In one of my Capstone classes, we talked about the Kumbh Mela with Dr. Moody as our guest speaker. She brought up an idea that stuck with me. It was something that really got me thinking. Most people go on pilgrimages to be free of something, whether it be questions that have bothered them for years or something physical like society or material things, but can freedom really be found in religious pilgrimage? Can someone really find freedom spiritually or even socially? To answer this, two things must be defined: Pilgrimage and Freedom.
After pilgrimage and freedom are defined, I want to go through three different religious pilgrimages, using four different documentaries: Inside Mecca, A Sinner in Mecca, the Kumbh Mela, and the Osun-Osogbo. Freedom will be defined by everyone in the documentaries and whether or not they found what they were looking for will be discussed. Finally, the question of whether or not freedom can be found in religious pilgrimage will be answered.
“A journey to a place of particular interest or significance.”1 This definition of pilgrimage comes from the English Oxford Living Dictionaries. It is only one of many definitions for the word, pilgrimage. Another is, “Life viewed as a journey” or “a journey undertaken with a specific objective.” There is not one definition for Pilgrimage, but one thing that these definitions have in common is the idea that pilgrimage is a journey. Pilgrimage can be a physical journey, it can be a mental journey, or it can even be a spiritual journey. In a pilgrimage, there is always a beginning and there is always an ending.
In the Kumbh Mela, Feiler describes pilgrimage as a personal journey that makes you ask yourself what you believe in. “If organized religion often obliges believers to conform and comply, a pilgrimage frees them and invites them to figure it out for themselves”. Another pilgrim from the Kumbh Mela, Sadhu, describes it as “something that calls us deeper in our spirit and is not really logical”. While pilgrimage is about belief and spirituality for the pilgrims in the Kumbh Mela, pilgrimage is about the past in the Osun-Osogbo documentary. “Each pilgrimage becomes a portal to the past.” Pilgrimage is about stepping into your ancestry and into your culture.
Similar to Pilgrimage, freedom has many different definitions. “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.” An example of this would be the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Another definition of freedom is “the state of not being subjected to or affected by something”9 This could be someone winning freedom from someone or something that had control over them, like when the colonies won freedom from the British. A third definition is “exemption from the presence of anything specified.” A few examples of this are freedom from society’s beliefs of certain things or freedom from questions that have bothered you for a long time.
