Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: the place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities

The great majority of the world's holy cities and sacred shrines attract pilgrims from

culturally circumscribed catchment areas, and thus host pilgrims united by strong degrees of

cultural homogeneity. Jerusalem, on the other hand, draws pilgrims from a vast multitude of

nations and cultural traditions. During religious festivals - which tend to be imbricated

because of the antagonistic engagement of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Jerusalem's

streets swarm with men and women displaying a rainbow of secular and religious costumes,

speaking a cacophony of languages, and pursuing a plethora of divine figures. Other sacred

centres which attract pilgrims from areas as heterogeneous as those which provide

Jerusalem's pilgrims - eminent among these Mecca (which nonetheless services only the sects

of a single religion) - funnel their devotees through ritual routines which mask differences

beneath identical repertoires of movement and utterance2. Jerusalem's pilgrims, on the other

hand, go to different places at different times where they engage in very different forms of

worship. The result is a continuous crossing and diverging - often marked by clashes - of

bodies, voices and religious artifacts. Jerusalem does not, in fact, appear so much as a holy

city as as a multitude of holy cities - as many as are the religious communities which

worship at the site - built over the same spot, operating at the same moment, and contending

for hegemony.