English

Pilgrimage and Ambiguity : Sharing the Sacred

Open access for this publication was provided by the following grant: The Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona · Abstract ‘Ambiguous sanctuaries’ are places in which the sacred is shared. These exist in almost all religions: tombs of saints, mausoleums, monasteries and shrines, a revered mountain peak, a majestic tree, a cave or special boulders in the river. This book examines this phenomenon in diverse parts of the world: in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Brazil. What these ritual spaces share is the capacity to unsettle and challenge people’s experiences and understandings of reality, as well as to provoke the imagination, allowing universes of meanings to be interlinked.The spaces discussed reveal the many different ways the sacred can be shared. Different groups may once have visited sites that are nowadays linked to only one religion. The legacy of earlier religious movements is subtly echoed in the devotional forms, rituals, symbols or narratives (hagiographies) of the present, and the architectural settings in which they take place. In some pilgrimage sites, peoples of different faiths visit and take part in devotional acts and rituals – such as processing, offering candles, in

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