The Peripatetic Tradition

As part of the Revisiting Religion and Place summer institute at UVA, we read Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berry also came to the institute one day, spending a couple of hours with our group in thoughtful discussion about his book and related topics. He was richly and generously conversant with the group and it was a fun afternoon.

Early in the book, Berry brings up the topic of walking. I love to walk - it is a daily ritual of mine. And I walk for all sorts of reasons -- to take the dog out, to get my heart rate up, to go places around campus, to engage in solitude and contemplation. Walking has become a widely practiced ritual, associated with a healthy lifestyle. There were so many people who took up walking during the COVID lockdowns. I would see so many people walking in my neighborhood during that time. While it has fallen off as a practice again, everyone understands walking as part of a healthy lifestyle. Berry describes it as a "cult of walking" promulgated by doctors, public health officials, and fitness gurus as a practice promising "health, happiness, and wholeness to those who take up the ritual" - which suggests a type of religious or spiritual practice (56).

Walking is a practice that has been intertwined with religion - or at least reflection and contemplation - since Aristotle's Peripatetic school (Devoted to Nature, 49). Berry writes that walking has been "one of modernity's primary contemplative techniques" and lists Western philosophers--from Hobbes to Thoreau--whose walking was "integral to their thinking" (50). They developed a particular type of walking: rambling "disassociated from the pursuit of fixed goals and free of any agenda" (51). This sort of walking engages the body while freeing the mind - without a goal in mind and without the constraints of time, one's thoughts wander freely, stimulating new ideas and fresh ways of thinking.

Berry contrasts this philosophical rambling with the medieval pilgrimage. These pilgrimages were a type of scripted walking, he suggests. A pilgrimage is a walk structured around a purpose, a story or narrative,  a specific way, and a destination. Not only that, it was "often carefully managed and hierarchically organized" by ecclesiastical authorities (51). That is, many pilgrimages may have originated as spontaneous popular responses to highly charismatic people and powerful events, such as miraculous healings or events of martyrdom, but were often quickly routinized and monetized as packaged religious experiences. Of course, that does not preclude their importance as personal and meaningful religious experiences. 

While it was a vital part of medieval Christian practice, pilgrimage has long been practiced in many religious traditions. The Islamic Hajj may be the most well known - but Shiites have their own pilgrimage routes in Iraq and Syria. There are many, many piligrimage routes in Hinduism from Amarnath to Varanasi. Buddhism has its own routes including Bodh Gaya of course and the Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage among others. Jainism has its own peripatetic tradition of wandering saints. And pilgrimage continues in new contemporary forms as a secular practice of self-discovery, healing from trauma, or making a transition in life.

All this got me thinking about types of religious and spiritual walking. What are the religious ways of walking? In addition to pilgrimage, what are other ways that walking has been utilized for religious or spiritual ends?

• Walking meditation - regularly used in Zen practice, Thich Nhat Hahn made it a central practice in his teaching.
• Circumambulation - around Buddhist stupas, or as part of a Hindu puja
• Fire walking - for instance, the Thimithi Fire-Walking Ceremony in which devotees of Draupadi from the Mahabharata walk across beds of red-hot coals
• Labyrinth walking - in the medieval Catholic tradition and revived in the contemporary spirituality movement
• Conversion -  "walking the sawdust trail" in Protestant revivalism
• Processions and parades - think of Holy Week processions in which the statue of a saint is processed through a European town, or a murthi of Durga is taken to a body of water and immersed at the end of Navratri. In Germania, Tacitus described the Heathen wagon procession of the goddess Nerthus and I described a contemporary wagon procession of Thor in my book Being Viking
• Protest marching - think of religiously inspired Civil Rights marches, nuclear protest marches, peace marches, etc 

I would love to hear about other examples of distinctive religious types of walking!