Planning a Pilgrim’s Journey
One of the best places in the United States for the study of pilgrimage is the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., where I had planned my Japanese and Korean travels. During that earlier research, I had discovered that the enormous library has pilgrim's guidebooks and pilgrimage studies for nearly every country on the Earth. A bewildering quantity of information is available, from general studies on the practice of pilgrimage to small pamphlets describing one individual's experiences at a particular shrine. I wanted to read as much of this material as possible and thus decided to organize my study from the general to the specific. With this in mind, I read a number of short works on the various religions of the world, studying their historical development, beliefs, geographic range of influence, and pilgrimage traditions. As I read for two weeks in this manner, I came to recognize that the institution of pilgrimage was a universal human practice that has occurred since well before the dawn of recorded history.
In the course of this research, I began to make lists of pilgrimage sites. At first, I simply recorded the sites by location, country by country around the world. As I continued my studies and added more sites to these listings, I began to notice several different classes or types of sacred sites. I therefore decided to make another set of lists to categorize the various types. Over the next fifteen years, with increasing knowledge of the subject, I would recognize additional categories of sacred sites, yet my initial listings were important for two reasons. First, they provided information that helped me develop my insights regarding the existence of different energy types at the power places (discussed in chapter 2). Second, the categorization of sites helped me to decide which places were most important to visit. As I would clearly learn during the course of my long travels, certain pilgrimage sites have more charged, or powerful, energy fields. Having a way to estimate this (with at least some certainty) prior to a trip, allowed me to save travel time and money.
While compiling the lists, I also began to plot the precise locations of the sites on detailed maps of each country. For approximately 80 percent of the sites, location was an easy matter. They were either well-known archaeological ruins, pilgrimage places of great popularity, or they were situated in major cities. Locating the other 20 percent turned out to be time consuming, difficult and sometimes impossible. To find these lesser known sites, I used the map division of the Library of Congress, where I had access to the largest collection of maps and gazetteers in the Western Hemisphere. While these resources and the assistance of the library's skilled and friendly staff were certainly helpful, I still could not locate several of the most ancient pilgrimage sites. Many sites on my lists had come from my reading of old pilgrimage guidebooks. These sources were often ambiguous, inaccurate, or filled with more legend than solid fact. Some of the guidebooks were written hundreds of years ago or were compiled from even earlier, orally transmitted pilgrim's tales, and the political and territorial boundaries that defined their geographic area had long since changed. There were further complications. Sometimes a source indicated the name of a pilgrimage shrine with no mention of its location. Other times the place names where the shrines were located and even the shrine names themselves had changed. Quite often I found two or more places with the same name shown on a single map.
In a number of cases it helped to consult maps drawn in past centuries. Locating a pilgrimage site on an old map and determining its approximate geographic coordinates, I would then mark those coordinates as an area of site-probability on a modern map. Months or years later, when finally traveling in that area, I would consult priests at other shrines, local government administrators, or the libraries of regional universities. Even with this detailed and multi-step attempt to locate shrines, I was often unsuccessful. Some shrines simply no longer exist.
A number of reasons may be suggested for this loss of knowledge of the whereabouts of certain ancient pilgrimage sites. Climatic changes may have caused abandonment of an area. Changing political boundaries and the resulting displacement of commercial trade and pilgrimage routes may have redirected the movements of people so that certain regions fell into decline and were then slowly depopulated. Equally significant, however, were the incursions of new cultures whose religious practices often brought about the destruction of the sacred structures of the previous culture. The legends and myths about the ancient sites might continue to be told while the actual location would be forgotten or lost beneath the newer culture's architectural expansion.
While conducting all this research, I became more and more excited about the journeys that lay ahead. In my reading, I had found many references to particular places where gods lived, fairies danced, miracles occurred, saints attained spiritual illumination, and magical dragons had been seen. While contemporary historians are inclined to interpret such legends as the imaginative attempts of ancient people to explain the mysteries of life, I formulated a different theory.
My research on sacred sites around the world had revealed numerous similarities between the sites, suggesting that the legends might perhaps have a basis in actual fact. Cultures of different eras and geographic locations had more than coincidental similarities between the topography of their sacred site locations, the architectural structures at their sites, and the legends regarding the discovery and use of the sites. Perhaps certain ancient people had found and used the power places of the Earth; perhaps their legends, already old long before the dawn of recorded history, were metaphorical indications of the energetic characteristics of those power places. The legendary homes of the gods and goddesses, such as the sacred mountains of Olympus, Croach Patrick, Shatrunajaya, Kailash, Emei Shan, Ararat, Hara and Iztaccihuatl may have been places where human beings had actually experienced spiritual illumination, divine revelation, and union with god. Perhaps the sacred places where miracles had occurred and visions were seen in ancient times were real places, and miracles and visions could still occur there today. I certainly thought the possibility worth investigating.
After completing research at the Library of Congress, I embarked upon my planet-spanning pilgrimage. How long would the journey take? I had no idea. I could not estimate the travel distances or the period of time needed to experience and photograph each sacred site. My pilgrimage route might be altered by the reception of more visionary information or the discovery of other sacred site locations through further research. I simply traveled from one geographic region to another according to the specific order that had been indicated during the Izumo Taisha vision. There were a number of reasons for this order, one of which I wish to introduce here.
Each individual power place has a particular character or energetic influence and will therefore affect human beings in a particular way. According to the revelations of the Izumo Taisha vision, the combined effect of multiple power places in each geographic region also has a specific effect. Each region has a different effect, a different teaching. The order in which I had been directed to travel to the various regions of the world was fundamental to a series of teachings that I would receive. My entire pilgrimage, however long it lasted, was thus a journey toward greater realization and awareness.
While not exactly a beginner on the spiritual path, I still had many lessons to undergo, many teachings to receive. These teachings (which all of us receive throughout our lives) come in many ways. One way they may come is at the power places. Therefore a long journey to many power points around the world can be understood as a sort of accelerated and intense exposure to the essential teachings of life. Pilgrimage to the power places is thus a way of ‘speeding up’ one's movement along the spiritual path. The order in which I would travel to the regions of the world afforded me the opportunity to receive spiritual teachings in a sequential manner; the teachings would successively build upon one another. The places I visited in Japan and Korea had been the sites of my initiation. The subsequent places I would travel to were my continuing curriculum. The next region I would visit was the Caribbean, and the effect/ teaching of that area was strengthening and healing. Mexico would be for magician energy and psychic protection. Europe would be for precognitive insight and visions of the future. Egypt would be for compassion. India would be for truth, humility, and trust. The Far East and Tibet would be for wisdom. And Central and South America would be for the fuller awakening of love.
