish, tsatsiki, taramosalata,
feta cheese, tiny olives, fried potatoes, local wine . . .
(www.goddessariadne.org/goddesspilgrimage.htm)
As well as visits to ancient sites and museums, the tour takes in seaside villages,
pottery studios, and a good deal of wonderful eating, swimming, local music and
dancing. The emphasis is on experiencing the spiritual power of sacred places and
the bodily pleasures of the Cretan environment, on connecting physically with
the places sacred to the Minoans and on learning about their culture.
Sacred Landscapes
Whether the Pagan pilgrim is having a picnic, meditating silently or conducting
a more elaborate ritual at a site, the perceived connection between the site and
pre-Christian deities or religion makes it a holy place. At sacred sites there is a
bleeding between the sacred and everyday realms, between the pilgrims human
body and the earths body, and between past and present worlds. Not only does
the divine penetrate the site at this node in the landscape, but it (usually thought
of as she) also becomes one with the pilgrim: human body and landscape both
embody the sacred. For these pilgrims, visiting an ancient pagan temple, cave or
stone circle might involve, in some sense, not only a journey to a (usually) distant
place, but also, in the imagination, a journey to a distant time, or into a state of
timelessness (albeit for a short period).
The sacred place provides the constant, material link between the past and
present worlds. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychotherapist whose writing is
well-known among modern Goddess followers, says that sacred places are where
worlds overlap or interpenetrate and life is imbued with depth and meaning; they
are intersections of the timeless with time where the invisible and visible worlds
come together in a liminal moment (Bolen, 1994: 11819). Sacred landscapes, she
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says, affect us like dreams or poems or music, moving us out of everyday reality
into a deeper archetypal realm (Bolen, 1994: 127).
This way of thinking about the interpenetration or bleed between past and
present is not so far from that of archaeologist Michael Shanks in Theatre/
Archaeology: the past does not hold comfortably some point in a linear flow of
time from past through to present; instead the past bubbles around us (Pearson
and Shanks, 2001: xvii). Pearson and Shanks contend that the site is as much a
temporal as spatial concept (p. 55) and that walking over a site is like a story, a
series of events for which the land acts as a mnemonic . . . To travel across such
a landscape is to remember it into being, it is sedimented with human significances (p. 138). This is especially true for modern Pagan pilgrims who approach
an ancient site as a sacred place/time, are alert to their somatic responses to the
place and perform ritual in it in a heightened state of consciousness.
Again, the idea of remembering a place into being has resonance in the
thinking of many Pagans today in so far as it suggests an intimate, participatory
relationship between people and land and a continuous process of creation in
which both are cooperatively involved. Pagan beliefs are closely linked to process
philosophy, the Gaia theory, chaos theory and quantum physics, and the following quotation from Christs She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the
World, while referring to process philosophy, also expresses a broadly Pagan
worldview:10
For process philosophy, the whole universe is alive and changing, continually co-creating new
possibilities of life. Every living individual is born, grows, and then dies. The world is a web
of changing individuals interacting with, affecting, and changing each other. The body is the
locus of changing life. Not to be embodied, not to change, is not to be alive. Change occurs
from moment to moment in our daily lives as we are acted upon and act, exercising creative
freedom. The universe as a whole is changing in a continual process of evolution. The world
is filled with free and creative individuals, related to each other. To a greater or lesser degree,
all individuals, including human beings, other animals, cells, atoms, and particles of atoms,
exercise creative freedom. (Christ, 2003: 45)
Understanding this worldview is crucial to understanding how the dualities

human body/earth body, past/present, self/other, human/deity can be reconceptualized as continuities. For many Neo-Pagans, the whole universe and the
web of dynamic relationships connecting all individuals in it from people to
elephants to rocks to particles of atoms constitutes the ever-changing body of
divinity (divinities). Each individual is an expression of the divine.11
For Bolen (1994: 31), sacred places are rather like acupuncture points on the
earths body: points which can be stimulated to reduce pain, heal the body and
restore balance and harmony. Her experience of visiting sacred sites leads her to
suggest that, like the Australian Aborigine whose sacred task is to sing his or her
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piece of the songline that keeps the soul of the earth alive, other people too can
become attuned to nature and commune with nature in sacred dialogue. When
pilgrims visit sacred places, Bolen says, they might experience a quickening of
divinity within themselves; she found herself responding to places kinesthetically
and experienced her body acting like a tuning fork. She describes this somatic
mode of paying attention to place: I was aware of something that was neither
pressure nor vibration nor warmth, yet seemed to have qualities of all three,
centered in the middle of my chest between my breasts and radiating in all directions (Bolen, 1994: 28).
For Pearson and Shanks the human body is the fundamental mediation point
between thought and the world; through the body we begin to understand spaces
(2001: 135). But it is not easy for archaeologists to find ways of representing
understandings of the past that result from embodied encounters with sites, to
embrace multitemporality and multiple interpretations, to reintegrate place and
language. The challenge, they say, is for archaeology to become part of an integrated, social and political practice active in the creation of personal, communal,
local and national identities, a practice unafraid to be sensual, interpretive,
romantic (Pearson and Shanks, 2001: 162). Another challenge facing archaeologists at present is to pay attention to others, like Neo-Pagans, who are also deeply
interested in ancient sites and engaged in integrated social and political practices
in relation to sites intended to create a personal and group identity, practices
which are as Pearson and Shanks advocate boldly sensual, interpretive and
romantic.
It often seems to non-Pagans that Pagans accounts of visiting sacred sites are
infused with nostalgia for a society that is different from the one in which they
habitually live. Pearson and Shanks say that there is a problem with giving
primacy to a subjectivist aesthetic walking the land with an eye to the experience can easily lapse into a past-as-wished-for (2001: 153). I would argue that
this is not the case with the majority of Pagans. They do not yearn to turn back
the clock several millennia permanently, advocate de-evolutionary cultural
change, or idealize everything about ancient societies. They would not, for
instance, wish to embrace stone-age technology, carry out animal sacrifices, or
endure high infant mortality rates; nor do they imagine that ancient goddessworshipping societies were utopias free of injustice, hardship, conflict or cruelty.
Many do believe, however, that the past offers radically different models for
more balanced gender relations and for a more sustainable relationship between
humanity and the earth.
With respect to Pearson and Shankss caution about giving primacy to a
subjectivist aesthetic, it is worth noting that any engagement with landscape,
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including that of conventional archaeology, is both subjectivist and ideologically/discursively constructed. A crucial difference between an archaeological
discourse (or archaeological discourses) about landscape and a Pagan discourse
about landscape apart from any substantively different meanings, values and
interpretations they might hold is that archaeological discourses are generally
attributed in scholarly and popular contexts with greater authority and legitimacy, and are consequently accorded greater interpretive power (and often
power/authority in discussions about access to sites and their representation in
museums and visitor centres). In Pearson and Shankss discussion of how to
present contested interpretations of sites that are saturated and resonant with
meaning, they acknowledge that any re-encounter will be inevitably political:
reawakening memories, stirring emotions, mobilizing causes (2001: 157). This is
precisely what often happens when Pagan pilgrims encounter sacred sites.
Performing Identity and Healing
Through their bodily presence and ritual enactments in sacred places, Pagan
pilgrims assert the ancestral roots of their modern Paganism. Some of the rituals
they do like pouring libations of wine or water on ancient altars, praying, meditating, chanting and dancing are creative, symbolic performances of the connection they feel with the ancient communities for whom the site was sacred. They
are a means of claiming a spiritual heritage, emphasizing and embodying a shared
Pagan identity. Often rituals are the result of intuitive, somatic responses to a
sacred place, as we will see below. Imagination, interpretation and performance
weave a tight cord connecting the pilgrim to the place. The past bubbles up; the
line between memory and imagination blurs.
Turner (1973: 214) says that a pilgrimage centre, for the believing actor, represents a threshold, a fluid, liminal place and moment in and out of time, where the
pilgrim directly experiences the sacred through miraculous healing or transformation. Such healing and transformation are frequently the valued ideals embodied
in the sacred places Pagans visit. A feminist project involving healing emerges
strongly in Christs explanation of the purpose of her Cretan tour:
In travelling to Crete, we seek to connect to ancient women, to a time and place where women
were at home in their bodies, honored and revered, subordinate to none. We seek knowledge
of a time when women and men came together freely without spectres of domination and
control, self-loathing and shame, that have marred the relation of the sexes for thousands of
years.
We have found that the ancient stones speak. Descending into caves we feel grounded in
Mother Earth and in the sure knowledge of the power of our female bodies. We seek to heal
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the wounds of patriarchy, violence and war. We hope to participate in the creation of ecologically balanced, peaceful cultures in which every woman and man, every creature and every
living thing is respected and revered for its unique contribution to the web of life. (www.
goddessariadne.org/carolwords.htm)
This quotation suggests that in the course of visiting a sacred place a series of
elisions occurs: of time and place, of ancient and modern women, of human
bodies and the earths body, of memory and healing. These elisions hold the key
to how healing is believed to occur. The sacred place gives access to a sacred time,
which is also a timeless time apart, a place where time stands still or is irrelevant,
an otherworld. The gap between past and present is collapsed; the intervening
period disappears. Within Cretan caves, the womans body is enveloped by the
earths body; while there, women imaginatively align their identity with those
who inhabited a time when, they believe, gender relations were different. In this
liminal space, womb of Mother Earth pregnant with potentiality, they remember
the power of their female bodies. This is experienced as a profound healing and
rebirth: remembering becomes a re-membering. By making the journey to the
sacred place and by consciously engaging bodily with it, these pilgrims perform
self-healing. We can identify the process Turner described when drawing a
parallel between pilgrimage and rites of passage: [a]n actor-pilgrim is confronted
by sequences of sacred objects and participates in symbolic activities which [he]
believes are efficacious in changing [his] inner and, sometimes, hopefully, outer
condition from sin to grace, or sickness to health (1973: 214).
Let us look at some further examples of how the spiritual meaning and significance of visiting a sacred site could be felt and expressed as a transformative
bodily experience by Pagan pilgrims. Christine Irving, a woman who finally
fulfilled a childhood dream to travel to Malta, wrote the following about visiting
the National Museum of Archaeology and seeing for the first time the fullbodied limestone Goddess statues that had once stood in the Neolithic temple of
Hagar Qim:
I tried to imagine what meaning they might have carried in their own time, but faced with these
extraordinary fat figures I found myself unable to be objective at all. They simply delighted
me. Their size moved me. They filled me with a joy in the beauty of my own body that I have
never felt before. I am not a very large woman, nevertheless, the issue of fat has negatively
affected my image of myself. Most of my American sisters have suffered from the same anxiety.
What I experienced in front of the glass case in that dusky museum was an epiphany: the
goddess revealed to me in my own body.
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Visiting Hagar Qim, I needed nothing more than the present. I did not see the temples as
remnants or ruins from the past but as contemporary sacred space. I lay down against the
curved wall, fitted my body within their warm contours, and felt utterly connected to the past,
present and future in the great cycle of being. (Irving, 1997: 1112)
The second paragraph of this account, describing Irvings visit to the temple
which had once housed the statues, again demonstrates how pilgrims might
experience a collapse of past and present (and future) time while at the pilgrimage site.
As well as releasing the visitor from the strictures of chronological time, the
sacred site, whether a museum, temple or cave, provides the pilgrim with a space
in which her body can be re-imagined as sacred and worthy of reverence
(whatever its dimensions) and re-experienced through ritual and symbolic
activity. Exposure to representations of the divine as a large, solid, fat, female
form contrasting radically with the thin human female body worshipped in her
own society gave Irving new insights about her societys values in relation to
womens bodies and enabled her to re-value herself. Her gaze gave way to a series
of emotions felt in her body: she was delighted, moved, filled with joy. She
experienced an epiphany, seeing/feeling her own body as divine, herself as
Goddess.
Irvings ritual performance at Hagar Qim symbolically inscribed on her body
the revelation she had experienced in the museum and enables us to observe the
intersubjective relations between pilgrim and sacred site. The contours of Hagar
Qim temple, and indeed of all the Neolithic temples in Malta, echo the rounded
contours of the Neolithic Goddess statues. One might say that entering the temple
one symbolically enters the (architectural) body of the Goddess. By lying down
and curving her body into the curved limestone walls of the temple in which the
rounded statues had once stood, Irving mapped the Goddesss stone body onto
her own human body and further embodied her self-recognition as Goddess.
There was a reciprocal exchange between site and human person: the temple was
architecturally designed to imitate the shape of an ample womans body, the
woman pilgrim moulded her body to imitate the temples curves.12 She transformed her body into a living mnemonic of the place and her experience there.
Having intellectually embraced an awareness of the Goddess revealed to me in
my own body while in the museum, Irving placed her body in the temple walls
embrace and symbolically embraced herself. In this position her body imitated
the embryonic state, metaphorically expressing the liminality of the moment.
Through encountering the materiality of the site, this pilgrim encountered her
own materiality in a new way and with renewed intensity.13 By curving her body
against the temple wall, she expressed her desire to share the sites materiality, or
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at least get as close as possible to it. The material surfaces of woman and site
touched intimately; the borders of human body and sacred place were perfectly
aligned. Her body became sacred landscape.
Irvings experience of being metaphorically held in the deitys embrace
resonates with those of the pilgrims in the Cretan caves described above who are
similarly enveloped by the earths body. It also resonates with what Danica
Anderson felt in Maltas Hypogeum, a remarkable 5200-year-old subterranean
Neolithic tomb/temple comprising a network of rounded chambers and
labyrinthine passages hewn out of limestone rock: [t]he Hypogeum made us feel
as if we were inside the womb of the Goddess. Within its walls, our tour group
lost all consciousness of linear time and calendar days (2000, see http://www.
awakenedwoman.com/malta.htm).
In Judith Butlers terms, these pilgrims are daring to perform gender differently, at least at the symbolic level. For Butler, [t]here is no power that acts, but
only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability (1993: 9).
The question is not how gender is constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex, but rather, Through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized? (p. 9). Gender is constituted through performance, not as a singular act,
but through a re-iteration of norms. Thus, pilgrimages organized especially for
women become political acts: through their ritual performances at sacred sites
pilgrims transgress and de-stabilize familiar societal norms for women as they
simultaneously institute new norms and reproduce themselves in accordance
with them. It is a process in which interpretation and performance, imagination
and memory are dynamically inter-connected. Through her performance at
Hagar Qim temple, Irving challenged her societys norm of female thinness. She
and the site together created a space for an alternative performance of the female
body. But her performance transgressed much more than norms about the proper
dimensions of female flesh. With respect to the norms of her dominantly JudeaoChristian society, Irvings revelation that she embodied Goddess and her subsequent performance might be seen as heretical.
I want to look now at another pilgrimage account to demonstrate further how
imagination and performance can work together to produce a subjective narrative, and how a pilgrims spontaneous visions and somatic responses to sites may
be interpreted by her as revelations, ancient memories and sources of reliable
knowledge. This story, like that of Christine Irving above, reveals a mutual
process of inscription even a conversation between a pilgrims body and the
body of a sacred site.
In June 2005, I received an email from a woman, Ann Marie, sending me
portions of a journal she kept while on a pilgrimage tour to Malta in 2004
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(which she very kindly gave me permission to quote here). Her journey was
made along with 23 other pilgrims, including two leaders. From her description
of visiting the Maltese Neolithic temple of Borg in-Nadur, it is clear that for Ann
Marie the site is as alive as she is: she writes of the group sitting on the stone
walls of the temple and meditating together quietly, listening to the stones
breathing beneath us. During the ensuing stillness she had a vision: [i]n it I saw
stately women, closely following one another, dressed in long white skirts
processing around the courtyard and then into and out of each of the four apses,
joined like a four-leaf clover. Ultimately they formed two figure 8s before
returning to the courtyard.
When Ann Marie shared this vision with the tour leader, the leader promised
that the group would have time to enact her vision later in the day when they
visited another temple. Thus a feedback loop was created in which bodily
performance (i.e. group meditation) produced a sense of intimate connection
with the site and a vision of the past which was later performed by the pilgrims.
Through their bodily performance in this liminal time/space, the pilgrims gained
an embodied knowledge of the site, one they believed enabled them to connect
with women of the past.
Later in her journal account, Ann Marie talked of her growing feeling for
Maltas Neolithic heritage:
We are deep into the magic now. My body is adjusting to this time and place, and my soul is
at peace. The locusts in the trees near the pool at the Cornucopia Hotel are good to journey
with . . . I am held here on this stone island in beauty and peace. May I carry this place of
knowing deep within me . . . And now sadness wells up from deep within. Its partly an anticipation of the loss of this place, i.e., I cant stay here forever. And also it is in acknowledgement
of the loss of this intimate relationship with place, the loss of living so intimately connected
with the Oneness of all that is.
This is a poignant expression of the experience of dissolving boundaries between

pilgrim and place, present and past time, inner and outer worlds, humans and
other beings (the locusts), human body and earth body so that a holistic
connection with the onenes of all that is, Csikszentmihalyis flow, is experienced. The account records further such experiences. At Ggantija, my correspondent settled down on the ground against the wall of one of the temples to
meditate:
I was more comfortable than I thought I could be. I opened to the ancient energies and
breathed them in. The breezes flowing over my face and ruffling my hair felt timeless, like they
had always blown there. And I imagined the rains and the winds on these stones over and over
through the millennia until they looked like bobbin lace . . .
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Next, I moved into the apse with the triple altars and sat against the wall in the corner.
Again, I felt that the Mother was holding me. I prayed here for healing for my partner on all
levels. When I opened my eyes following these prayers, the stones began to dance. Whenever
I looked at them with soft eyes, I saw faces and animals and signs and symbols everywhere.
I blinked hard several times, thinking that I was hallucinating. But each time I looked at them
again, they danced on. The stones came unmasked for me. It was thrilling. . .
I went to sit outside of the South Temple. I meditated quietly for a few minutes. Soon I was
feeling time moving forward and backward so continuously that there was a distinct sense of
no-time.
I completed my hour of silent meditation time with these temples of Ggantija by walking
around their periphery as the twilight descended and the stars began to shine. Again, I saw
their faces and sculptures, and I knew I was seeing them as the Ancient Ones saw them in their
ceremonies, or at least I had a small glimpse into their reality.
Later, in the underground silence of the Hypogeum, Ann Marie has a past life
vision:
And in that quiet space, surrounded by the carved earth that held all those ancient bones, I
know: it is through my father that I have made my connection to this space. My father in one
of my former lifetimes was one of the original designers or builders of this temple/tomb. I see
his tools in my minds eye, wooden mallets and chisels made out of obsidian.
In the liminal underground space of this temple/tomb, where the hectic modern
world is forgotten and invisible, time loops back on itself, the line between
memory and imagination disappears, and the pilgrim apparently experiences past
and present merging.
Something similar occurs in the following account of a ritual performance led
by Starhawk, one of the best-known proponents of modern Paganism, at the
Castalian Spring at Delphi. I summarize the first part of the account, written by
Charoula and published in Goddessing Regenerated (1997) and then quote her
directly. The ritual the women perform which reveals the meanings they attach
to the site is transgressive in its rejection of the patriarchal subordination of the
earth goddess.
One September full moon night, after the guards of the site had retired, a
couple of dozen women climbed the gate leading to the Castalian Spring. This
spring is said to be where the Sybil, also called Pythia, oracle of the goddess
Athena, once bathed and revitalized before she prophesied to the people. She was
guarded at the spring by a sacred python, which was later killed by Apollo, the
sun god. The pilgrim groups reading of this myth, which is salient to the ritual
they performed, is that the killing of the sacred python symbolized the patriarchal attempt to destroy the dark, chthonic powers of the earth and the crone
goddess and replace the natural cycles of dark and light, death and rebirth, with
eternal youth and light.
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Having arrived at the spring, the group formed a circle and Starhawk led a
visualization in which the women imagined they were sending taproots deep into
the earths core in order to raise the python that lay coiled there awaiting rebirth.
We hummed quietly, raising Her from Her depths ecstatic energy vibrating throughout our
bodies. We lifted Her upward toward the heights of the powerful mountain at whose feet we
stood, up, up to the moon that shone full above our heads.
In a trance we danced around the spring, bathing and cleansing ourselves, then pronounced
our own oracles: we called Her to awake and purify the waters of the land which had become
murky and polluted; we called Her to return and lend us Her wisdom so that we could heal
ourselves and the planet; we called Her to rise and fill us with Her energy so that we could go
forward and make changes. . .
Each woman spoke, like the priestess Sibyl used to speak thousands of years ago, and we
all listened, the mountain listened, the moon listened, the spring listened. And as we each
spoke, the power grew within us and we became the Sibyl, the Goddess reborn within us.
(Charoula, 1997: 33)
In this account, and in the last paragraph in particular, the boundaries between
people and place, past and present, self and other, human and deity are perceived
as dissolving in the liminal space of ritual performance. The past bubbles up as
the python, dead for millennia, is raised; each woman speaks and all become the
Sybil; the moon, mountain and spring listen to the oracles; the Goddess is reborn
in all.
Sacred Embodiment
Another account of a pilgrimage to this site was sent to me by Karen Tate,14 who
has made numerous journeys to sacred sites in the Middle East, Europe and
Egypt. Like the group described above, Karen Tates group of men and women
visited the Castalian Spring after the crowds of tourists had gone for the day,
when they could more easily enjoy the majesty of the setting and rethink the
legends of the first Pythia, called Sybil, and try as we might to become one with
this place so special to our ancestor priestesses and the Goddess Athena. Like
Starhawks group, they also needed to defy the signs blocking their entrance to
the spring. Tate writes:
The water flowing down is cold and clear and we kneel at the flow and cover our face and arms
and hair with the sacred waters. As we do so, even in our t-shirts and tennis shoes, we awaken
the feeling were sharing in an ancient ritual and revel in the special energy our gestures create.
Were giddy with delight and our eyes swell with tears because were so thankful to have
repeated the acts of our ancestors. Somehow, there is a knowing, a remembering, perhaps on
a cellular level; this place of Athena and the Pythia conjures special meaning even in this
lifetime.
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It is the bodily act of kneeling and washing in the spring that generates for Tate
the sense of a special energy and awakens the feeling of participating in an
ancient ritual. As anthropologist Michael Jackson found, the phenomenological
problem of how to understand the experience of the other was overcome by
using my body as others did. To recognize the embodiedness of our being-inthe-world is to discover a common ground where self and other are one
(Jackson, 1989: 135). For Tate and her fellow pilgrims, performing an act that
they imagined was long ago performed by pagan priestesses, the common ground
stretched millennia into the past. The landscape acted as a mnemonic; the
pilgrims ritual performance remembered its sacred past into being.
Anticipating the performance of her dance Birthing as part of a ceremony at
the site of Catalhyk (Turkey) in 1998 a ritual that turned (unexpectedly for
the pilgrims) into a large political event attended by archaeologists, journalists, a
national television crew, the local mayor, the governor of the region, a representative from the Turkish Ministry of Culture and gendarmes armed with machine
guns performance artist Diana Marto experienced worry and vulnerability
along with a furnace of rage:15
Storm clouds gathering overhead, I was worried, exhausted . . . A week before in meditation I
had found a huge block of fear lodged inside my cells, underneath this fear was a furnace of
rage for the erasure and muzzling of the female, guilt was there too! An ancient knee-jerk
response to kowtowing to patriarchy . . . Gendarme guarding me with a machine gun while I
prepared for the ceremony, Please, please ground me, I prayed, and She did . . .
And when it was over She walked away, left the circle, walked way out into me16 Beyond.
Moments later a stork flew over the Mother Mound. (Marto, 1999)
The ritual that Marto and other pilgrims performed at Catalhyk was not
intended, according to the accounts by participants I have read, to have the kind
of political significance it had. It was not meant to be a media circus under police
surveillance witnessed by a crowd of politicians, archaeologists and so forth. The
intention was to fulfil a dream of visiting a place where the ancient religion had
centred on a great Goddess, to honour and celebrate the site with ritual, to
experience the sacred energy of the place, to imagine another time. This was not
particularly easy when some non-Pagan individuals in the crowd were laughing
in embarrassment and armed police were hovering. For some, this experience was
at times moving, but at other times uncomfortable and distracting: the event felt
fractured and uneven (Rose, 1998: 18). Several people reported that the most
meaningful part of the day was when they visited the local village and the
children began to gather and a little girl with hennaed hands opened her arms
and blessed us (Marto, 1999: 25).17
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Within speech act theory, says Butler (1993: 13), a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names. According to the
biblical rendition of the performative, namely, Let there be light!, it appears
that it is by virtue of the power of a subject or its will that a phenomenon is named
into being (italics in original). It is by virtue of the power of Neo-Pagans wills,
along with their performative and imaginative practices at sacred sites, that the
phenomenon of their own sacred being, shared with the earth and all other individuals, is named into being. This might well be a transgressive articulation in
relation to non-Pagan interpretations of what are more frequently termed
archaeological, historic, heritage or simply ancient sites. This was the case
in the example of Catalhyk above.
According to another biblical rendition of the performative, adapted for this
context: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Goddess/God
and the Word was Goddess/God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth.18 Through their bodily performances at ancient sacred
sites, modern Pagans call forth what they name. It is subjective interpretation that
defines subjective experience and the relationship between imagination and
memory is similar. However, many Pagans might be inclined to invert the formulation in which the Word has primacy over the flesh thus: in the beginning is the
flesh, the lived body is our primary text and starting point for knowledge. They
would agree with those phenomenologists19 for whom embodiment is the existential condition in which culture and self are grounded and continuously
created (Csordas, 1993: 136).
Notes
1. In this article Neo-Pagan and modern or contemporary Pagan have the same meaning. I
capitalize Pagan (just as I would capitalize Christian or Buddhist) when referring to the modern
phenomenon because its participants claim it is a religion (or group of religions). I do not capitalize
pagan when referring to ancient pre-Christian religions because it is far too broad a term and is not
one that followers of ancient religions used to refer to their religious identity.
2. Early Christian churches were often built on the sites of earlier pagan temples: thus the sacred
essence of a site and the local populations devotion to the site were appropriated at the same time as
the visible signs of the previous religion were covered over, incorporated or obliterated.
3. When I was in Ireland in September 2005, I took a Celtic Experience tour that was geared
towards those with a spiritual interest in Celtic sites (as well as regular tourists interested in the Celts
and Irish history and prehistory), as is the Mary Gibbons Newgrange and Hill of Tara tour that Pagans
I know have taken. While visiting various sites in Ireland, I noted offerings left by Pagan pilgrims, and,
indeed, one tour guide pointed them out in two locations and another commented on them.
4. The scholarly literature on various Pagan traditions is growing, although small in comparison
with the vast popular literature. Excellent introductions to Paganism are Adler (1986), Harvey (1997),
Harvey and Hardman (eds) (1996) and Pike (2001).
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5. The first, third and fourth of these principles are based on those of The Pagan Federation
(Harvey and Hardman, 1996: xi).
6. See, for example, Hutton (1996, 2000).
7. Co-creation is a term integral to process philosophy. See Carol P. Christs feminist philosophy
of religion: She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World (2003).
8. I am drawing here on Thomas Csordass terminology in his article Somatic Modes of
Attention (1993). Csordass article discusses somatic modes of attention in relation to two healing
traditions.
9. I frequently receive advertising flyers for pilgrimage tours (via email) to such places as Turkey,
Greece, Britain, Malta, various parts of Asia and the United States. These are almost exclusively billed
as Goddess tours for women. In July 2005, for example, I attended a Goddess conference in Ephesus,
which was inserted into a Goddess tour in Turkey organized by two American women and a Turkish
man who is a tour guide and has written about Anatolian goddesses. There were close to 50 people
there, mostly American women, some of whom also lead sacred tours themselves. See http://www.
goddessconversations.com/Turkey.htm This apparent bias towards tours for women may be because
my main involvement has been with Goddess feminists. Of course, male Pagans also visit and make
pilgrimages to sacred sites, but I suggest they are more likely to do this independently of tours
organized by a special pilgrimage tour guide.
10. I am wary of generalizing about Pagan worldviews because each Pagan has his or her own, and
there is no requirement or expectation of any conformity to a doctrine. The idea of the earth and all
her beings as connected in a web of dynamic relations is, however, common to many.
11. In She Who Changes, Christ draws on the work of process philosopher Charles Hartshorne
who sometimes used dual pronouns to refer to God (He-She, Him-Her) but did not use the term
Goddess, although he was sympathetic to what he knew of the feminist critique of God. Christ refers
to the divine power intended by process thinking as Goddess/God (2003: 17).
12. This reciprocal exchange between person and place reminds me of the title of an international
symposium on women in prehistory held in Istanbul 2527 June 1998 called Earth Shaped by Women,
Women Shaped by Earth.
13. My thinking here has been influenced by Simone Fullagars illuminating article Desiring
Nature: Identity and Becoming in Narratives of Travel (2000). Much of what Fullagar writes about
the relation of the traveller to nature is also relevant to the relation of traveller to sacred site.
14. I am indebted to Karen Tate for generously sharing this story and others.
15. The visit to Catalhyk was the final event of an international symposium on women in prehistory held in Istanbul 2527 June 1998 and organized by Ceylan Orhun of the Anakltr cooperative.
Presenters came from Turkey, the Ukraine, Wales, Canada, the United States, Germany, England and
Italy.
16. I am not sure whether me is a typographical error; if so, it is an interesting one which merges
woman and Goddess.
17. The reason the women had visited the village was to perform healing and cleansing rituals at
the site of a burnt-down house, which had been purchased a short time previously by the Anakltr
cooperative as the HERINN-Formation Center, intended as a cultural centre and Bed & Breakfast
home for women visiting Catalhyk. There is a considerable range of theories about how the house
came to be burnt down, but the official one is that it was an accident.
18. The original is in St Johns gospel, chapter 1.
19. See Csordass (1993) discussion of phenomenology in anthropological theory.
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missionary women tried to colonize Maori womens bodies.

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Feel her power in holy mountains

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Understanding this worldview is crucial to understanding how the dualities

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Performing the Divine

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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

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Performing the Divine

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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

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Performing the Divine

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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

This is a poignant expression of the experience of dissolving boundaries between

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Performing the Divine

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05 070886 ROUNTREE (bc-t)

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

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Performing the Divine

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05 070886 ROUNTREE (bc-t)

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

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05 070886 ROUNTREE (bc-t)

Performing the Divine

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