Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World, Kathryn Hurlock, Profile Books, £22.

In November 1918, a Māori farmer named Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana (d. 1939) began to have visions in which the Holy Spirit told him how to convert the Māori people from their traditional beliefs to a form of Christianity. Initially, even his family were sceptical, but then he began to perform healing miracles. Soon, thousands of people were claiming to have benefited from his remarkable powers. People from across the world wrote to Rātana asking him to cure them; many others travelled to his farm to see the holy man in person.

Soon, Rātana was at the head of a fast-growing church: at its height, around 20 per cent of New Zealand’s population belonged to it, and the country had more Rātana priests than Anglican ones. But his priorities were evolving, and in the late 1920s, after his healing powers dried up, Rātana reinvented himself as the leader of a political party. His movement quickly gained MPs who, for more than two decades, held all the Māori seats in the New Zealand parliament. Nearly a century after Ratana’s death, his farm is still a place of pilgrimage, not least for politicians, for whom a visit to this special place is a powerful way to indicate respect for the Māori people, their beliefs, rights and concerns.

Rātana’s story is one of 19 told in the academic Kathryn Hurlock’s delightfully cynical history of pilgrimage, Holy Places, in which she focuses on politics, power, and the practicalities of pilgrimage. Her case studies range from the ancient world to the modern day, criss-crossing the globe and encompassing many faiths; world famous sites such as Mecca, Jerusalem and Rome sit alongside less familiar destinations such as the Angolan shrine of Mama Muxima and the ancient Mayan pilgrimage centre at Chichén Itzá. And, though Holy Places is structured as a series of standalone essays, patterns soon emerge.

It is, for example, very clear that many elite pilgrimages have been motivated at least as much by political expediency as by piety. In ancient Greece, political leaders regularly visited the Oracle at Delphi – an unassuming middle-aged woman whose visionary powers allowed her to communicate the wishes of Apollo – meaning that unpopular decisions could be justified as following the god’s advice. And in China, emperors from Qin Shi Juang (221-210 BC) to Qianlong (1735-96) travelled to the sacred mountain of Tai Shan whenever they needed to assert their authority, unite their people, or claim divine support.

Other rulers have gone further, creating and nurturing holy places in order to bolster their position. Constantinople was a city built on relics: rulers from Constantine onwards acquired holy objects such as the Virgin’s girdle and the lance that pierced Christ’s side, and thus attracted vast numbers of medieval pilgrims. After the city became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the new rulers adopted a similar strategy, converting churches into mosques and establishing the tomb of Ayyuub al-Ansari (the Prophet’s standard bearer) as a focus point for both pilgrimage and royal ritual. In Spain, the crown played a crucial role in the growth of Santiago de Compostela: Catholics from across Europe were encouraged to visit the shrine of St James, who was cast as Spain’s protector in the ongoing war against Iberia’s Muslim population. Though visitor numbers declined after the Reformation, they increased substantially under General Franco – a dictator who was extremely aware of the power of religion as a tool of the state.

Yet while political support can help pilgrimage centres to thrive, it can also make them vulnerable. Constantinople was sacked by crusaders in 1204; they stole many of the city’s finest relics and took them back to Europe (St Luke’s body ended up in Venice, which was somewhat awkward, given that the Benedictines in nearby Padua also claimed to own it).  And Saint James’ shrine was the target of a late 11th-century attack led by the Caliph of Córdoba; his forces torched the church and captured its bells, which were melted down and incorporated into the Great Mosque. In Iraq, Karbala has been an important place of pilgrimage for Shia Muslims since the late seventh century, when the Prophet’s grandson Husayn was killed there. But it has also been the scene of terrible violence: in 1801, Wahabi fighters from Central Arabia pillaged the shrine and killed thousands of pilgrims, and in recent years it has become a regular target for terrorists.

Such problems inevitably discourage pilgrimage, and access to holy sites has been an ongoing problem for many centuries, especially in places which are significant to multiple faiths (such as Jerusalem), and in places where land ownership is disputed (especially under colonial rule). In 19th-century India, the East India Company’s attempts to charge Hindu pilgrims to bathe in the River Ganges caused considerable resentment. And in South Dakota, access to Bear Butte (a hill which is sacred to several Native American tribes) has been disputed ever since settlers arrived in the mid-19th century. For several decades, pilgrimage was banned, and while the 20th century saw the restoration of access, as well as recognition (in the form of a Supreme Court ruling) that the land had been illegally seized, ownership has not been restored. The fact that many people now view this sacred site as a tourist destination, and see no reason why they should not take photographs of indigenous religious rituals, has been a particular cause of tension.

As the history of Bear Butte suggests, sites associated with minority groups often have particularly difficult histories. In Punjab, Amritsar has been a place of pilgrimage since the 16th century, but as a Sikh site in a mostly non-Sikh country, it has also been a place of conflict. In 1919, hundreds of protestor-pilgrims were killed by the British Indian Army, an event which has been seen as a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India. And in 1984, Indira Ghandi’s decision to send troops into the Golden Temple led to widespread unrest, and her own assassination. Disagreements around the annual Gypsy pilgrimage to Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer have been less bloody, but equally persistent: the Catholic Church has made repeated efforts to enforce conformity to orthodox practice, and in recent years anti-Romani sentiment has been whipped up by right-wing mayors.

Local hostility to these visitors has meant that, rather than staying around to profit from the pilgrims, many residents of this small French town shut up shop and go on holiday for the duration. But other pilgrimage centres have become extremely commercialised, most famously Lourdes, which the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) described as ‘a haemorrhage of bad taste’. Elsewhere, the need to cater for vast numbers of pilgrims has led to significant development. In Saudi Arabia, where the regime’s success is heavily reliant on its control of Mecca, entire mountains have been moved to make way for hotels and other necessary infrastructure.

Such improvements make pilgrimage more accessible, but this is not always seen as a good thing. In Japan, for example, there has been considerable unease over the tendency of modern pilgrims to visit the 88 temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage circuit by car; to the devout, it seems that many visitors are not taking the process seriously enough. But although such concerns feel like a product of modernity, they are actually centuries old. When the Swiss Dominican Felix Fabri visited Jerusalem in the 1480s, he complained that ‘we ran around the holy places without understanding and feeling what they were’. Others suspected that travellers were mostly motivated by the opportunities for sin: the 17th-century magistrate Huang Liu-hong claimed that women only visited Tai Shan so they could have ‘liaisons with dissipated youths in secret passages of monasteries’.

Yet despite such concerns, and despite our tendency to assume that we live in an increasingly secular world, pilgrimage shows no sign of going into decline. In 2025 alone, millions of people will complete the Hajj, celebrate the jubilee year in Rome, or visit one of countless other sacred places across the world. Nor has it lost its political dimension: Pope Benedict XVI’s 2008 pilgrimage to Lourdes led to concerns that France’s separation of church and state was at risk, while political pilgrimages to the graves of figures as varied as the Labour leader John Smith (whose 1994 burial on Iona was seen by some as a desecration of Scotland’s earliest Christian site) and the Argentinian first lady Eva Perón (whose many devotees consider her a saint) have become increasingly popular.

While some readers may wish that Hurlock had a little more to say about piety, miracles and spiritual experience, she makes a compelling case for understanding pilgrimage as an activity in which the secular and the sacred are inextricably entwined, an insight that remains extremely relevant in today’s world.