‘Ambiguous sanctuaries’ are places in which the sacred is shared. These exist in almost all religions: tombs of saints, mausoleums, monasteries and shrines, a & Zarcone Hobart revered mountain peak, a majestic tree, a cave or special boulders in the river. This book examines this phenomenon in diverse parts of the world: in Europe, Pilgrimage and Ambiguity the Middle East, Asia and Brazil. What these ritual spaces share is the capacity to unsettle and challenge people’s experiences and understandings of reality, as well as to provoke the imagination, allowing universes of meanings to be interlinked. Sharing the Sacred The spaces discussed reveal the many different ways the sacred can be shared. Different groups may once have visited sites that are nowadays linked to only one religion. The legacy of earlier religious movements is subtly echoed in the devotional forms, rituals, symbols or narratives (hagiographies) of the present, and the architectural settings in which they take place. In some pilgrimage sites, peoples of different faiths visit and take part in devotional acts and rituals – such as processing, offering candles, incenses and flowers – that are shared. The saints to whom a shrine is dedicated can also have a double identity. Such ambiguity has often been viewed through the lens of religious purity, and the exclusivity of orthodoxy, as confusion, showing a lack Pilgrimage and Ambiguity Pilgrimage of coherence and authenticity. But the openness to interpretation of sacred spaces in this collection suggests a more positive analysis: that it may be through ambiguity transcending narrow confines that pilgrims experience the sanctity and power they seek. In the engaging and accessible essays that comprise Pilgrimage and Ambiguity the contributors consider the ambiguous forces that cohere in sacred spaces - forces that move us into the inspirational depths of human spirituality. In so doing, the essays bring us closer to a deeper appreciation of how ambiguity helps to define the human condition. This collection is one that will be read and debated for many years to come. Paul Stoller, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology In a time of religious polarization, this fine collection of essays recalls that ambiguity, ambivalence and shared experience characterize the sacred as it is encountered in pilgrimages. Readers will travel through the Mediterranean, India, Pakistan and China, but also Western Europe and Amazonia, to discover saintly landscapes full of multiple meanings. Alexandre Papas, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris Angela Hobart is the Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Honorary Reader at Goldsmiths College and Honorary Professor of Medical Anthropology at University College London. Thierry Zarcone is a Senior Research Fellow (Directeur de recherches) at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), Paris. edited by ANGELA HOBART & THIERRY ZARCONE PILGRIMAGE AND AMBIGUITY First published in 2017 by Sean Kingston Publishing www.seankingston.co.uk Canon Pyon In association with The Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona Text © Dionigi Albera, Isabelle Charleux, Jürgen Wasim Frembgen, Omar González, Angela Hobart, Carlos César Xavier Leal, Pierre-Jean Luizard, Manoël Penicaud, Yasushi Tonaga, Robin M. Wright, Thierry Zarcone Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0 Ebook ISBN 978-1-907774-99-7 DOI 10.26581/B.HOZA01 Pilgrimage and Ambiguity v Sharing the Sacred Edited by Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone Sean Kingston Publishing In association with www.seankingston.co.uk The Centro Incontri Umani, Canon Pyon Ascona From The Boy Who Was Afraid, by Sperry Armstrong (illustrated by the author), 1942, William Heinemann Ltd. By kind permission of Random House. Acknowledgements The conference on the theme of ‘Pilgrimages and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred’, which led to this book, was held at the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, overlooking Lake Maggiore, on the border between Switzerland and Italy. The Centre seeks to encourage cross-cultural understanding, respect and peace internationally. We want to express our gratitude to the participants for their stimulating and thought-provoking contributions and for the scientific support of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laicïtés of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (based at the École Pratique des Haute Études) in Paris for their help in organizing the conference. We also thank Sean Kingston Publishing for the competent assistance in publishing the book. We’re living in an era of globalization, rapid technological development and far-reaching environmental and social changes, which often entail conflict, suffering and uncertainty. This is epitomized in recent years by perilous voyages of thousands of refugees leaving their destroyed and fragmented homelands to reach foreign shores for imagined safety. Where is the sacred, the light, in the turmoil of the night? (See illustration.) This book is a modest attempt to explore questions confronting humans in their pilgrimages as they engage with multi-dimensional and ambiguous sites of worship and homage. In so doing, they expand their horizons of knowledge and experiences of different faiths and religious movements, perhaps to transcend them. This is beautifully expressed in the poem by the Indian saint, Kabir (d. 1518): Allah stays in the body of everyone, Try to understand this in your soul Allah is the same for the Hindu and for the Turk, This is what Kabir claims. (Kabir, 1959, Au Cabaret de l’amour, p. 70) Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone Contents Introduction Why do pilgrims share a sanctuary? 1 Some hypotheses Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone i Ambiguous sacred places in the Mediterranean Chapter 1 Towards a reappraisal of ambiguity 29 In the footsteps of Frederick W. Hasluck Dionigi Albera Chapter 2 From the god Amon to Sufi mawlids 51 Pierre-Jean Luizard Chapter 3 ‘Ambiguity in context’ according to Islamic thought 69 Bridging theory and actuality relating to saints in Islam Yasushi Tonaga ii Pilgrimages and sacred places in the Indo-Persian world and China Chapter 4 Chinese, Tibetan and Mongol Buddhists on 87 Wutaishan (China) from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century Isabelle Charleux Chapter 5 Betwixt and Between 119 Figures of ambiguity in the Sufi cult of Lāl Shāhbāz Qalandar (Pakistan) Jürgen Wasim Frembgen Chapter 6 Syncretism and the superimposition of Islam 131 on Buddhism in the Pamir Mountain cults and saint veneration Thierry Zarcone viii iii Ambiguous sites cross-culturally Chapter 7 Monte Verita, the ‘Mountain of Truth’ in Ascona 157 A pilgrimage site of paradoxes and contradiction Angela Hobart Chapter 8 The Seven Sleepers pilgrimage in Brittany 183 The ambiguity of a Christian-Muslim ‘heterotopia’ Manoël Pénicaud Chapter 9 Multi-centric mythscapes 201 Sanctuaries and pilgrimages in north-west Amazonian Arawakan religious traditions Robin M. Wright, Omar González Nanez and Carlos César Xavier Leal List of contributors 233 Index 237 INTRODUCTION Why do pilgrims share a sanctuary? Some hypotheses v Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart We cannot kill the gods. Though we can knock them off their pedestals, they continue nevertheless to be present inside us, surviving in dark caverns, in the chambers that we thought to be closed up. From this unknown darkness, they speak once more. (Roger Bastide 1975:222) One of the main aims of the book was to question the expression ‘ambiguous sanctuaries’ that was coined by the historian William Hasluck (d. 1920), towards the end of the nineteenth century, with respect to Anatolian and Balkan sanctuaries, mausoleums and pilgrimages that were shared by Christian and Muslim pilgrims. An ‘ambiguous’ sanctuary, according to Hasluck (1973:94), represents a distinct stage of development – a point of transition between Christianity and a Sufi movement and vice versa (see Albera’s chapter). The conference at the Centro Incontri Umani, in Ascona, on which this volume is based, set out to discuss the concept of ‘ambiguity’ and the question of sharing ‘the sacred’ from a wider global and spiritual perspective. In so doing, the resulting chapters examine ‘ambiguous’ sanctuaries in various parts of the world. Thus, they are not concerned only with sanctuaries in the Mediterranean but also with Middle Eastern (Egypt) and Asian sanctuaries (India, Central Asia, China); two others chapters deal with sanctuaries in Europe (France, Switzerland) and one in South America (Brazil). Furthermore, two participants of the Ascona converence, Dionigi Albera and Manoël Pénicaud, participated in organizing an international exhibition in Marseille from April to August 2015 called Lieux saints partagés (Shared Sanctuaries) at 2 Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille. The exhibition, as reflected in its title, dealt with the same subject matter as this book, but focused exclusively